this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Expense Tracker/Replacement for Mint (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] 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.

  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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[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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 :

  1. Touch shortcut
  2. Enter description
  3. Choose category
  4. Enter amount
  5. 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

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