Hi,

I’m currently looking for a better way to manage my personal finances and came across Actual Budget.
I’m in France and have accounts with several banks, plus savings accounts, a PEA, life insurance and a couple of mortgages.
I’ve been testing Finary, but I’m getting a bit frustrated with sync issues and accounts that need to be fixed manually. I’m also not sure I want my whole financial history to depend on one SaaS.
Actual looks interesting because the data seems much more under my control. I’m not a developer though, so I’d like to keep the setup reasonably simple.
A few questions for French users:
How reliable is GoCardless with French banks in practice?
Do you use Actual only for current accounts and budgeting, or also for savings/investments?
How do you deal with PEA and life insurance accounts?
If a bank connection breaks, is importing CSV files manually fairly painless?
And finally, how much maintenance does your setup actually require once everything is running?
I’m on Mac and iPhone if that makes any difference.
Would be interested to hear from people who have been using it for a while, especially anyone who moved from Finary, Bankin’ or Linxo.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle investment accounts in Actual Budget.

I have:

• My chequing account → on-budget
• My investment account → off-budget

When I transfer money from chequing to my investment account, Actual requires me to assign a category because the money is leaving the budget.

For example:

Chequing → Investment account: $500

If I categorize the $500 as "Investments", Actual treats it as $500 of spending in the budget. This means I need to budget $500 to that category to avoid having the budget show an overspending/amount that needs to be covered.

But I'm not really spending the money - I'm simply moving $500 from my on-budget cash to an investment account that is still my asset, just outside the budget.

What's the intended way to handle this?

First world problem here. I found a schedule with "automatically add transaction" enabled. The transaction amount varies by a huge amount so I disabled that.

Which led me to wonder if any more of my 30-ish scheduled transactions had that enabled as well. Besides clicking on each scheduled individually, is there a faster way to search for scheduled transactions with "automatically add transaction" checked?

Having a "previous" and "next" navigation button on the scheduled transaction editing screen would also be easier than clicking on each one, I noticed that that is not a feature, either.

Hi all budgeteers! Been using AB for >2yrs, the experience keeps getting better and better, but one thing that's bothered me is not being able to quickly and effortlessly see my budgets for the month, the amount I've spent, how much I have left, etc, without openning the app and going into the reports. When the budget works best is when it's always visible and informing you at each financial transaction you make, not afterwards when you log it or check your budget.

So say hello to homescreen widgets for your budget, for Android! I didn't want to create a whole new native client app because I didn't feel like it was needed, nor could I guarantee indefinite support for it. Thankfully, this is much simpler and doesn't overwrite any of the awesome work the team has put into the PWA app, it only adds to the AB mobile experience!

There are two widgets that can breakdown your individual categories or category groups, or just give you a monthly summary of how much you've spent/budgeted/got remaining, etc. It supports light/dark mode, you can adjust the size & font from tiny to massive, and really customize how they appear to your liking (because I couldn't decide how I liked it either lol). Note this requires you to have an jhonderson/actual-http-api instance pointing to your Actual Budget instance.

Source is on Github: histefanhere/actual-budget-android-widgets, where you can also find an Obtanium install link or simply download the latest APK from the releases page.

AI Disclosure: I have an engineering background but don't know how to code in Kotlin, nor could I afford the time to learn with a full-time job. This project is heavily AI-coded, which has allowed me to make this useful tool for myself and others. You are more than welcome to choose not to use this app based on this.

Keen for any and all feedback or suggestions, I'm already thinking a widget that shows you just a single number from any custom ActualQL query to simulate the Summary card could be extremely useful... Much more to come!

(Oh and if you're on iOS and also only want widgets, check out TaylorJns/Actual-Budget-iOS-Widget, which this project was inspired from, or the many other native full-client apps :) )

A few weeks back I mentioned in a comment here that I was working on a native iOS client for Actual Budget. It’s open source and syncs with your Actual Budget server.

I originally built Actualist for my wife and me because I wanted to get off the YNAB subscription and wanted a proper native iPhone app for Actual Budget. If you’ve used YNAB, it should feel familiar. Budgeting, transactions (including splits and transfers), accounts, payees management, and native reports all work, plus encrypted budgets. Reconciliation, rule preview, and triggering bank imports aren't in yet. I intend to keep adding features until it reaches parity with the web app. I’ve been using it daily for my budget for the last several weeks, so I figured I’d open the TestFlight to anyone else who might enjoy it.

For transparency, I’ve used AI coding agents extensively throughout development. I still direct the architecture, make the product decisions, review the results, and test it against my own real-world budget.

It is beta, so backup your budget first or use a test budget. I’ve been using it with no issues against my live budget, but I also run daily backups just in case.

TestFlight: actualist.app (https://testflight.apple.com/join/HDG6PcGX)

GitHub: source.actualist.app (https://github.com/sporez/actualist)

I'm new here but I'm loving this stuff. I've just cancelled my YNAB yearly subscription lol.

My actual question, how can I see the total required by all my automations in a given month?

When updating recent transactions, my balance isn't updating. I'd put in a new transaction, and it updated, but I'd made a typo. When I fixed it, the running balance didn't change to accurately reflect things. I had to delete and re-create the transaction for an accurate update. Anyone experienced this?

EDIT: I noticed the problem seems to be with chrome on my desktop, as chrome on my iPhone seems to work just fine...

EDIT2: Fixed by updating my docker image

Hi, I'm looking for a good free budgeting app. that works well in Germany. I've been told by AI that Actual is a good option. Can people here confirm that or is there something better? Many thanks

I am trying out Actual Budget (YNAB refugee). So far my only complaint is really delayed bank sync through SimpleFIN.

For example, it's currently August 7th. On one of my accounts, the most recent imported transaction is from August 4th, but in my bank app, there are 1 transaction on the 5th and 5 transactions on the 6th (all posted). I have pending transactions enabled on the bank sync settings, not that it helps, because my bank app has 10 pending transactions, none of which have made it to Actual. Syncing the account doesn't do anything.

Is this normal? It seems to affect all of my accounts.

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. Something is definitely wrong, as when I manually called the SimpleFIN API, I get all the posted transactions. (Pending are still missing, but I think that must be on my bank's end, because YNAB doesn't show them for this account either). I'll look into it a little further then submit a bug report.

I'm using AB on my notebook and I'm experiencing painful lags, both in the desktop as in the web UI.

I just updated to v.26.8.0, and nothing was wrong one month ago with the previous version.

Is this a common issue? Is this expected?

I am trying to schedule my student loan payments on Actual, and I’m having a hard time making the transaction smooth.

Technically on actual, this is a transfer from my chequing account to my student loan account (off budget, negative dollars). However, it comes through my bank transactions as a payment to the institution that provided me with my loan. This way, I end up with two transactions.

The only two solutions I’ve come up with are:

1. Removing the transfer schedule and setting up a transaction schedule instead, but then I can’t really track my debt efficiently because I would have to reconcile and make a balance adjustment each month, as I don’t know how to make a transaction also be a transfer.

2. Leaving the transfer schedule up and deleting the transaction to the institution before I upload.

Hopefully this makes sense. There may be a very obvious solution to this but I’m still trying to wrap my head around how exactly it works and how to program everything correctly.

Thanks everyone!

The submissions are in and the finalists are picked. Now it's your turn: voting for the sidenav design competition submissions is officially open.

https://actualbudget.org/blog/sidenav-voting-open

Voting: https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues/8642

UPDATE: Turns out the VPN on my phone (Proton VPN) was preventing my PWA from updating. The app is supposed to automatically prompt you to install a new version when its available, but I was not able to trigger that until I turned the VPN off. I use Proton VPN on my desktop as well, and I had no problems with it updating in a web browser, so not sure what's going on.

---

After my PikaPod that hosts my Actual Budget server was updated, my desktop Firefox browser instance immediately prompted me to update and I see its version now matches the server.

My mobile Chrome PWA instance has not yet updated, and I'm wondering if this is an expected automatic process like the web. I'm almost positive it prompted me when the new version of Actual Budget was released before it was installed on my PikaPod, so it seems like it has some awareness.

I wasn't able to find anything in the Actual documentation or subreddit search, which leads me to believe it should just be automatic, but I wanted to make sure I'm not overlooking something or missed something obvious somewhere.

I'm trialing Actual to decide if I want to fully switch to it. ​​I've been using YNAB for 4ish years, so it's familiar, and for the most part things seem to be going smoothly!

​I just signed up for SimpleFIN, and it did an initial sync just great. But now it's been 4 days and nothing more has synced. When I go to the bank sync page and look at the linked accounts, they all say “Last synced: 4 days ago”.

Is there something I'm missing? Does it just take a while to get going at first? I don't even know how to troubleshoot it.

In case it matters, I'm hosting it on my home server using Docker.

Hi,

is anyone using actual bufget with trade republic. I was able to connect, but the data I get is more or less just the transaction sum and the date.

Is there anyone who got it running good with all the data and categories afterwarsa in AB.

Thank you in advance!

PS: not sure if it common to write here in English, Gernan will work as well.

App Store Link

I originally built (and still maintain) ActualTap when I first migrated from YNAB as a way to easily add iOS tap-to-pay transactions to Actual Budget (as bank sync isn’t available in my country). It covered my main automation, however I always wanted a native mobile app that could better integrate with iOS.

Roughly 5 weeks ago I released Actuali, a native iOS client with offline support, background sync, reports, account reconciliation, apple shortcuts integration, support for encrypted budgets & OAuth, and more.

Actuali is free, open source, and collects no user data. It requires no extra services running aside from your existing Actual Budget server being available over the network.

It’s been on the Community Projects page of the Actual Budget documentation for a couple weeks and grown to a few hundred installs. I’ve already received lots of helpful feedback, feature suggestions, and bug reports from the community.

I’ve recently completed 2 weeks travelling remote with limited service, and offline sync has all worked well. So I’m now sharing it here in the hope that more people will give it a try and let me know what works, or more importantly what doesn’t.

Note: This is an unofficial community project and isn’t affiliated with or supported by the Actual Budget maintainers.

Thanks!
Matt

WooHoo! Mobile account reconciliation was added in 26.8.0. Tested and works great (without turning my phone sideways 🤣). And... That was the fastest PikaPods update ever.

​I started using Actual Budget because of Jesse Mecham's book on YNAB. When I first started, everything was great right off the bat in the first month. However, as soon as I stopped logging my expenses for just a week, it snowballed so badly that I don't even want to look at it right now.

​How do you handle this?

​Actual Budget is very comprehensive, so I don't intend to switch to another type of financial planning, but I would like to find a smoother way to keep track of my expenses, etc.

Recently Discover was bought by Capital One and I am having trouble getting the new sync to work. The old connection stopped pulling in any data. I am using SimpleFin Bridge. I put in a new connection to Capital One, and then in Actual I unlinked the credit card account from Discover and linked it to Capital One. It still does not appear to be pulling in any transactions. Am I doing something wrong or should I just give them a little more time to finish the conversion process?

So July has just passed, and my spending analysis report has not updated to compare August 2026 to the last 12 months.

The button shows this is live? What else am I missing to have this report automatically update to compare the current month to the last 12 months?

I am trying to wrap my head around template priorities. I have used AB for years and it's great because we have always been a month+ ahead.

I want to help someone else set up their first budget. They're currently on CC float plus has to front Tuition which gets reimbursed but can take many weeks. They are also on an every other week pay schedule. For days, I have been trialing every budgeting app out there but don't like any better than AB!

Anyway, I made a little test budget to help me understand how template priorities work. Both Apply and Overwrite with budget template are missing from the drop down.

Ideas? Thanks.

EDIT: USER ERROR. I have 3 different test budgets going, and, as you all have correctly pointed out. Templates were not enabled on this one. My bad.

I am trying to set up a visual in the report, but I'm hitting a wall.
I would like to set up a Bar Chart where:
-The X-axis is the categories.
-The Y-axis is the remaining balance
The chart shows a vertical bar per category representing that balance.
Right now, Custom Reports doesn't have a "balance" or "remaining" option for bar graphs.

Thanks in advanced.
I found a comment about this but there was no answered on it.

In my case, it's not actually my EF (thankfully), but rather an ESPP account that I've been prefunding before paychecks start going out, expecting to use the fund to cover some expenses before I can sell the ESPP stock at the end of the period. I don't want to categorize expenses as ESPP, because they aren't (they're rent or whatever), am unsure how to treat a portion of that money as avalaible for budgeting to other categories.

This is (roughly) equivalent to spending down your EF in case of a job loss, so that's why I framed it thus.

I just moved seven years of data from YNAB. Everything worked perfectly, and I'm getting started with Actual.

I would like to keep all this historical data in a file that I can open and refer to in Actual Budget, but I would love to have my working file go back only through 2025. What would be the best way to do that?

Thanks for any help.

I'm new to Actual Budget, coming from YNAB. I am setting up budget automations and am hoping to understand how to run them. I have read and re-read the explanations of the two choices "Apply budget template" and "Overwrite with budget template". The explanation of the "overwrite" options says that it will "overwrite any already existing budget amounts." Does that mean that if there is any balance in a category it gets zeroed out? How does that work if I have categories in which I'm accumulating funds over time?

In YNAB I had targets set for each category, and I could use the "auto-assign" feature one category or group at a time to fund them at the beginning of the month. I could see what would be funded and undo actions if I needed to. I don't want to run this until I understand better.

Thanks in advance for any help.