Easiest Way to Track Expenses (UK and US)

January 4, 2023 6:54 AM

I'm terrible at keeping track of my expenses/income. There must be an easier way, no?

I am a dual UK-US citizen, and I pay taxes in both countries. I am self-employed (freelance) and am just horrifically bad at keeping up with my expenses/income on a mishmash of spreadsheets and crumpled receipts.

Are there any great apps that would make this easier? Would Quick Books work for both countries? Thanks!

posted by heavenknows to Work & Money (2 answers total)

At the most basic level, your income transactions and your expenses are just that, transactions. So you need to get them logged accurately and timely and scan any receipts or others support so you don’t lose them. Any tool, especially if you can import your bank account transactions will allow you to do that. Most tools ought to be able to cope with different currencies/foreign currency bank accounts. But do check that before you pick one.

You then have the problem that your UK tax year and your US tax year are different. In addition, you have different rules about what is allowable income and expenses for each jurisdiction.

Most of the tools aimed at freelancers are going to struggle to support with these two aspects. They are designed to make it easy to meet a specific jurisdiction‘s requirements, not multiple.

So I‘d focus on finding an app you’ll actually use to make sure you log ALL your transactions timely and don’t lose the support. The key is to get a full record.

Preparing your accounts/tax returns for each jurisdiction is a separate matter. Assume any tool will only support one, not both. That means you export your transactions from the app into Excel and manually adjust for tax year and rules for the other jurisdiction.
posted by koahiatamadl at 8:39 AM on January 4, 2023

LunchMoney is an app for tracking expenses and income that has explicit support for multicurrency. I use Mint, but it is not very good for multiple currencies.
posted by vegetableagony at 11:50 AM on January 12, 2023