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Expense Tracker/Replacement for Mint (self.personalfinancecanada)

submitted 10 months ago by SamuelRJankis to c/[email protected]

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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.

Touch widget
Enter title
Choose Category
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] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I've started using Actual Budget https://actualbudget.com/

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

I tried to check it out and just got a message saying they weren't doing sign ups for the hosted version.

Might look into setting up the self hosted version.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yes, I'm running self hosted

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I'm curious: what was your problem with Google Forms?

Our form has more questions than cashew (day of the expense if not today, amount, category, recipient, description and spender), but could easily be made shorted, so it could be a 4 step process :

Touch shortcut
Enter description
Choose category
Enter amount
Click submit

I've been using my own Google Spreadsheet for a few years now, and it would really be hard to switch to something else, not because of Forms, but because it works the exact way I need and if something is missing, I can easily add it. It is also mostly technology agnostic, so I could easily move it to Excel or LibreOffice. I'd have to rewrite part of it in order to get back live currency exchange rates and stock data though.

[–] SamuelRJankis 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Google forms does have the edge on having additional fields. The only one I'd want for now would be the Recipient/Merchant field and my current work around is using a delimited title(e.g. StoreName - Title ). They probably should make a enhancement to allow the user to add additional fields, the dev seems to be pretty active on Github and Reddit.

For all the overlapping fields I think Cashew is much better. For example Title will have a auto fill list as you type with Category. I also really didn't like how the Forms date field didn't have a calendar or auto selection on the mobile site or the price field was just a free text field that didn't trigger the proper secondary number pad keyboard on Android.

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.

Example screen shots for entering a transaction.

1(A)

[–] [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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Thanks for the recommendation. I've begun using Cashew as well now, ever since I saw your post. I really like how the app's transitions feel, on top of it working intuitively for my brain.