Wife and I want a simple spending tracker. We want manual entry (not linked), because we have several 'bills' charged to our credit cards (phones, utilities, subscriptions, etc), that we don't want getting mixed with what we're actually spending at stores, fuel, amazon, etc.

We used good budget for a while, but I didn't like it because we had to set a spending goal/limit/budget, whatever, and every month if we went over or under it would adjust the next month accordingly. I don't want the app comparing what we spent to some budget we input. We know we have roughly $2500 a month to spend outside of bills, so I just want to easily track every time we swipe our card, with manual entry (because of reason stated above), and we can both use the app and be synced so we can check it and know where we are on any day.

Suggestions?

I just downloaded mint, linked up my chase card, and it was very apparent that this method doesn't work for us. The card balance is much higher than we typically spend because I have a $500 car insurance bill on there, AT&T, internet, monthly subscriptions, utilities etc.

Following. Also interested

Are you trying to track monthly expenses more or less real time so you know when you're getting close to $2,500 for the month?

txaggieacct85 said:

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Are you trying to track monthly expenses more or less real time so you know when you're getting close to $2,500 for the month?

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yeh pretty much. Doesn't have to be instant real time. I often get to work Monday morning and go through finances, that's where I can enter spending from the weekend for example after logging into credit card acct. Wife is pretty good about doing it when she swipes the card. We only have 3 cards.

We also already budget for many things that are periodic, but we know we are going to spend. Vacations, yearly fees like Costco or prime, kids sports, birthdays, clothes, Xmas, etc. I have all that added up for the year and divide by 12. This monthly cost is subtracted from our monthly net along with bills, and so that leaves is our monthly spend for all the other stuff like groceries, fuel, Amazon, etc.

Idea is if/when we get close to say that $2500, we can slow it down for the last week or whatever. Or skip the grocery that last week and clear out freezer stuff.

62strat said:

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txaggieacct85 said:

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Are you trying to track monthly expenses more or less real time so you know when you're getting close to $2,500 for the month?

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yeh pretty much. Doesn't have to be instant real time. I often get to work Monday morning and go through finances, that's where I can enter spending from the weekend for example after logging into credit card acct. Wife is pretty good about doing it when she swipes the card. We only have 3 cards.

We also already budget for many things that are periodic, but we know we are going to spend. Vacations, yearly fees like Costco or prime, kids sports, birthdays, clothes, Xmas, etc. I have all that added up for the year and divide by 12. This monthly cost is subtracted from our monthly net along with bills, and so that leaves is our monthly spend for all the other stuff like groceries, fuel, Amazon, etc.

Idea is if/when we get close to say that $2500, we can slow it down for the last week or whatever. Or skip the grocery that last week and clear out freezer stuff.

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why not use an app like rocket money and you can download all of your transactions to excel and do what you want with them there. seems like adding expenses manually is a waste of time.

I actually use Dave Ramsey's app called Every Dollar. I go in and manually add each expense at the end of each week based on the card activity.

I've never liked Mint or any of the others that are linked because they place expenses into the wrong category too often so I was always having to go in and change a bunch of them anyways.

I download transactions from credit cards and bank accounts into excel, but I just created a Rocket Money account where I can do the same under one login

Not a financial advisor, but I've been successful enough that I get asked this question. My goto answer used to be Quicken, but it's way too expensive now.

Look at Empower (Personal Capital). It's free. Loads all your accounts for a full picture including loans and investments. Lets you enter a budget. Lets you categorize everything.

https://home.personalcapital.com/

I guess I'm confused by what you mean when you say you want manual entry.

We use copilot. I like it, but still generally upload the categories to excel for my own tracker.

If I'm understanding what you want correctly….you can categorize everything in copilot. So you can categorize all your bills, etc. It's pretty good at this. We then have a category for restaurants, groceries, home shopping, my shopping, wife's shopping, etc. We input the budget and can track our monthly spending towards that number. You can also set it to carry over the balances.

Instead of how we do it, you can just have a bigger category of "all other spending," set the budget to $2500 (or no budget, can just track spending), and track against it. You'll probably have to do some cleaning up, like it may try to put some charges in more specific categories, but pretty easy to review transactions and set up rules for future similar transactions.

txaggieacct85 said:

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62strat said:

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txaggieacct85 said:

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Are you trying to track monthly expenses more or less real time so you know when you're getting close to $2,500 for the month?

---

yeh pretty much. Doesn't have to be instant real time. I often get to work Monday morning and go through finances, that's where I can enter spending from the weekend for example after logging into credit card acct. Wife is pretty good about doing it when she swipes the card. We only have 3 cards.

We also already budget for many things that are periodic, but we know we are going to spend. Vacations, yearly fees like Costco or prime, kids sports, birthdays, clothes, Xmas, etc. I have all that added up for the year and divide by 12. This monthly cost is subtracted from our monthly net along with bills, and so that leaves is our monthly spend for all the other stuff like groceries, fuel, Amazon, etc.

Idea is if/when we get close to say that $2500, we can slow it down for the last week or whatever. Or skip the grocery that last week and clear out freezer stuff.

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why not use an app like rocket money and you can download all of your transactions to excel and do what you want with them there. seems like adding expenses manually is a waste of time.

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because my wife wants to be able to see it too, when she's at target about to spend $200, maybe she'll hold back some if we're already at our spend on week 3.

Good budget was great as far as the process to add a transaction. Open app, hit +, put in Walmart, $80. Done. We don't even care about categories or labeling it, we usually know what it is when we look back anyway.

htxag09 said:

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I guess I'm confused by what you mean when you say you want manual entry.

We use copilot. I like it, but still generally upload the categories to excel for my own tracker.

If I'm understanding what you want correctly….you can categorize everything in copilot. So you can categorize all your bills, etc. It's pretty good at this. We then have a category for restaurants, groceries, home shopping, my shopping, wife's shopping, etc. We input the budget and can track our monthly spending towards that number. You can also set it to carry over the balances.

Instead of how we do it, you can just have a bigger category of "all other spending," set the budget to $2500 (or no budget, can just track spending), and track against it. You'll probably have to do some cleaning up, like it may try to put some charges in more specific categories, but pretty easy to review transactions and set up rules for future similar transactions.

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I'll check this one out.
As said above we don't care about categories. I don't care if we spent $1000 at a restaurant in a month, I just care about how much total money we spent, and knowing it at the beginning of each week or so.

I wouldn't mind an app that links to chase or amex to download activity automatically. But like I mentioned above, we budget on a yearly basis for a lot of things, and so I'd have to manually go and take those out or categorize them into something that isn't our $2500 budget. Like after school care, music lessons, school clothes, dog food, on and on.

So either way I'm doing manual stuff. I'd rather just manually enter purchases I know are part of our $2500.

Annual things are a part of everyone's budget. We have them in ours as well. For example, I just paid homeowners insurance for the year. I have that bucket treated differently, it doesn't show I'm over $2k for the month. It just shows what I spend a year, month, etc.

I feel like you're over complicating it.

Since you're checking out copilot and mentioned Amex, the link between them currently sucks. Copilot says it's Amex's fault and trying to fix it. Our chase card works fine, links purchases real time. I have to manually remove and re-add Amex to get it to sync. Will probably cancel if they don't fix it by our renewal.

But, I do think you're over complicating it. Any budget app should be able to do what you're asking. Nothing you're saying is weird, it's normal for anyone budgeting. You just have to spend the time in the beginning setting up your categories and rules.

I have been downloading transactions from my credit cards and chase bank etc to excel

Reading this post I created a Rocket money account and it has a smart phone app and the user has control over categorizing etc.

And it links to my credit cards, bank account, investment account

Wife and I just started using pen and paper to track groceries/miscellaneous categories.

So, your use case is basically start with $2,500 every month and then decrement it manually until it gets to $0. I'm going to assume you are allocating any surplus into savings to make this easy.

If that is all you want to do, I would look at "Fudget 2", "Spending Tracker", or "PocketGuard" in the Apple store assuming you have Apple phones. I believe they address this use case without worrying about tracking categories or connecting to anything, if you don't care about that.

YouBet said:

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So, your use case is basically start with $2,500 every month and then decrement it manually until it gets to $0. I'm going to assume you are allocating any surplus into savings to make this easy.

If that is all you want to do, I would look at "Fudget 2", "Spending Tracker", or "PocketGuard" in the Apple store assuming you have Apple phones. I believe they address this use case without worrying about tracking categories or connecting to anything, if you don't care about that.

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in a nutshell yeh. Although, sometimes we hit say $3k. $2500 isn't a hard number that once it's hit, we're out of money. We have a reserve, and while we don't want to constantly take from it or deplete it of course, we can take from it as necessary to pay the cards every month.

Overall story; My wife took a little sabbatical of sorts for 22/23, and this year is starting up again. She was still working last year as a permanent teacher sub, but now is back in her typical counselor role again part time.
So She's going from $x last year to $2x this year, and next year will increase again to about $3x once she goes full time. So we need to get a baseline of what is a comfortable spend for us, as we're kind of starting over, and it's not a gradual income increase like typical where you make small adjustments. We're talking a couple thousand dollars per month increase, two years in a row.

So just a simple tracker is all I want. One That resets every month without carrying over and under or over budget.

But so many charges on our cards don't count towards this monthly spend that a linked app, in my opinion, might be more work than just manual tracking.
I'll check those out.

why not just use a google sheet? you can update/format that as you like and open it from your mobile. stored online for all to access.

I was going to say use excel, but google sheets probably works better

Agree with the Google sheet option based on what you're trying to do (simple tracker, no categories needed, etc)

We use YNAB and it allows you to manually enter in transactions (which we prefer). Also has an app for multiple people to access. However, it's probably not worth it for what you're trying to do ($90/yr).

I was going to mention Google Sheets as well. They have a template called Budget Template with a Transactions tab where you can manually enter transactions. You can ignore the Budget tab.

Using the Transactions tab, put your $2,500 budget at top and put a simple formula in that decrements it every time you enter a transaction.

Boom. Done.

in mint you can edit individual transactions to "hide from budgets and trends" and it'll show only what you want. this gets what you're asking for and is probably easier and faster than doing manual entry. alternatively, mint also allows you to export transactions to an excel sheet.