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Left YNAB because I didn't need a budget — I needed to see 2 days ahead
▲ 4 r/PFtools+2 crossposts

Left YNAB because I didn't need a budget — I needed to see 2 days ahead

I used YNAB for almost two years. Categories, envelopes, the whole method — I actually stuck with it, which apparently puts me ahead of most people. And it still didn't stop me from overdrafting.

Took me way too long to realize the problem wasn't spending. It was timing. Three bills were hitting my account two days before my paycheck landed, every single month, and no budgeting category was going to fix that. I had the money — I just didn't have it yet when the bills wanted it.

YNAB is built around "give every dollar a job," which is great for figuring out where your money should go. It's not really built to answer "what's my balance going to be on the 14th." I found myself exporting stuff to a spreadsheet just to map bills against paydays, and that got old fast.

So I built a small tool that does exactly that — you put in your bills and income once, and it shows your projected balance for every day going forward, based on when things actually hit. Not a budget. Just a forecast, so I can see the dip coming instead of finding out from my bank.

It's called CashFlowCast if anyone wants to poke at it (cashflowcast.com) — but mostly I'm curious if the timing thing was just my problem or if other people switched off YNAB for a similar reason. Anyone else find the envelope method didn't actually solve the "will I have money on Thursday" question?

cashflowcast.com
u/SpecificCondition798 — 4 days ago
▲ 0 r/PFtools+2 crossposts

Is there a budget app that tells you what's safe to spend based on your account balance, and expected income and bills?

I know my checking account balance isn't what I can spend because I need to keep some money in there to pay bills and my credit cards. But there's no easy way to know exactly how much I can actually spend from the balance in my checking account. What makes it even harder is that some months I get paid only twice and other months I get paid three times, so I need to keep a certain amount in my checking account for the two-paycheck months, so I have enough for the monthly bills. Is there an app that solves this problem and just tells me every week one consistent number of what I can actually spend beyond all my bills?

reddit.com
u/Global-Thought-1049 — 6 days ago
▲ 2 r/PFtools

I wanted one finance app that didn’t need my bank login or $100 a year

That was really the whole idea behind TESORIN.

I didn’t want one app for budgeting, another for investments, a spreadsheet for net worth, and something else for goals or planning. I wanted one place where I could see the bigger picture.
So TESORIN brings spending, budgets, accounts, debt, net worth, investments, goals and longer-term planning together.

The other two things I cared about from the beginning were privacy and price.

There’s no bank login. Your core financial data is encrypted on your device. On Android, there’s optional bank-SMS parsing if you want a bit of automation without actually connecting your bank.

And I’ve probably spent more time than I should admit on the UI. If you’re going to look at your finances regularly, the app shouldn’t feel like accounting software.

It’s also deliberately cheap: 30 days free with no card, then $1.99 CAD/month or $14.99 CAD/year in Canada, ₹29/month or ₹199/year in India, and $1.99/$14.99 USD in supported USD markets.

There is a tradeoff: if automatic bank syncing is something you absolutely need, TESORIN probably isn’t for you. That’s intentional.

I’m the developer, so obviously I’m biased. But if you try it, I’d genuinely rather hear what feels confusing, unnecessary or annoying than get a generic “nice app.”

Website: https://www.trytesorin.com
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trytesorin.tesorin
iPhone/iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tesorin-personal-finance/id6790928779

u/Sharp-Literature-217 — 6 days ago
▲ 58 r/PFtools+1 crossposts

Personal Project: Built a Personal Finance Dashboard on Excel

So I've been slowly turning my finance spreadsheet into something that does everything for me, and I think I might have gone overboard, but it's decent i guess..

Basic idea: I dump my bank statements into a tab, and pretty much everything after that happens on its own.

  • Cleans up and merges all the raw data automatically
  • I sort new transactions into categories myself, only takes a couple minutes a month
  • Feeds into a data model that drives all the charts
  • Behind that there's a full model tracking my income, spending, savings, and investments month by month

The dashboard itself just shows me the important stuff, income, spending, savings rate, net worth, plus a couple charts. But the bit I actually like most is that it writes little summaries on its own, like "car was your biggest expense this month, up 18% from last month," so it is easier to make sense of it all.

It also checks its own numbers and flags anything that doesn't add up, which sounds minor but has saved me a couple times when something got miscategorized and threw a number way off.

Screenshots below, happy to answer questions if anyone's curious how any of it works.

u/leastracistpaki — 8 days ago