Budget software online reviews

After another round of testing nearly a dozen apps, we continue to recommend Simplifi by Quicken as the easiest, most comprehensive way to both see where your money is going and plan for future expenses. For those beholden to a budget that forces them to account for absolutely every dollar in their bank account, we recommend You Need a Budget YNAB. Simplifi combines an elegant, intuitive interface with robust tools to track your spending and plan for future expenses.

It also had the fewest bank connectivity issues of the apps we tested. Most budget apps are either easy to set up but ultimately ineffective when it comes to money management, or so complex and dull as to drive away anyone without a spare week to investigate their finances. Simplifi threads the needle. It lets you sync your bank accounts seamlessly, and it offers a combination of helpful tools and user-friendly design that encourages you to stay within your means.

Our favorite feature is the personalized spending plan, which gives you an up-to-the-minute dollar figure of what you have left to spend for the rest of the month after accounting for your bills and savings goals.

Plus, having some skin in the game may compel you to stick with it. YNAB has some syncing issues and a steep learning curve, but it remains a great option for hard-core budgeters. For a more stringent approach to managing your money, a zero-based budgeting system —where you assign every dollar in your bank account to either a spending category or savings goal at the start of each month—may be for you. The complexity of getting the allocations right can take a while to truly understand, but for those with whom this approach fits, the payoff can be immense: Your brain is trained to spend less.

Besides the steep learning curve, though, in our tests YNAB had more synchronization issues with some banks. Wirecutter senior staff writer Melanie Pinola researches and writes about home-office products and tech, including our guide to the best online tax-filing software.

For over five years before joining Wirecutter, she wrote extensively about personal finance for sites such as Lifehacker, SmartAsset, and MyBankTracker. He won a Loeb Award for his work on the financial costs of mental illness. If you want to live within your means and for your money to grow, the most fundamental rule of personal finance is: Spend less than you earn and save the rest. Or, put another way, earn more than you spend and save the difference.

A budgeting app is for anyone who wants to get a better handle on their finances without having to manually tally up numbers in a spreadsheet every month. We know many people are concerned about the security and privacy of these apps; more on that in a bit.

Does everyone need a budgeting app, though? Personal finance writer Helaine Olen makes a case in Slate for why such a meticulous and exacting approach to personal budgeting may be misguided. Tracking apps offer a 30,foot view of your finances, display your transactions in real time, and require very little effort to set up. Conversely, zero-balance apps encourage a more hands-on approach, forcing you to account for every dollar you bring in X amount for savings, Y amount for rent, and so on , but they tend to be idiosyncratic and costly.

It tracks your spending, revolving bills, savings goals, and earnings history to estimate how much you have left to spend in a given month in any category you want. Spreadsheet-based budgets and some other budgeting tools prompt you to create a myriad of categories and assign a dollar amount to each one, which is not only overwhelming but also likely to fail.

Ever get hit with a large bill, such as for an auto repair or emergency dental treatment? Those kinds of things can throw your budget off track.

This mix of approaches tracks with how many Americans actually behave. Just one in three US households has a detailed, written budget, according to a Gallup survey , whereas about two-thirds of Americans budget in some fashion, per Debt.

Both polls are from pre-pandemic times, however. The key is to choose an approach that you feel comfortable with and that actually works with your lifestyle. Both of our picks offer a free trial period, so you should experiment before settling on one option.

Trust us, connecting our bank accounts and entrusting apps with our financial data made us nervous too. That includes:. Most budgeting apps use a third-party service to aggregate the data from your bank to the app; the budgeting apps simply provide the means for you to read that data in one place. The third-party services include Plaid and Envestnet Yodlee.

These services have their own security policies and procedures, which makes it very difficult to assess everything. All of them claim to not sell or share personal information— the same way that your bank also promises to protect your privacy. What if something goes wrong and someone was able to access your account with one of these budgeting apps?

This is why we strongly recommend properly securing any app you use—budgeting apps and financial apps in particular—by:. What data do you get from banks? What can the company see? How do you use and share that financial information? We scoured the web and app stores looking for popular budgeting apps—ones that have at least a modest user base for instance, a sizable number of reviews on the App Store or Google Play.

Then we culled our list of contenders 35 apps in and 17 in to test using these criteria:. Fortunately, for this endeavor at least, the authors of this guide have complicated financial situations: Dozens of credit cards, multiple checking and savings accounts, mortgages, and car loans.

After throwing our data at these apps on our laptops, iPhones, and Android phones , we settled on two types of recommendations:. Simplifi helps you create a personalized spending plan that provides an elegant solution to a surprisingly complex budgeting problem: How much can I spend this month?

We found it to be the easiest budgeting app to set up and use, with more helpful reports and alerts to keep tabs on your spending and plan for the future than the competition offers. When you first connect Simplifi to your bank accounts and credit card accounts, the app will pull in your most recent transactions, attempt to categorize them, and suggest ones that seem to be recurring bills or transfers.

This mode of budgeting meets you where you are, allowing you to shake up your budget in the moment while also nudging you to stay within your means. But Thanksgiving is coming up, and you breeze well past your normal amount on turkey, pie, and wine. Rather than readjust the rest of your budget to account for this temporary spike—as you would with a zero-based budget where every dollar is planned out for the month—you adjust your behavior on the fly. The spending plan is also easy to adapt to your life.

If your grandparent sends you a birthday check that you want to bank instead of spend, you click a little button that removes it from your income for that month. Simplifi caught most of our expenses from looking at our checking accounts, but you can add your own with little effort. The pop-up screen to add a transaction or create a recurring transaction is user-friendly, with large, clearly labeled fields for selecting how often the expense happens, when if ever the expense will end, the account it belongs to, and so on.

You can create a watchlist by category e. Once you create a watchlist, Simplifi will present your:. While budgeting apps all basically track your money coming in and going out, Simplifi also gives you a future look: The cash flow view projects your account balances for up to the next 6 months. By showing you how much you might have months from now, this feature can help you better plan for large expenses.

The only other app we tested that has this forward-looking cash flow projection is PocketSmith , which can project up to 10 years into the future. But PocketSmith had connectivity issues with our financial accounts. She broke down the numbers and came up with a realistic monthly budget.

Knowing that her budget was tied to something she was looking forward to and that meant so much to her really motivated her to stick with it. PST every day should you run into trouble. It also offers basic accounting functionality for small businesses to manage invoicing, bill payment and payroll. GnuCash is not an online, cloud-based program so no one has physical access to your data; the software runs on your computer and your data lives wherever you store it, such as on your desktop, a hard drive or Dropbox.

Budgeting gets a bad rap for being a monotonous and tedious task, but it can also be a helpful way to understanding your spending habits. And a budgeting tool can make the process a lot easier if you find the right one for your needs. That tool might be an already-formatted spreadsheet where you just plug in your transactions, or an app that auto-categorizes your spending for you.

Because different budgeting tools offer slightly different approaches to tracking your money, first decide how intentional you want to be. Hands-on methods, such as manually enter your transactions into a spreadsheet, may take more time, but the process can help you be more thoughtful about your spending.

You'll also want to decide if you want to pay for a budgeting tool. While the top-rated tools on this list come no cost to users, those who don't mind paying a premium have options for budgeting tools with more robust features.

Learn more in the app's review. Once your budget is created, the bulk of the work is done and from then on you are just revisiting it to make tweaks as your spending habits or income change. To determine which free budgeting tools offer the best user experience, Select analyzed over a dozen different budgeting tools and looked at their features and user reviews.

We narrowed down our ranking by looking for at least one pick in each of the following categories: spreadsheets, desktop software and smartphone apps.

We wanted variety in the ways users can build their budget, and we ranked each tool by who it is best designed for anyone, beginners, investors or small business owners. The five tools we selected for this ranking are all free and easy to use. For our selection, we also favored budgeting tools that have strong user reviews. Other factors we looked at included the security features, user customization and illustrative data insight, such as graphs and reports, that are available.

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Click here to read more about Select. Click here to read our full advertiser disclosure. We may receive a commission when you click on links for products from our affiliate partners. Understanding how much you earn and spend is key to getting control of your finances.

Best free spreadsheet for anyone: Google Sheets Best overall free smartphone app: Mint Best free smartphone app for beginners: Goodbudget Best free smartphone app for investors: Personal Capital Best free desktop software for small business owners: GnuCash. What does a budgeting tool do? How do you create a budget? Learn More. For one, it allows you to analyze your forecasts or budgets against your costs, deals, revenue, profits, and more. You can also control all of your sales and purchase invoices from one place , and send detailed invoices to your clients based on proposals you build in Scoro.

Additionally, you get powerful enterprise-grade reporting and powerful real-time dashboards through which you can discover new and latent opportunities. And with just a few clicks, you can create and render detailed financial reports at any time. Besides, Scoro allows you to create separate budgets for each project and track them against your actual income and expenses. You can compare multiple budget scenarios with your actual revenues, costs, and profits, and you can get forecasts based on booked deals and scheduled invoices.

Scoro offers seamless integration with your accounting software , ensuring that your financial information is kept up to date. Scoro is business-oriented and its pricing reflects that.

All plans have a 5-user minimum. PocketGuard is a great option for those who love to track every penny they receive or spend. It is available for iOS, Android, and desktop. The platform is available in both the US and Canada. You can view how much spare money you have, create spending limits so you can better control your expenses, and set savings goals. The free version of PocketGuard is fully loaded with useful features and tools to help you manage your finances.

YNAB connects directly with your bank and credit card accounts and allows you to set money and financial management objectives with the Goals function.

The YNAB interface is deceptively powerful and can be tailored to suit your needs depending on your overall financial picture. The platform revolves completely around your budget. When you add your bank or credit card accounts, you can import transactions into the platform.

The platform offers new features like the Age of Money feature which is essentially a measure of how prudent you are. Your overall objective on the app is to keep everything in the green.

Wherever you have a negative balance, the platform will show red. This visual system of organizing your finances makes operating YNAB simple. Targeted at SMBs, it provides users with a robust solution for financial planning and helps them create viable budgets and build reliable financial forecasts. Planning Maestro leverages the power of financial intelligence to analyze your financial data and uncover insights and opportunities to help you stick to your budgets.

These financial models eliminate the guesswork as far as your finances are concerned. Centage also ensures frictionless synchronization between all your financial accounts. This way, you can more easily and effortlessly compare and reconcile data from across your financial accounts and statements. The platform delivers a comprehensive financial planning package by offering the ability to generate actionable reports. With its rich analytics, you gain important insights into your performance so that you can address existing and future planning challenges.

The name might seem unusual but this app is smarter than you might give it credit for. The app, available for iOS, has already garnered a sizable following and generous heaps of praise in the media.

While Wally is generally regarded as a personal finance app, it is so much more than that. It is multi-faceted and offers functionality that can be used by all and sundry, including families, individuals, workers, and employees. In short, anyone who needs to keep an eye on their spending can use this app. The Wally Gold plan offers some advanced tools such as advanced budgeting, currency conversion, and the ability to handle foreign accounts.

But even the free version is packed with useful features such as joint and individual accounts, budget sharing, automatic syncing, lists, reminders, notes, and comments. There are in-app purchases, too.

Mvelopes is a budgeting app based on the cash envelope budgeting system. It was created by Finicity, which is a fintech company owned by Mastercard. The app syncs to all your financial accounts , showing transactions whenever you shop online, pay a bill, or swipe your credit card.

The safety of your information is guaranteed as the app uses bank-level encryption. Once you assign a transaction to an envelope, it automatically shows you how much you have left to spend in that category. And if you use cash for anything, you can enter the transaction information into the app manually.

There are various versions available to get started. For example, their Premier plan offers a Debt Roll-Down feature which allows users to input their debt total, and view several payoff options which you can then integrate into your envelope budgets.

The Plus plan offers financial advice from a personal financial trainer every quarter that is, every three months. Other benefits of the Mvelopes program include a comprehensive snapshot of your bank accounts and reports that detail metrics such as your envelope spending and funding, envelope balance, net worth over time, account balance, envelope spending per month, and many more.

Mvelopes offers no free plan but you do get a day free trial of Mvelopes Premier. It helps you log and allocate your finances; all you need to sign up are an email address and a password. The app is built on the envelope budgeting tactic. You start by creating your envelopes. Then you manually input your income, debts, cash amounts, and balances from each of your financial accounts. Having set up the app, you simply log in the info every time you spend or receive money and see how it affects your budget in real-time.

The balance in each envelope is reflected by a colorful bar on the home screen that adjusts according to your activity. Unlike most other budgeting apps, Goodbudget does not sync with your bank accounts or track transactions automatically for you. However, you can still view transactions that you manually logged into the app and compare them to those in your bank statements.

This way, you can spot discrepancies such as expenses you forgot to log or errors. You can also schedule transactions for later and have email notifications sent to remind you of them. PlanGuru is an affordable financial planning software for businesses and nonprofits.

It helps finance professionals working on many projects or with many clients simplify complex budgeting and forecasting processes. It can perform computations that are generally considered to be the preserve of full-scale ERP solutions that can cost tens of thousands of dollars and are complicated to install, use, and maintain. You also have the option of cloud hosting , if you prefer that to on-premise installation. Plus, you can run projections or estimates of future staffing needs.