I really wish there was more granular nomenclature around budgeting. "Budgeting" varies so much and the splash page rarely helps. So I will often have to downlo

I really wish there was more granular nomenclature around budgeting. "Budgeting" varies so much and the splash page rarely helps. So I will often have to download or sign up for the app, attach actual data (which I'm less than eager to do) and poke around. When looking at credit unions they touted their website's features but were surprised when I asked if there was a way I could demo it. YNAB uses a variation of the "envelope method." You categorize money earned. Then that gets deducted by expenses. In meatspace you would take your paycheck in cash and split it into labeled envelopes and use that for spending. This is a simplification of what YNAB does and there are other free tools that use this method. Mint and Money in Excel take transactions and categorize them. From there you can look at the history of the category or look at net worth or income/expense over time. When you set a "budget" it's just a number you set based on previous month's spending and it's unrelated to your income. These generally suck for non-monthly expenses like property tax or my bi-monthly trash bill. YNAB /can/ do charts and trends, but they often encourage a "fresh start" which starts everything over and don't have great tools around historical data. So you can't look back that far. With Excel it's just a spreadsheet so if you have the data in any format you can pull it in.