3 Budgeting Apps Compared After 3 Months of Parallel Use

My Paycheck Kept Vanishing and I Didn't Know Where

Salary hits on the 25th, and by the 15th of the next month the account is nearly empty. After fixed expenses, variable spending was about $930/month, but I had no idea where it went. (I didn't even know how much I spent on coffee each month.)

So I decided to track expenses. But there were too many apps, so I ran three simultaneously for 3 months.

Banksalad: Automatic but Misclassifies a Lot

Banksalad (Korea's leading financial aggregation app) auto-syncs with your cards. Pay with a card and it logs automatically. Over 3 months, I only manually entered 11 cash transactions.

But auto-categorization is unreliable. A convenience store lunch gets filed under "shopping" instead of "food." A cafe lunch goes to "cafe/snacks." I had to manually fix about 30% of categories. If "automatic" requires 30% manual corrections, that's semi-automatic at best.

The monthly spending report looks nice. Category pie charts, month-over-month changes. But it only shows obvious stuff like "food spending was high this month." No deep insights.

Toss: Clean Interface but Limited Features

Toss (Korea's biggest fintech app) has cleaner UI than Banksalad for spending history. The timeline view is intuitive. But you can't customize categories. There's no way to create your own classification system.

For example, I wanted a "self-improvement" category. Book purchases go to "shopping," online courses go to "education," and there's no way to group them together.

After three months, Toss feels more like "quick glance at spending." Not enough for serious analysis.

Spreadsheet: Tedious but Most Accurate

I built a template in Google Sheets. Date, amount, category, notes. Five minutes each evening. (Actually more like 7-8 minutes.)

First two weeks: daily without fail. Week three: every other day. After a month: entering 4-5 days at once. Forgotten purchases started appearing. "What was this $6 charge?" Had to dig up receipts.

But data accuracy was the highest by far. I classify everything myself, so there's zero miscategorization. Pivot tables let me analyze however I want. Spending patterns by day of week, by time of day, total spending at specific stores.

What 3 Months of Data Revealed

I compared all three. (The fact that the same period showed different totals across apps was amusing. Banksalad: $2,764, Toss: $2,793, Spreadsheet: $2,814. The gap was mostly due to cash transaction coverage.)

The shocking one was coffee spending. Monthly average: $91. I was drinking 1.8 cups per day. Half was convenience store canned coffee. "If I quit coffee, I'd save $91/month." But I'm not confident I can quit.

Delivery food averaged $167/month. That's ordering 1.7 times per week, which felt like more than I expected. The solo living trap.

So Which Did I Pick?

Banksalad as the main tool, with quarterly deep dives in the spreadsheet. Toss got cut. I learned that maintaining a daily spending log is realistically unsustainable beyond three months, so leaning on automated tools is the pragmatic choice.

Oh, and I was going to cut coffee spending... still haven't managed that.