Help me find budget software that thinks of the future.

June 6, 2010 7:21 PM

I'm looking to replace my budget spreadsheet with a preferably free and definitely offline piece of software. I'm picky though, and the handful of programs I tried all lacked one very important feature.

My spreadsheet currently lists and graphs my daily balance both in the past and the future. Past data comes from transactions entered manually and future data comes from estimates setup with a category, amount, frequency, and start/stop dates. For example I can setup a "rent" category, set it to $XXX, monthly, with the date I started the lease and a stop date 20 years out. I could also setup laundromat fees by week, biannual car insurance payments, daily expenses, a bi-weekly paycheck, and one-off events like next year's vacation. These estimates would be summed and used for calculating the future daily balance. I've found programs that can graph past data but nothing that calculates or plots future estimates based on similar parameters.

So, dear hive mind, is there a free or moderately priced software package that features future estimates as I described? Other features needed are the ability to import CSV records for multiple bank accounts and tag them by category, but this seems much easier to find than the estimating bit. Hopefully I'm simply looking in the wrong places.

posted by waxboy to Work & Money (10 answers total)

Open office's spreadsheet program.
posted by TheBones at 8:08 PM on June 6, 2010

Response by poster: I'd prefer something budget-specific. I already have most of this implemented in excel and would rather avoid writing routines for importing/tagging the CSV exports. Does open office have some sort of budget mode?
posted by waxboy at 8:15 PM on June 6, 2010

gnucash is free and I have used it for years.
posted by jack.tinker at 8:21 PM on June 6, 2010

Response by poster: I tried gnucash and didn't find a way to setup future estimates. Did I overlook it?
posted by waxboy at 8:26 PM on June 6, 2010

Microsoft Money (at least 2006 Deluxe) did this with the Cash Flow feature and the Lifetime Planner. Not free and currently not supported (dead product), but if you don't care about online updates for much longer, would still be usable.
posted by sageleaf at 8:39 PM on June 6, 2010

Excel will plot projected data on charts using trendlines. Versions from 2003 at least.
posted by NortonDC at 9:05 PM on June 6, 2010

Response by poster: My current excel spreadsheet performs future calculations based on the current periodical estimates as entered and tweaked. Trendlines don't help as I'm in the process of revising estimates according to recent data and future goals. Excel works great in this regard but sucks because I have to manually enter past data. Budget software generally makes entering past data as painless as an import, while flexible future calculations are sorely lacking in everything that i've seen.

MS money sounds good, but the halted support likely means I'll be shopping around again in a few years :(
posted by waxboy at 9:39 PM on June 6, 2010

Response by poster: All this thread policing makes me feel like a scrooge. Note the picky tag :)
posted by waxboy at 9:40 PM on June 6, 2010

Gnucash has a budget feature but I can't say I've bothered with it. My general rule of thumb is to use credit cards as an interest free loan, and have enough money in checking to pay off the full balance at any time. Thus I avoid negative balance service charges, earn a small amount in cash back, and get a small interest free loan. I do forgo an amount that could plausibly be locked up in investments at a higher rate, but I think it's worth the peace of mind, and certainly worth more than I'd 50 dollars worth of fancy budgeting software.
posted by pwnguin at 1:39 AM on June 7, 2010

It's been several years I used it, but I vaguely feel like Homebank might do this. Sorry if it doesn't.
posted by PueExMachina at 8:16 PM on June 8, 2010