Thanks for such complete feedback. Did you notice that they recently added YNAB together? That may be the trigger I needed to get the app, that way I can share the subscription price with my special one. We downloaded the app and made our budget, watched the intro video and the videos that explain further the 4 rules. My partner got really excited, seeing for the first time the allocation of budget for the iPhone she needs, and also other expenses.
As you, I prefer to enter everything manually, that way there is a lot more intentionality when spending money. Also, my bank takes some time to clear the money and I have noticed with other apps, that they show you money YOU DON’T REALLY HAVE because the bank hasn’t cleared it.
Intentionality is key. It’s like the advice of Cal Newport when planning your day and then seeing your metrics of what habits you invested time in. By manually checking a box, you see whether you were lazy or not. Instant hit to the ego, and in the case of money, an instant punch to your face if you spend when you didn’t have to.
Yeah, in my research I didn’t find a discount. Check YNAB together, one person pays the subscription but up to 5 people can share it and budget. Pretty close to a discount, although with a sun.
It’s not a sale, but Buckets will let you trial it as long as you like. It comes with a “buy Buckets” budget line item, too, so you could squirrel away a few dollars a month for it to make the purchase easy.
Glad you are on this journey. I know there was. a lot of flack in the YNAB forums, before they closed them down but on balance YNAB remains the best solution for my family due to familiarity. It’s as much a part of my life as putting my keys in my pocket as I leave the house.
Double Entry Booking is the standard way of Booking for all German Traders, as required by the law.
Maybe you will find something that meets your requirements there?
I think double entry bookkeeping is used by all countries, but tends to be used by companies and accountants. I’m looking for something more for home use.
I’ve managed to create a Numbers spreadsheet. Did have it in Excel, but it was so unwieldy and doing weird stuff.
I’ll see how it works for my accounts! If you experiment let me know how it goes.
Never looked at GNUCash. What advantages does it have? I’m assuming it’s PTA? How does it stack up against Ledger, Hledger and Beancount? I went with a spreadsheet as the commandline is not as visual.
This is nothing, you would normally do on a voluntary base, therefore it is enforced by laws to force the companies to work with this.
And it is something, you normally have to (in Germany) run thru a 3-year-training, to do so.
I wouldn’t recommend it for “home use” at all…
As with all things, there are degrees of use. I haven’t the complexities of a business, but there are a number of people from the accounting industry who do recommend double entry accounting for all people. There are also quite a few apps available for personal use that use subsets of this.
There is a benefit to a household doing double entry bookkeeping recognising that this isn’t business grade accounting.
It’s a GUI double entry bookkeeping program, so it does all the setup and arranging in the background, so no need to fiddle with formulas etc in the background. It also allows for budgeting if you wanted that, and it has in built graphs. Allows easy creation and files and will highlight any issues you make with the double entry. One of the big features is that it can link online and collect investment data if you want that (well, share prices - you have to do the hard work in terms of the buy and sell).
It’s FOSS software and actively developed. There’s pretty good help online and the manual is good if you ever need to use it.
I wouldn’t call it hard to use if you can already use double entry book keeping.
I just use a Google Sheets document, not really very sophisticated but very customized. I believe double entry stuff to be overkill for my use case: my indicators are “how much am I worth this month” and “what are my recurrent vs point expenses”.
Each month I download my bank reports and methodically update the Excel file, this is about 1hr. But as @Jvet said, I almost enjoy it.
