A budgeting app for when your bank will not connect
Most budgeting software is sold on one feature: it connects to your bank and pulls in your transactions. If you live somewhere that feature does not reach, you are paying full price for the half of the product that does not work — and typing everything in anyway. This is what to do instead.
Why the sync is missing where you live
Automatic import depends on a data provider having an agreement with your specific bank. Those agreements were built for the American and British markets first, and the coverage thins out quickly beyond them. In one-star reviews of the big budgeting apps, the same sentence keeps appearing in different accents: the app does not work with Australian banks; a Canadian bank connection has to be re-authorised every day; a Polish or Norwegian bank is simply not on the list. The subscription price does not change to match. It is also not a problem that gets fixed by waiting. A bank that is supported can fall off the list after an API change, and a household that budgeted on autopilot for a year suddenly has a backlog of transactions and no habit of entering them.
What actually changes when you type it in yourself
The honest answer is: less than the marketing implies, and the difference is not all in one direction. What you lose is the illusion that a budget maintains itself. What you gain is that you notice what you spent. People who enter transactions by hand tend to catch the subscription they forgot about, the delivery fee they did not agree to, and the week the groceries doubled — because every one of those passed through their own fingers. The cost is time, and it is smaller than it sounds if the app is built for it: a week of receipts is a few minutes when the date is pre-filled, the last account is remembered and the envelope is one tap away. It is a long evening when the app was designed around an import and treats manual entry as the fallback path.
What to look for in a manual-first app
A short checklist, learned from what people complain about: · The add-transaction form is the first thing on the screen, not three taps deep. · It remembers the last account and the date, so a batch of receipts does not mean re-selecting the same things twenty times. · It reads amounts the way you type them, whatever your decimal comma or point convention is. · It works in your currency without converting anything. · Money that has not been given a category is visible rather than silently ignored — that is where a manual budget usually goes wrong. · You can get your data out as a plain file, without asking anyone.
How handbudget approaches it
handbudget was built for exactly this case: no bank connection at all, for anybody, anywhere — so there is no second-class experience for the countries the sync never reached. It is an envelope budget. Money comes in, you assign it to envelopes, you record what you spend, and what is left rolls into next month. The browser edition is free and keeps everything in your own browser. The desktop edition is a native app for Windows and Linux that keeps a plain JSON file on your own disk, and it is a single payment rather than a subscription. Both read and write the same file, so nothing is trapped in either one.
Frequently asked questions
Is manual entry really workable for a whole household?
Yes, if you do it in batches. Most households that budget by hand sit down once or twice a week with the receipts and the card app open, and are done in under twenty minutes. The failure mode is not the typing — it is leaving it for a month.
Can I import a CSV from my bank instead?
handbudget does not import bank CSV files today. It reads and writes its own JSON file, so you can move a budget between the browser and desktop editions, and back it up wherever you like.
What happens to my data if I stop using it?
Nothing happens to it. The browser edition keeps the budget in your browser and the desktop edition keeps it in a file you chose the location of. There is no account to close and no server holding a copy.
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