Personal Finance Software

Lately I’ve been playing with PocketSmith.

I started out using the Quicken version we bought a couple years ago, planning on updating it if it worked out… but it’s become pretty obvious that Quicken is being grossly neglected in favour of Mint. I absolutely adore Mint, particularly the budgeting tools (which are terrible in Quicken now that I’ve tried something better), but sadly Mint supports exactly one Australian bank - WestPac. I’m pretty happy with my bank, and don’t care to change banks over Mint support.

We used PocketBook for a while, but it’s just not that good either. The Android app is quite useful (PocketSmith doesn’t have one yet) but PocketBook has a laundry list of problems, particularly with the budgeting portion. It works well enough and is free, so if the free version of PS won’t work for you give it a go too. My primary complaint with PB is that it is utterly incapable of dealing with transactions where the amounts and dates are the same - eg two World of Warcraft subscriptions. The notifications and email alerts are very well done otherwise, and for someone who doesn’t automate or otherwise stay on top of recurring transactions, PocketBook could be a godsend.

PocketSmith supports bank feeds from our bank (and many others), but you have to pay for it. I’m considering doing so - upgrading Quicken each year (which we haven’t done in ages, honestly) works out around the same price as a PS subscription, and if they fix a few issues with the UI it’ll be a really nice service. At the moment I’m sticking to entering transactions manually - I’m really no worse off than using Quicken in that sense.

I might be alone in this, but for some reason I couldn’t stand YNAB.

Horsham VIC 3400, Australia

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Horsham VIC 3400, Australia

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