One of my teammates at Neo is putting together a business case around budgeting features, and we’re curious to hear from people directly on what works best for you today.
Personally, I’ve always done my own accounting — even before Neo was my main bank. Every month, I export all my transactions, categorize them (groceries, restaurants, alcohol, coffee, etc.), and add tags like travel or gifts. I also keep a section for deposits, investments, cash-flow, and net worth.
That’s my approach, but we’d love to hear yours:
Do you use spreadsheets, apps, notebooks, or something else?
Do you focus on tracking every expense, or just the big categories?
What’s the most helpful way for you to see your overall financial picture?
Really appreciate any insights you’re willing to share.
Spreadsheets divided into categories! I find the categorization that most credit cards default to can be imprecise so the only way that worked was to manually categorize transactions. A lot of work and I’d love an easier way!
Hi @tkato that’s definitely an awesome idea, I’ll be sure to pass the idea of having a more precise way to export the transactions along to the team that can use it most. I’m going to reach out to you through DMs to confirm your details so that if we do end up getting that feature I can email you about it!
I’ve been doing this for years, since 2018! None of the banks offered great categorization off the books so I went to a spreadsheet. It’s pretty sophisticated now, but I have a friend that recommended YNAB and I’m thinking of trying next.
I find YNAB to be quite difficult for new users and a barrier to the basics of budgeting. I shake my fist at the clouds that desktop based solutions have gone by the wayside as being able to export a CSV from your bank and upload and manually manage your money, compare actual to budget was quite handy.
Unless Canada adopts the Open Banking framework more robustly, the current method of using services like Plaid does still concern me as we’re essentially just screen scraping.
I would love to have the ability to have CSV with selectable columns, as I would categorize myself after uploading into my budget system.
When you say CSV with selectable columns, you mean selecting what you want to export rather than just exporting all columns, which is how we’re currently set up?
Exactly Grant - my budgeting app makes me go through one extra step of matching (and then excluding) the extraneous columns, so having the ability to just select the ones I need would be a great want but CSV works well enough for me. It is frustrating that Plaid works one way into Neo and not the other way around but that’s honestly for the best from a liability standpoint.
Yeah, deleting and reordering columns is a familiar frustration for me, I used to do that every week. I would honestly love to be able to do a little more in the app, in terms of categorizing transactions, so I don’t have to do that manually every export as well.
A few months ago I found a free open source budgeting app that I really like called cashew! It has both mobile apps and a website so you can do things on both desktop and mobile. It supports CSVs and manual input. I’ve honestly love the look of it and being able to support a small developer on it if I want to pay, but it’s totally free! Over the years I’ve gone through quite a few different ways of budgeting and tracking. I have various different things like a spreadsheet for some rough budgeting. I mostly tracked things mentally until recently as I only had like one or two main accounts I’d use. I know budgeting/tracking things are quite personal but I’d recommend people try out cashew as it’s quite nice and seems to fit a lot of needs. Plus it’s free and open source and made in Canada!
Tried spreadsheet but you need to do it after each purchase lol.
It Neo could get a built in budgeting tool that would be nice. You already have a basic version of it but showing in and outs but knowing how good your developpers are , it can be the pinnacle on the app.
Seriously there’s no other financial app as smooth and well built as yours.
Even Wealthsimple is no match. When you start offering the same products as them ( managed tfsa with stocks ) you’ll be a serious contender for them
I am for sure checking out Cashew, that sounds amazing. It looks like the Anki (not sure if you’ve ever used Anki, but it’s an amazing flash card tool) for budgeting. Cheers!
Budgeting tools are on the radar, and from what we’re hearing they don’t have to be fancy. Appreciate you weighing in on the discussion.
As for managed TFSAs, we do actually do that. I’ve been using WS and our Neo Invest for almost a year now and they return effectively the same rate. I could use either, but since most of my money is in Neo I focusing it on that side.
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