Spreadsheets and self-hosted

These tools ask more of you. You install updates, make backups and sometimes troubleshoot imports. Bank connections, where they exist, often rely on third-party services you set up yourself, and many people import bank files instead. In return, nobody else holds your transaction history, and the software keeps working even if a company changes its plans.

Check whether a tool imports the file formats your bank offers, such as CSV, OFX or QFX, how it handles more than one currency, and how you would move your data out later.

Spreadsheet budgets reward people who like to tinker. You can build any report you want, add a column for something no app tracks, and share a read-only copy with a partner or a bookkeeper. The trade-off is that the sheet only knows what you put in it, and a broken formula can quietly throw off a month of totals. Keep a simple layout, lock the cells that hold formulas, and check totals against your bank statement now and then. For self-hosted apps, write down how you installed them and where the data lives. A future you, restoring from backup after a disk failure, will be grateful. Test any restore at least once, before you ever need it.