Simple Balance

Budget app and spending tracker

Your money should add up.

See where your money goes, make a budget you’ll keep, and know whether you’re getting ahead.

Sign up freeSee how to run it yourself

No card to start. The software is open source, so you can also self-host it, on a computer you control, with no limits.

The Simple Balance overview for one month: a dollar total with balance, deposits, withdrawals and net cash flow across the top, then a checking account, a savings account and a credit card with their balances, beside spending by category as bars from rent down to subscriptions.
The money in these pictures is made up. They are photographs of the real product, filled with example spending so there’s something to look at.

What it’s for

Start with what you want to know about your money.

Simple Balance is a free budget app and spending tracker. Use our cloud app in your browser, or self-host it, on a computer you control. Pick the job you came to do: each one has a plain guide that works with any tool, and ends with how to do it here.

  • See where your money actually goes

    Bring in your statements and give each payment a category. Overview then shows what every category cost you, biggest first.

    The guide: How to track your spending

  • Make a budget you’ll keep

    Set an amount for each category and watch what’s left as the month goes. What you don’t spend can carry into next month, so a careful month isn’t wasted.

    The guide: How to make a budget

  • Get ready for the bills you can see coming

    Car insurance in June, gifts in December. A budget can save toward a date a little each month, and a bill that repeats turns up when it’s due, waiting for you to okay it.

    The guide: What are sinking funds?

  • Find the subscriptions you forgot

    Everyone you’ve paid is on one list, with everything you’ve paid them. That’s where a renewal you forgot about shows up.

    The guide: How to find and keep track of your subscriptions

  • Use a credit card without the surprise

    A card purchase counts the day you make it. Paying the card off is a transfer between two of your own accounts, so the same groceries never count twice.

    The guide: How to budget with a credit card

  • Know whether you’re getting ahead

    Add up what you own, take away what you owe, across every account, and watch that one number month by month in Reports.

    The guide: What is net worth, and how do you calculate it?

Why this one

You shouldn’t have to trust a number you can’t explain.

  1. Follow a total back to the payments behind it

    Open any account and you get every payment in the order it happened, with the balance after each one beside it. When a figure is wrong, that column is where you find the row that made it wrong.

    Underneath, every dollar that leaves one place has to arrive somewhere else, and the two sides have to agree before anything is saved. That’s the reason the totals hold up.

    A list of transactions, newest first, each with who it was with, which account it was in, its category and its amount, all in dollars. Most are spending on groceries, a lunch, cinema tickets and a transit pass. One is a $750 freelance payment coming in, and one is $600 moved from checking to savings, which shows both accounts and no category.
    Everything you’ve entered, in one list you can search or narrow down to one account.

  2. A correction doesn’t erase what it corrected

    When you fix something, what it used to say stays with it. You can see the old figure and the day it changed, so a correction is something you can go and look at rather than something you take on trust.

  3. Nothing counts until you’ve looked at it

    Download the file your bank gives you and drag it in. Simple Balance works out which column is the date, which is the amount and who you paid, and it recognizes the names it has seen before.

    Anything that looks like a payment you already have is put beside the payment it resembles, and nothing reaches your accounts until you say so.

    There’s no automatic pull from your bank today: you download the file and bring it in yourself. That’s slower than it could be, and it’s also why nothing lands in your accounts without you seeing it first.

    The import screen before a file is picked: a step headed Choose a CSV file, an empty drop target reading Drop in a file or browse, and a preview panel saying no file has been chosen yet.
    Where the file goes. It figures out the columns itself, and shows you every row before any of them count.

Day to day

It does the ordinary things too.

Every account on one page

Checking, savings, credit cards, cash, a car loan. All of them on one page, for any date you pick. If you hold more than one currency, each keeps its own totals instead of being blended at a rate that will be wrong tomorrow.

Budgets that carry what you don’t spend

Set an amount for groceries, gas, or whatever you actually watch. Anything left at the end of the month can carry into the next one, and a refund goes back to the budget it came out of instead of looking like income.

Set a repeating payment once

Rent, payday, a subscription that renews once a year. Set it up and it turns up when it’s due, waiting for you to okay it. There’s also a list of everyone you’ve ever paid, which is usually where you spot a subscription you forgot about.

Split one purchase across categories

A grocery run that was half food and half things for the house counts as both, in the right amounts, from a single line. Change the split later and the money moves rather than doubling.

Templates for what you enter every week

The grocery run, the cash you take out, the transfer you make every payday. Save one once and pick it off a list next time.

Fix thousands of transactions at once

Say a file came in with a year of groceries filed under the wrong category. Fix all of it in a single step, up to ten thousand rows, after seeing exactly what will change. It all changes or none of it does.

The budgets screen: a form for setting one, with fields for the category, the amount and how it's decided, the currency, a start date and an optional end date, an optional savings goal and which budget gets funded first, and a checkbox for carrying what's left into next month. Below it, the list of standing budgets begins with $200 a month for dining out.
Setting a budget. The checkbox near the bottom is what carries the remainder forward.
A net worth report with a separate table for each currency: checking, savings and a credit card totaled in dollars, and below it a euro account totaled in euros. No combined number appears anywhere.
What you own and what you owe, each currency counted on its own.

If you use an AI assistant

Ask a question instead of hunting for the answer.

Connect an AI assistant to Simple Balance and it reads the same records you do. Ask it when you last paid the electric bill, or what a store has cost you this year. You decide how far it goes: reading only, or allowed to queue things up for you to approve, or allowed to make the change itself. Settings lists what each assistant can do, and cuts an assistant off when you want it gone.

  1. YouWhat day did I pay the electric bill last month?
  2. AssistantThought for 4 seconds
    • Simple Balancelist_payees
    • Simple Balancelist_transactions

Your records

Your records stay yours.

Self-host it, on a computer you control, and we never see your records. If you use our cloud app, your records live with us, and our privacy policy spells out exactly what we keep and who can reach it.

  • Pull every transaction out as a spreadsheet any time you want. We never hold your records back to keep you paying.
  • No analytics in the product itself. On the free plan the ads bring Google’s script with them. Premium and your own copy have neither.
  • Nothing you put in is used to sell you anything, here or anywhere else.
  • Anyone can read the code, and that isn’t going to change.

Plans

Start free. Pay only for more accounts or no ads.

Free gives you everything Simple Balance does, for three accounts you can use at once, with ads on the page. Premium is $3 a month or $30 a year, and takes away both the limit and the ads. Run it yourself and there’s no plan at all.

Sign up freeSee pricing