Any app/tools/bank that can help analyse a card statement for spending habit?

[Jacinle]

Hi all

I want to see where my outgoings go.

Wonder if you use any app/tools/bank that can help analyse a card statement for spending habit and recommend?

or plain excel/google sheets ?

I used to log each purchase but have been getting lazy in the past few months.

Jac

[MudPuppy]

I use YNAB (syncs to my bank and cards, but I’m in the us) to categorize each purchase. I find that automatic categories are often incorrectly categorized. For example, if I grab a coffee or snack from the hospital cafeteria, the software seems the hospital name and places the expense in medical when in reality it’s my personal allowance.

[MarcherLady]

Yeah, I agree with MudPuppy, the auto-categorisation tools I have used are generally a bit hit and miss. I used to export my data, either by copy/paste or by whatever tools are available on my providers' sites, dump to google sheets then categorise by hand. With the added bonus that when I was working hard to cut costs I found that looking at each payment to categorise it really focuses the mind on the necessity of each transaction.

[nereo]

I used to use Mint when we were tracking every purchase.  I liked how it could input multiple credit cards and also track investment accounts.  It did require some manual input - for example it had no idea whether a particular Amazon purchase would go under ‘cleaning supplies’ or ‘work’ or whatever.  BUt on the whole it was good.

[charis]

I second Mint. It can track all cards and accounts and create spending graphs. It does take some small manual tweaking but you can create categories that cover anything you buy.

[bownyboy]

MINT is not available in the UK.

OP, the best I’ve found is MoneyHub, you sign up and link all your banking, saving, investment accounts (securely using openbanking) and it auto categorises everything.

You can the view your total networth, spending categories, forecasts etc.

Costs £9.99 a year which is worth it for me.

[habanero]

I also live in a no-mint-land.

Everyone is different, but maybe if it's too much work doing it "by hand" you might have too many smallish expenses or too many spending categories? I played around a bit until I found something that worked for me. At first I used an app but I got lazy and didn't record expenses in the app I installed so it didn't work for me wither. Now I just go through my statements at the end of every month and put every item in a category by hand. The most frequent stuff is grocery shopping but that's fairly easy as I put a lump sum each month into a shared account with my GF so it's a one-liner in my case. We have a common card used only for groceries +  some other small stuff noe and then but the latter is so little I don't even bother. Unless you are scratching your head over where money actually goes, having track of the main categories and larger expenses go a long way. I discovered that I had so few expenses in some categories that I just ended up with a pretty wide "other" category as it din't total to much anyway.

I also have a separate account I pay all regular expenses from - those being mortgage, insurance, cable/internet, house alarm and electricity. I know roughly how much they total each year so I dump a fixed amount into that account every month to even out as they are paid monthly, quarterly or semi-annualy so outflow is irregular,

The easiest way is to spend less money and make fewer purchases ;)

[sea_saw]

I'm a YNAB or spreadsheet manual entry fan. Note that YNAB have made some noise recently about automated entry coming to the UK 'soon', but I don't know how soon is soon.

Another option is that UK challenger banks like Starling or Monzo will auto-categorise your transactions for you in the app. Those categories are reasonably accurate these days, and in the 5% of occasions where they're wrong you can re-categorise a transaction manually. You can then see reports and stuff, and set targets.

A nice compromise that I've accidentally happened upon is to use both. I have my main bank account that is tracked comprehensively using YNAB, with transactions entered manually. And I have a Starling card for day-to-day spending on shared expenses with my partner, which basically means groceries, meals out, and household items. Those are the sort of thing where you can have multiple sub-£20 transactions in a week (or even in a day, if you wander a market or something making multiple small transactions) and are annoying to write out manually. At the end of the month I just look at the total spent on each in Starling and put that in YNAB, so I have one £110 'groceries' transaction to log by hand rather than 20+ smaller ones. And if I needed to see how we were doing on those costs as we went along (although in my situation I don't) I could check in Starling.

[beee]

I've been manually tracking expenses in my own app called HoneyMoney since 2011. I think paying attention to every transaction is important.

I simplify entering by combining similar transactions into 1 (one category, one account). For example, here's an "eat out" transaction from last week:

Code: [Select]

3, 5 starbucks
17, 28 italian shop
In reality it was 4 separate transactions over multiple days.
I also round up everything, because cents don't make any real difference but take time to enter

[Jacinle]

MINT is not available in the UK.

OP, the best I’ve found is MoneyHub, you sign up and link all your banking, saving, investment accounts (securely using openbanking) and it auto categorises everything.

You can the view your total networth, spending categories, forecasts etc.

Costs £9.99 a year which is worth it for me.

Thanks, Looks like a promising one, need to understand the open banking thing.

Would it support accounts in different names?  My hubby paid some expense and groceries shopping etc (e.g. depends on who go out) and I want to aggregate that.

[Jacinle]

I used to use Mint when we were tracking every purchase.  I liked how it could input multiple credit cards and also track investment accounts.  It did require some manual input - for example it had no idea whether a particular Amazon purchase would go under ‘cleaning supplies’ or ‘work’ or whatever.  BUt on the whole it was good.

Amazon one is difficult.
On the amazon one, do you know if there is any history that I can see all purchase in a spreadsheet style?

[bownyboy]

Thanks, Looks like a promising one, need to understand the open banking thing.

Would it support accounts in different names?  My hubby paid some expense and groceries shopping etc (e.g. depends on who go out) and I want to aggregate that.

Re accounts with different names. Yes its possible as I’ve linked my wife’s accounts into it as well so we have a total view of all our accounts and networth. We both have the app on our phones and it alerts you when transactions happen and you approve the auto categorisations or you can amend them.

Open Banking means that its super simple to link your accounts and is secure. Also MoneyHub don’t sell / mine your data (hence the £9.99 yearly cost).

Let me know if you have any other questions.

[MarcherLady]

Thanks, Looks like a promising one, need to understand the open banking thing.

Open banking is just a mechanism for you to allow your bank(s) to give your data to the 3rd party. First you tell Money Hub, 'I bank with x', then you log onto your banks' sites and authorise the other half of the link - it's like pairing a bluetooth device. It's much safer for you. Some of the older data aggregator services required you to store your online banking password within the 3rd party, which meant if the data was hacked you might not have got your money back from the banks, because giving out your details is a breach of their T&Cs.

You just need to check that all your banking orgs have signed up for open banking with Money Hub before you pay for a subscription. The Money Hub site should tell you who they support.

[PhilB]

I'm another spreadsheet fan and concur with the sentiment that if the number of transactions makes this too onerous then that's your problem right there.  I also like having quite big categories rather than over-analysing.  I just add a comment if any category is unusually large one month.

[shelivesthedream]

Another spreadsheet here who finds the sheer tedium of entering transactions a useful psychological process (mostly). How many transactions do you have per month that it is such a time consuming task? Or is it just the overcoming of inertia to sit down and do it?