topic Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features in Personal Finance

Seeking a budget app with specific features

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 21:48:24 GMT

I'm looking for a budgeting app that will link to my credit card accounts to track expenses and allow me to create thresholds that I would like to spend in each category so I can monitor it in real time.

Does something like this exist? I've tried YNAB, PersonalCapital, and many more, and it does not appear they do this.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

hernaemm90 — Sat, 06 Apr 2019 02:17:58 GMT

Have you tried looking into Mint?

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

Kforce — Sat, 06 Apr 2019 04:12:23 GMT

With your forum name you should just make what you want !

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

iced — Sat, 06 Apr 2019 14:01:43 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
I'm looking for a budgeting app that will link to my credit card accounts to track expenses and allow me to create thresholds that I would like to spend in each category so I can monitor it in real time.

Does something like this exist? I've tried YNAB, PersonalCapital, and many more, and it does not appear they do this.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

What you're asking for is likely not feasible because of the real-time requirement. I can swipe a card at a restaurant and see the charge appear in my Chase app within a minute, sure. I can swipe a card and a restaurant and see that it got coded as dining once the charge clears, sure. While it's still pending, though...not so much. You also have the variable of different banks - American Express has a delay before coding charges that's different than Chase's delay, that's different than Citi's delay, that's different than Barclay's and so on.

To create an app that can tell you how much you spent, how that merchant will code, as you swipe the card, regardless of which bank...not in April 2019.

Now, if you wanted something that did this on-demand, so as soon as that information was available you could check it at any time...that's at least possible. But that's not nearly the same thing as getting that data in real time.

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

Revelate — Sat, 06 Apr 2019 16:54:12 GMT

I think the core problem is all of the existing tools explicitly ignore pending charges in my experience.

So you're talking a 3ish day delay anyway, and short of writing something different I don't know there's a way around that.

I would ask though is there any real need to get true real-time information for budgetting purposes? My short term memory isn't great anymore but even I have a pretty good idea of how I'm trending when I'm really tracking.

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 17:16:07 GMT

I'm thinking about it!

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 17:16:55 GMT

Yes, I looked at mint but it does not do real-time alerts.

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 17:18:52 GMT

Well thought out. Thank you.

I noticed I can set up an email alert from Chase. I've noticed that arrives almost exactly as I swipe my credit card.

I'm thinking now of possibly writing some code to catch those emails, and then parse the vendor and amount out of the email. If I can do that, then I could apply that vendor to a specific category and track how those categories are doing each day. Might be possible.

The limitation here is it would only work for Chase, but that is what I use.

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 17:20:11 GMT

It's a fair point. But my ultimate ideal is to keep a daily budget going. It would need to be flexible, but if I can break down my recurring expenses into a daily cost, and break down my income to a daily average amount, then I can make day by day baby steps towards improved savings. It sort of would put me on a 'streak' that I'd like to maintain. Does that make sense?

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

iced — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 17:28:34 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
It's a fair point. But my ultimate ideal is to keep a daily budget going. It would need to be flexible, but if I can break down my recurring expenses into a daily cost, and break down my income to a daily average amount, then I can make day by day baby steps towards improved savings. It sort of would put me on a 'streak' that I'd like to maintain. Does that make sense?

It all makes sense, it's just that guessing the code in advance really is a guess. If you only dine at the same 10 restaurants over and over, you can learn the code and be accurate - provided the merchant doesn't change up. Unfortunately, in a lot of situations, the coding isn't so simple.

There are some merchants who code different transactions from the same store differently. A ticket at a movie theater may code as entertainment, but the concession stand codes as dining. I know several ice cream parlors, including some national chains, that code as grocery. Some restaurants code as grocery and some grocers code as restaurants. Some parking garages are travel; some aren't.

If you don't mind the inaccuracy, you can certainly guess as to what you think it will be, but unless you go back later and verify those codes once they post, you will likely skew your results over time. You're also focusing on Chase for now, which will help somewhat with this, but if you introduce other banks, this problem quickly compounds. Your local gas station may be travel to Chase and gas to Citi and grocery to Discover.

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 17:30:25 GMT

Super helpful @iced. You must be a software person

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

PineCat — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 10:58:34 GMT

In a past life I did some work on a project that used a data aggrigation service for investment accounts. I think something similar is used by many of these apps to retrieve transaction data. The accuracy of these apps in real-time cannot be any greater than what information is made available from the bank's transaction data.

The problem with real-time card transactions and pending status: many times the correct amount isn't available right away. This is common with pay-at-the-pump gas stations and places where you add a tip to the transaction. A 'preauthorization' is done at the time the card is swiped, but the transaction isn't finalized until the establishment does a 'batch settlement' of transactions - sometimes the end of the day, or maybe two or three days later.

This is made worse by the fact that many institutions don't even include pending transactions in the data they export or make available to the aggirgation service. For example, I can download transactions from my credit union. The pending transactions are not made available in this data.

It's one of the reasons I still do everything manually. Perhaps some day in the future, the banks and credit card processors will get together on a standard for transaction data access, and hopefully have some better way of handling these pending transactions.

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 20:16:22 GMT

Not looking at reply's but YNAB has been a life changer for us & everyone i know.

Re: Seeking a budget app with specific features

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 20:17:12 GMT

YNAB does connect to your cc’s and your banks & any other accounts..