getting a sense of where the money goes... without any effort

[DistrictCommissioner]

Has anyone got a good routine/clever bank accounts etc that help them watch the money without spending hours each month poring over bank statements and excel spreadsheets?

I periodically think I should put more into it, spend hours trawling through bank accounts to see what we are spending on, then do nothing more... I hear stuff about Starling, is that any good?

I think some of the challenger banks offer online banking which does this for you - so you can put money into pots on your apps to monitor your spending in different areas.

I use the Money Dashboard app which tags transactions and them groups them together at the end of the month.

Santander categorises your spending monthly so tells you if you have increased spending on groceries compared to entertainment etc

Yeah I've been wondering about switching to Starling or Revolut to achieve this.

I just looked at Money Dashboard - doesn't work with my account!

My Starling account automatically breaks down spending by category. Although it can't differentiate between food and clothes at M&S

I have Emma app linked to my account, it breaks down into categories

I have been looking into this today. (I.e. I'm new to this as well and no expert)

There seem to be 2 kinds of app that can help you figure money out:

1. Budgeting style apps, the most sophisticated of which seems to be You Need A Budget
2. Financial tracking apps, which basically keep track of the contents of your back accounts, transaction by transaction, in one place. Quicken gets a lot of mentions.

It sounds like you need one of the first type! I think YNAB takes a bit of time to set up but is really powerful at helping you figure out where you can save and to achieve financial goals once you've done that.

I am looking for the second of these to help my MIL manage her money. If anyone has any recommendations I'd be grateful

You can download bank and credit card transactions into a spreadsheet and sort them into categories that are automatically assigned.

It's not perfect, eg I think it counts McDonald's as 'entertainment' and everything bought in a supermarket counts as groceries but you could get a basic idea of what you spend in a few minutes each month, certainly not 'hours'.

My credit card allows you to download a year's worth of transactions in one go, and we do just about all our non direct debit spending on that so gives a good overview.

BarbaraofSeville I can only download statements as a PDF, so then have to transcribe each item into a spreadsheet. I can also only get 25 transactions per statement, so lots of downloading more statements to get the whole month's transactions - it definitely takes hours!

financialhelpneeded I did briefly use YNAB about 12 years ago - found it hard going but probably needed to stick with it..