4 ms·
5 Reasons Why I Switched from Mint to a Spreadsheet
- osullivj 10y agoSome good points explaining why spreadsheets are so sticky. I do my books for my limited company in Google & Excel. Points 2 & 5 are key for me: flexibility and awareness. I tried freeagent.com a while back. Initially it seemed very convenient, but then I had massive hassle with some double booked transactions, so went back to spreadsheets. I do note that the author is an MS person, so is likely to talk up Excel...
- dend 10y agoFull disclosure - yes, I work at MS, but not on the Excel team, and have no stake in Excel in any way. That said, you can substitute Excel with any other spreadsheet processor you like :) And I agree with you that in some cases transactions are hard to track with existing tools when there are very specific scenarios that are simply not common enough to be included in the "one-size-fits-all" services. For me those are cash transactions between friends and them paying back for things through, say, Venmo.
- fleurdelotus 10y agoWhat about Microsoft Money?
- dend 10y agoHey, Money Plus Sunset is still an available download: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20738 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=207...
- saddestcatever 10y agoHow are you populating your spreadsheet? Importing a .csv from each of your bank accounts? Let's say I have 3 different accounts, logging in and getting updated transactions is now a 15 minute process. Mint absolutely blows (slow, barely works, poor categorization, poor projections), but I haven't found an easier way to view multiple accounts in one place.
- dend 10y agoCSV export/import for frequent transactions, for others I just pop the Excel spreadsheet on my phone (it's synced to Dropbox) and just roll from there.
- zomg 10y agoSeems like a move backwards to me. I'd recommend trying YNAB (You Need A Budget - youneedabudget.com).
- dend 10y agoHow do they talk to banks and what is their security policy? I've found that they use Finicity (https://www.finicity.com/ https://www.finicity.com/) for API and are stating that only a limited number of engineers have access to the DB (https://www.youneedabudget.com/security/ https://www.youneedabudget.com/security/). Still, would love to know more details on the security policies and infrastructure that are kind-of glanced over.
- zomg 10y agoI intentionally don't auto-import transactions, which keeps me honest about my spending (part of their philosophy, which I enjoy), so I haven't had a need to look into it.