Financial Aggregator Apps
As I mentioned in a previous post, I started my financial journey using Quicken. I purchased TurboTax on Amazon to file my taxes that year and saw an offer for a discount on both. I jumped on the offer and used Quicken to create a budget, categorize, and track my spending. In 2007, Mint.com launched as a free financial aggregator. It featured everything that I needed from Quicken, so I switched. In 2009, Intuit acquired Mint and it became noticeable that they stopped innovating soon after.
After moving from the US to Canada, I could no longer track all of my accounts. I had problems syncing and I ended up deleting and reconnecting accounts. It was time-consuming. It became clear to me that Mint performed screen scraping, stored, and entered login credentials. Syncing transactions broke when a bank updated its UI. It is clear from banking terms of service that you should not provide your credentials to third parties. I ended up deleting my Mint account and switched back to Quicken.
In November 2023, Intuit announced that Mint was shutting down. That led to a flurry of Reddit posts on r/mintuit seeking advice for alternatives. This was timely as I only recently discovered that Quicken was increasing its prices by $1/month for most pricing tiers. For Quicken Classic Deluxe, that amounts to a 20% increase. I’m using Quicken US because I have bank accounts in both the US and Canada and read that I can connect to both with the US version. Since then, I read that Quicken Canada for Mac can also connect to bank accounts in both countries.
One of the things that I want to tackle early this year is a reduction in spending on foreign exchange fees. I’m hoping that I can find an alternative to Quicken US that I can pay in Canadian dollars.
Requirements
Many financial apps fall under one of two categories. They’re either budgeting apps or they’re investment trackers. What I’m looking for is an investment tracker that can be used to categorize and track spending. I don’t need budgeting capability.
What I need from a financial aggregator app are:
- Transaction support for bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts.
- Syncing for bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts in the US and Canada.
- Ability to manually create transactions.
- Automatic categorization of bank and credit card transactions.
- Ability to add custom categories.
- Tax lot and cost-basis tracking for investment account transactions.
- Net worth tracking.
- Low-cost.
These are nice-to-have features:
- Multi-currency support.
- Ability to import/export transactions from/to CSV files.
Neontra
The first financial aggregator app that I tried was Neontra. What attracted me to it is that it is a Canadian company that is certified SOC2-compliant. It offers a 45-day trial with a premium plan that costs C$60/year. The pricing is perfectly fine since Quicken US is charging US$72/year, which comes out to C$96/year.
Neontra uses both Plaid and Flinks to sync financial accounts. I was able to sync with both US and Canadian bank accounts. I had trouble syncing with Interactive Brokers. The web app suggested using Flinks instead but that didn’t work for me either. I may not have set it up correctly because I was able to sync with Interactive Brokers through Plaid with other financial aggregator apps. It was a deal breaker for me without syncing capability with my primary investment account. As a result, I didn’t test other features of Neontra.
Lunch Money
I love the story behind Lunch Money. It was created by a Canadian solopreneur who made her rounds in big tech in the US and is now a digital nomad. Lunch Money offers a 30-day trial with a pay-what-you-want subscription model with a minimum price of C$40/year. Incredible.
Lunch Money uses Plaid to sync financial accounts. I was able to sync with both US and Canadian bank accounts. I was also able to sync with Interactive Brokers. It even synced with PC Financial, which doesn’t sync with Quicken. Lunch Money does a good job of automatically categorizing credit card transactions. It does this through the rules engine. I found it difficult to modify a categorization.
It does not support investment account transactions or show a list of stocks. It only shows the investment account’s net worth. Net worth snapshots are created at the end of the month and show up as an editable value. While Plaid will import up to 2 years of transactions, Lunch Money will not retroactively calculate past net worth but allows users to enter it manually.
I saw that there was an ability to invite someone to collaborate, like a spouse or partner. This seems to be a feature offered by other financial apps and I think it’s a great idea. The whole family should get involved in meeting financial goals.
Besides Quicken, Lunch Money is the only app that I tested that supports multi-currency. That makes sense given that the creator is a digital nomad.
I really wanted to like Lunch Money but it simply didn’t support my use-case. While I love the story behind the app, I was concerned about how quickly feature requests would be implemented with a single employee.
Monarch Money
Monarch Money was created by the first product manager at Mint. One of the big selling points for Monarch Money is that it’s great for couples who collaborate on family financial goals. I think this is great. They recently launched in Canada. They offer a 30-day trial with an annual subscription price of C$100/year.
Monarch Money uses Plaid to sync financial accounts. Similar to Lunch Money, I was able to sync with both US and Canadian bank accounts. I had similar success with Interactive Brokers and PC Financial. But similar to Lunch Money, it’s missing the features that I’m looking for. It doesn’t support investment account transactions, but they are working on it. But further searching shows me that these features do exist, just not displayed how I would expect them. For instance, hovering over the quantity of a stock ticker will show the total cost. Additionally, I could only see my net worth for the current month. Monarch Money didn’t retroactively calculate my net worth for previous months although it had transactions for the past 2 years.
Of the financial aggregator apps that I tried, I liked Monarch Money the most. But the price is just too high.
Wealthica
I tried Wealthica in the past when it was completely free. Compared with the other apps, Wealthica primarily focuses on investments. Like Neontra, Wealthica is SOC2-complaint. Wealthica offers a 14-day trial with an annual subscription of at least C$75/year.
Wealthica uses Plaid and Yodlee to sync financial accounts. Similar to Lunch Money and Monarch Money, I was able to sync with both US and Canadian bank accounts. The deal breaker for me was that the categorization of transactions was extremely poor. Most transactions could not be categorized and categories were limited. It felt like someone tried to add budgeting features to an investment net worth tracking app.
Quicken Canada
That leaves me with Quicken Canada. I read that the Mac version can connect to both US and Canadian accounts. While the price of Quicken Canada is also increasing to C$72/year, it will be charged in Canadian dollars instead of US dollars, so it’ll be cheaper. What I’m uncertain about is how easy it will be to copy my data from Quicken US to Quicken Canada.
Conclusion
For my use-case, Quicken is still the best option. But I will continue to monitor the developments of Lunch Money and Monarch Money. They seem promising. If they provide the features that I’m looking for at a reasonable price, then I’ll make the switch.
If you’re looking for a financial aggregator app, I recommend trying out various apps to find the one that meets your needs. They all offer very generous trial periods.