EveryDollar Budget App - Pros and Cons from a Former Mint User

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll go over what I consider to be the biggest pros and cons of the EveryDollar budgeting app.

I've been demo-ing a bunch of budget apps in the past several months.  I've had Mint, YNAB, and EveryDollar running in parallel on my computer and phone for the past month.  This has given me an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of each budgeting system and app.  I've already done series on Mint and YNAB and in my last video, I did an overview/tutorial of EveryDollar's budgeting software.  Today I'll share what I like and what I don't like about EveryDollar.  First

PROS

Easy to get started

One of the best things about EveryDollar is that is is so easy to start a budget.  You can set one up in minutes.  You estimate your income, set up a couple of simple categories, estimate spending, and you are off and running.  The interface is easy to understand and work with and you can customize your budget as much as you want.  There is a lot of flexibility in adding, deleting, and changing things around.  You don't have to wait for income to arrive and you don't even have to set up any accounts if you are putting transactions in manually.  EveryDollar doesn't keep track of different accounts, so need to set any up -- just start entering in transactions.  In addition, it is 

Easy to understand

The interface is clean and simple.  You can understand immediately what is meant by budgeted, spent, and remaining and there aren't a bunch of totals or reports cluttering up the screen and complicating things.  Since you are estimating income and budgeting based on that monthly estimate, you don't need your bank balances or a complicated approach to credit cards.  You simply count everything that isn't income as an expense.  The fund feature helps you to carry accumulating money over from month to month so that you can save and it's easy to see where you have overspent.  Also, searching for transactions is easy and intuitive.  Okay -- so what are the 

CONS

I should have said this at the beginning, but I'm one person with my own preferences.  Everyone will have different needs, so just because I like something and dislike something else doesn't mean that holds true for everyone.  Okay -- I think the drawbacks of EveryDollar fall into three categories: poor usability, less accountability, and too simple.  Let's start with

Usability

The two things you'll do the most in your budgeting software are entering new transactions and -- if you have your bank accounts linked with the Plus version -- tagging transactions with the correct budget category.  EveryDollar doesn't help to make those activities faster.  If you are entering in new transactions, the web version makes you enter in the entire date -- you can't leave out the year.  If you start typing the vendor, it doesn't auto-suggest names that you've used in the past so you have to type out the full name and it doesn't remember the budget category you used last with this vendor.  That's the biggest issue with tagging transactions that have been imported from your bank.  Other software, including Mint, will either remember or can be told what your budget category is for that vendor.  For example, Starbucks is always going to go into Restaurants.  It's annoying that EveryDollar can't remember that and just let you approve it.  It does have a fancy dragging to categorize feature, but it's not nearly as fast as having it default to the last used.  I'd also rather have the screen cluttered up and see three columns, rather than having to toggle back and forth between spent and remaining.  In addition, EveryDollar doesn’t match transactions, so if you are entering your purchases in real time, it won’t match that when it imports that same transaction, so you could end up with a bunch of duplicates.  The next issue for me is that EveryDollar is

Less Accountability

The first area where this is an issue is around estimates.  You estimate income, but are never required to adjust the numbers if your income was less.  In addition, EveryDollar doesn't keep bank balances, so you never know if you are getting every transaction since you can't reconcile the app against reality.  The other area where there isn't great accountability is around notifications.  Both EveryDollar mobile and the web app let you know if there are new transactions to tag (if you are using linked bank accounts).  The mobile version has a badge telling you how many you need to take care of.  However, it doesn't tell you if you've overspent an account, so you could exist all month and beyond without every dealing with a budget category overspend.  And frankly, that is the real benefit of budgeting software -- having to be accountable to what you estimated.  In addition, the badge doesn't seem to update very frequently.  Every time I open the app there seem to be more transactions to deal with than advertised by the notification badge.  EveryDollar does have a nice reminder feature that has the app remind you monthly to do a new budget and twice a week to track or tag your transactions.  The last issue for me is that EveryDollar is a bit

Too simple

I'm definitely a budget nerd, so I tend to favor more information over less.  And EveryDollar just doesn't give me quite enough information or features.  They've come down on the side of simplicity, which I'm sure works great for many of their customers.  For me -- I like more more features, more information.  It drives me a little nuts that the transactions don't map to bank or credit accounts.  EveryDollar doesn't group them this way and doesn't even record the account information for each transaction.  EveryDollar doesn't allow you to import transactions from another system into it.  Since I wanted some history, it meant I had to put in 100+ transactions in by hand.  Their reporting is super minimal.  Budget reporting is rarely good enough to meet my standards, but by anyone's standards EveryDollar provides very little.  All you get is a totals by group for Planned, Spent, and Remaining and on the mobile app you don't even get that.  I usually supplement the basic reporting by exporting the data and doing my own, but with EveryDollar there is no ability to export.  Unfortunately, that's a deal breaker for me.  

So those are my thoughts.  I didn't include this, but EveryDollar was the most expensive of the software I tested at nearly $11 per month.  It's simplicity may be a selling point for some, but it ends up being a drawback for me as I found myself wanting more information and more features.  At the end of my trials, I switched over to using YNAB as my main budgeting software, but there is a lot to recommend all three.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!