this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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As with many Mint users I was looking for a alternative when they announced their shutdown.

TLDR: Cashew is pretty good and free

I tested a few of the auto scraping alternatives (YNAB, Wealthica) but even though they were paid they didn't even have all the financial institutions.

Then I looked into manually entry and the top suggestion of Google Forms which turned out to be a pretty limited hack of a solution.

Finally stumbled on Cashew that had a proper mobile app, desktop web app, widgets, csv export. Perk of it also being free and open source(aka FOSS).

The whole app is actually impressively refined and noticeably better than the Mint Android app ever was.

As someone who had about 10,000 transactions in Mint from 2014 I was pretty hesitant on the switching to manual entry but everything is so streamlined it only takes 20 seconds from picking up my phone to entering a transaction once you have things setup.

  1. Touch widget
  2. Enter title
  3. Choose Category
  4. Enter amount

Few cons

  • Some syncing issues between the Android and Web App

  • General lack of documentation.

  • When a Main Category has Sub Category it'll add a extra step for the SubCat every time you enter a transaction. Otherwise entering a transaction is 3 steps from a home screen.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Since you can export to CSV, Cashew is also equally agnostic. Not really sure what I’d do in Excel but I do plan to make some better chart and graphs in PowerBI and possibly merging transaction off CC records.

So basically, you use Cashew to input your transactions, but process them outside of it in PowerBI?

Since you can export to CSV, Cashew is also equally agnostic

You'd have to process the data again though, unless you really use it only to input transactions, but not to manage your budget.

[–] SamuelRJankis 3 points 10 months ago

I haven't felt the need to manipulate the data in any way at the current time. Did find another function I wanted on splitting larger transactions into multiple categories but in context of the OP Mint did none of these things.

For PowerBI or Excel I would just dump it into a folder along with my old Mint data. If setup correctly you would just need to refresh the data. I don't do any budgeting.