Most people don't budget at all.
Most people live paycheck to paycheck. I have lived paycheck to paycheck for a long time. When your finances are in distress, and you have no planning, the least helpful thing you can do is trying a fully featured app, or even worse, a spreadsheet. It requires a lot of attention to details and they can get overwhelming and confusing to manage — not everyone is fluent in spreadsheet formulas, as basic as they may be, to the point of getting the setup right, and most template spreadsheets available pack a lot of unnecessary things and customizing them becomes a project of its own. There's also the feeling of despair realizing you're not even close to even having that much data or assets to put in. This is not only my opinion — this is what I've gathered asking friends and family on the topic.
So this is a way to keep things simple. Extremely simple. No integration to banks, no mental overhead, just a smart replacement for a piece of paper where you write down your income and your expenses. There is a lot of people that still use a physical notebook to keep track of their finances, in this day and age, out of sheer choice — it's a way to maintain focus on the big picture, and not miss any detail.
It's a way to express your finances in a portable, human-readable format that is essentially computable plain text. You can express your finances at a 10,000-feet level, know what your savings will look like, for motivation, and know where your money is going. This is it. Surely it will be too simple for many, but perhaps just about right for some.
You're also not vendor locked, your data is plain text and you can use the CLI (free and open source) to process it. I myself use the CLI and manage my sheets from Sublime Text. Yep :)
then you categorize expenses to get an understanding of your spending.
only after you have those categories, you can start to budget.
you can look at the categories and consider whether you are spending to much on a category or not.
if your cash flow is negative you need to find categories that you can reduce. likewise if you want to save money for future events.
i'd like an expense tracker that helps me categorize my expenses. your app seems useful only after i have done that.
the workflow i am looking for is:
i enter expenses as i make them, one line at a time. including breaking out groceries into individual items. then it should allow me to group items into categories. tracking which items don't have a group yet. finally it should tell me how much i am spending per group each month.
fruits and vegetables don't need their own category. they could be grouped into food but candy bars or soda are not food.
i don't want the tool to suggest anything, but i want the numbers so i can draw my own conclusions.
entering data by article is easier than categorizing on the spot. i could just scan the receipt and let the tool work out the categories (once i assigned a category to an item, the tool can do it for any repeat appearance)
I personally use hledger, but beancount is also popular.
One thing that I think is missing is having different dates for transactions to occur. So like some things happen just once ever, or transactions on the last day of the month which shifts.
This just means the stats that are given by this app are a bit rough. Looking at the source it seems to estimate the projections. Not a bad thing, just something to note.
I recently translated my own script-based cash flow simulator to a web app as well, which might be interesting: https://nicktrevino.com/tools.cashflow-simulator.html
One last thing, if you haven't heard of Wails, and you like Golang, I recommend it when thinking about making a desktop version of a web app: https://wails.io/
It’s not plain text, but it feels like plain text.
I am confused why you would want to bother with plaintext and go out of your way to use a limiting editor to do that.
Ah well the macOS utility app market is weird.
Some observations and bugs I encountered:
- A license added to Github: Currently, I don't know if I'm allowed to build an application using the package, say an integration to Obsidian or whatever.
- The example in your readme features the wrong group name ("Housing" vs "Main")
- Your DSL does not like comma-values. :)
- The DSL also does not like to see groups being used multiple times. So, what I wanted to try was:
= Housing
- 2000 Rent
- 1000 Utilities
- 500 Leisure
# 2025-05-09
= Groceries
- 10 Coffee x 12
- 10 Milk x 12
- 20 Cereal x 6
# 2025-05-10
= Groceries
- 2,60 Bread
= Income
- 5000 Salary
- 1000 Side hustle
+ Income
- Housing
- Groceries
- You are using Electron, so a Windows build would, of course, be nice.
Thank you for all your observations. Two things: 1) floats were originally purposefully not allowed, for simplicity, but I might change that and 2) multiple groups with the same name are indeed not allowed, but you raise a good point: it should be possible to reference all groups with a common label if the only difference between them is an attached timestamp.
And yes, will definitely push Win/Linux releases soon!
It might make sense to provide some system for figuring out how to create the budget, and then how to track your expenses against it.
In my mind the simplest form of budgeting is so-called "Envelope Accounting", where you have physical envelopes full of money where you pull money out when you spend it.
There are electronic envelope accounting systems which retain the simplicity.
I'm a bit unsure of how this system works, where it differs, etc.
In summary, I'd love to see:
1. An explanation of how to construct a budget using your system.
2. An explanation of how to compare your spending to your budget? (bonus points if I can use my existing plain text accounting system, or at least a csv file)
3. An explanation of how to track my budget over time.
> In my mind the simplest form of budgeting is so-called "Envelope Accounting", where you have physical envelopes full of money where you pull money out when you spend it.
I've done that, it helped me a lot!
Tried out the Mac app snd didn’t encounter any obvious bugs. looking forward seeing some functionality around annual expenses and potentially dating entries to create some sort of anticipated distribution across a date range
https://plaintextaccounting.org/
Especially because there is a wide range of apps, ranging from CLI to web and even mobile, which can be used for PTA and due to the fact that they acknowledge the same standard are interoperable:
https://plaintextaccounting.org/#software
The most well known ones being
- hledger (https://hledger.org/),
- beancount (https://beancount.github.io/),
and
- ledger (https://ledger-cli.org/)
Important note: All free and open source
$2145.00 Assets:Checking
$-1000.00 Equity:OpeningBalances
$192.00 Expenses
$65.00 Food:Groceries
$127.00 Unknown
$-1337.00 Income:Salary
---------------
0
Only issue I have is with the indentation-based subitems.
I'd rather keep it restricted to top-level groups for clarity.
Although I see your point in wanting clarity, if the format supports arbitrary subaccounts, you can use the tool itself to limiting the number of subaccounts to show (e.g. with 1 you would only see the accumulated amount in all accounts in the "Income:Work" hierarchy). This still fits your use case for clarity, but allows other users to expand the budgeting tool to their needs.
hx8•2mo ago
* Setting the budget is one thing, but you never actually spend exactly the budget. There is no way import transactions which is crucial. It's a good habit to compare actual expenditures to projected budgets.
* One of the major problems that successful budgeters run across is how to track savings over time. Savings are shifting in nature. In bank accounts or bonds the interest the occur is predetermined. What if the savings is in stock, crypto, precious metals or collectables? It's a shame that my tool for tracking the value of my retro game collection doesn't communicate with my tool for tracking my savings accounts.
* I'm concerned about using your GUI tool to edit a text file instead of my own primary text editor. The nice thing about my text editor is that my font is set how I like, my keybindings are set how I like, and I know a ton of useful shortcuts. I'm not sure I'd want to spend the time to configure your tool, and even if they have the configuration options I'd want.
* Honestly there are a ton of budgeting apps with more features. Some good ones are even free.
jgalvez•2mo ago
I've been using it for several years and wanted to get it into an app. I've been getting a lot of suggestions and requests from early adopters. I will definitely take yours into consideration. There's a lot of room for improvements.
Re: GUI limitation, there's a CLI which is open source and free:
https://github.com/galvez/plainbudget
The parser and processor have a comprehensive test suite.
npm i pbudget -g
I talk about the DSL design and its capabilities in detail here:
https://hire.jonasgalvez.com.br/2025/may/8/plainbudget/