Maybe you just started your career as a young professional, maybe you’re managing big investments and assets in mid-life, or maybe you’re thinking about retirement planning soon…
No matter what stage of life you’re at, finance is one of the most important parts of it. Managing your finances well lays a secure foundation for a happy life.
You need a finance tracker.
A finance tracker not only keeps you on track with spending and budgeting but also gives you comprehensive financial clarity to feel financially secure.
Many Choices in 3 Buckets
There are a huge number of products and solutions available to choose from—probably one of the most crowded spaces to explore.
However, we can easily bucket them into three categories:
Spreadsheet World:
People can easily design a tracking sheet on Excel or Google Sheets, using it weekly or monthly—and even share it (or sell it) for others to reuse.
The biggest advantage here is the spreadsheet’s versatility and flexibility to create whatever you want.
The downsides are also clear: no live data, a certain level of spreadsheet expertise is required, and it’s easy to break—overall, an error-prone solution.
To solve the “no live data” problem, Tiller Money is a pioneer in this space. Through its plugin, you can get transactions into your spreadsheets and stay within that environment.
Budget Apps:
The most famous one was Mint—a monolithic app with a 10 million user base, once owned by Intuit. Unfortunately, it was completely shut down in early 2024.
Mint users flooded into other apps, and a few alternatives topped the list—Monarch Money, Rocket Money, YNAB, Quicken Simplifi, etc. (see more apps).
These apps are well-designed widgets that you can run on your phone or, sometimes, in a web browser.
The benefit of using them is simple: convenience.
You pay a subscription for them to pull data from your banks, provide interfaces to categorize transactions, and offer a few cookie-cutter visualizations for viewing your finances on a dashboard.
The drawbacks are also clear: unlike spreadsheets, everyone sees the same view that the app maker designs, regardless of how different your finances may be.
Basically—no personalization.
Consulting Tools:
These tools are typically crafted for special purposes—to help financial professionals such as advisors and coaches better communicate and collaborate with their clients.
They usually provide basic functions such as recording transactions, making a budget table, etc. The main priority is to allow professionals to share simple documents and facilitate meetings.
As an individual user, you tend to avoid this type of tool—unless you’re seeking professional services in return for a fee.
What Do You Really Want?
If you’ve read this far, I assume you want to find a finance tracker that fits your needs!
Before taking any further steps, take a moment to ask yourself:
- Am I a spreadsheet person?
- Am I okay with working with manual data?
- Are cookie-cutter apps good enough for me?
- Do I have personalized needs in financial insights and analysis?
- Do I want to better share and communicate financial literacy?
If you’re looking for an ideal solution that can serve your financial life for the next 10 years, let me help you make decisions based on your answers:
- Go with spreadsheets if you’re comfortable with them and fine with manual data.
- Try Tiller if you want spreadsheets with auto-data.
- Use any finance app if you want auto-data with cookie-cutter dashboards.
- Find a financial professional if you don’t want to manage it yourself!
Alright, if none of the above is what you want, I have an answer for you!
You want complete control over your finances. You want to see insights that matter only to you. You want a personalized financial system, tailored just for you.
Fina Money – Modular Finance Tracker
What you’ve been looking for is Fina Money—the modular finance tracker, giving you the most flexible finance tracker in the world.
As a Fina user recently commented:
“What I love most about Fina is the combination of simplicity and versatility—bringing together the ease of spreadsheets with the power and flexibility of dashboards that are accessible to anyone.”
Fina Money saw the market clearly—there was no solution that combined the flexibility of spreadsheets with the ease of use of modern apps.
Fina Money employs two major aggregators to provide the broadest financial institution coverage for auto data: Plaid + MoneyKit.
It’s a highly customizable system that lets you configure all key components your own way, such as:
- Your customized category system with multiple switchable versions.
- Your documents, where you can place any Fina insight block anywhere.
- Your rules to automatically classify your data.
- Your profiles to segregate financial accounts into different containers.
It’s not just another app—it’s a platform where you can build your own finance tracker.
It offers 3 tiers of service:
- Free Tier: Manually add accounts and transactions. Also link Google Sheets to batch sync your data.
- Essential Tier: Link up to 5 financial institutions within a single profile.
- Premium Tier: Link unlimited institutions with multiple profiles.
The Fina community encourages users to help each other by sharing methodologies, tracking templates, and even category setups.
As many users have recommended, Fina Money is de facto the best finance tracker available—not by trying to become a better version of another app, but by offering building blocks so each person can construct a personalized system, while still enjoying the versatility that spreadsheets offer.
Check it out today: Modular Finance Tracker.
For easy discovery, I actually used Adobe Express to make a unique QR code for Fina—just sharing it for fun! If you love QR codes like I do, you can make one yourself using this online QR code generator.
