Quaestor Ledger

Quicken alternative

Outgrown Quicken? I lasted three days.

Give me three minutes. I gave Quicken three days, and I’m going to show you why there was no fourth, why your net worth is probably wrong, and what I built instead. If you have one bank and one currency, keep your setup and enjoy your afternoon. If you have more than that, read on.

7 days free, then $12.99 a month or $89.99 a year. Card required, cancel anytime before your first payment.

Free trial for first-time customers; if your organization has subscribed before, the paid plan starts at checkout. Renews automatically until you cancel in Settings. Taxes may apply.

Leaving another app? Bring the history. Keep the evening. Fifteen years of my own records came over in one move, so yours is not going to scare me. On the annual plan I carry the boxes myself, inside your trial, and you see the whole move before it lands. Ask before you start the trial: one email, no files, no passwords.

How it works, and how to ask
My Accounts page, grouped by institution: two banks abroad and a US card issuer, every account in its own currency, the total reported in USD. The synced checking account shows ledger, bank and drift; the accounts fed by file, a ledger balance only.Names, institutions, currencies and balances shown are illustrative.

I run 60-plus accounts at 15-plus institutions in four currencies on three continents. More than thirty of them are credit cards, and yes, I know. For ten years my old app synced them all and then filed my $13,878 card payment, paid from my own checking account, as an expense in some account it had nothing to do with. Every month. I spent fifteen hours a month fixing mistakes like that, and I dreaded opening the thing. Somewhere in year nine I realized I had become its unpaid bookkeeper, and it still couldn’t answer a simple question about my own money. So I built the app that could.

7 days free, then $12.99 a month or $89.99 a year. Card required, cancel anytime before your first payment.

Free trial for first-time customers; if your organization has subscribed before, the paid plan starts at checkout. Renews automatically until you cancel in Settings. Taxes may apply.

Why I stopped after three days

My money is in four currencies on three continents. The Mac version I tried couldn’t do that the way I needed, and the phone app I tried only did dollars, so my first evening went to currency math the app should have done for me. On top of that, it was clunky. By day three I had turned it off.

I had just spent ten years in my old app fixing card payments it filed as spending. I wasn’t signing up for another ten. I wanted a ledger that lived in a browser tab on whatever machine I sat down at, kept every account in its own currency, paired transfers on its own, and let me cross-examine my money in plain English. That is what Quaestor does.

What a multi-currency ledger looks like when you leave the desktop file behind

When your accounts span banks, cards, loans and brokerages across currencies, the ledger has to do the work without tying you to one computer.

Brokerage positions and cost basis beside your bank and loan accounts.

My brokerage accounts sit on the same Accounts page as my checking accounts and credit cards. Over the same read-only Plaid connection in the United States and Canada, investment holdings refresh daily with quantity, price, current value, and your cost basis and signed gain or loss whenever the institution provides them, while dividends land as income and fund purchases stay out of spending.

QIF and CSV file import beside live US and Canadian bank sync.

Live read-only bank sync and QIF or CSV import work side by side in the same ledger. My US banks connect through Plaid, while my overseas bank and older archives come in by file: QIF tags are recognized out of the box, and for CSV files Quaestor proposes the column mapping from the header row in a preview screen before a single transaction is written.

Read-only by architecture, at your bank and in the AI assistant.

Moving from a desktop program to a browser should never mean giving an app authority over your money. Your bank credentials stay inside Plaid’s sign-in window, never on our servers, and the encrypted token we keep is strictly read-only by design: it has no authority to move money or place trades, the AI assistant is read-only too, and we never train AI on your financial data.

10 reasons your money needs a ledger, not another budget

  1. A transfer is not a purchase.

    Pay your card from checking and most apps put you on a $13,878 shopping spree. Quaestor matches both legs by amount, date and account and keeps them out of spending and burn rate. It has caught 100-plus of mine so far. Flagged something that isn’t a transfer? One click says so.

    My transactions page filtered to transfers: a card autopay leaving checking and arriving on the card, both legs tagged, then a transfer I recorded by hand between two cards that share a nickname, and two more card payments, tagged the same way. None of them count as spending. The Matched column is about receipts.Names, institutions, currencies and balances shown are illustrative.

  2. Euros are not dollars.

    Every account keeps its own currency. Your net worth is in the one you think in, converted at live rates. Last year’s report does not rewrite itself when the rate moves.

  3. A net worth you’d swear to.

    Every bank, card, loan and investment on one screen. 12,000-plus institutions through Plaid.

  4. Read-only means read-only.

    We can see your balances. We cannot touch them. Same goes for our AI. That is not a limitation. That is the design.

  5. Your bank statements are not a study guide.

    We do not train AI on your financial data. Ever.

  6. Ask. Don’t export.

    “What did I really spend on restaurants last quarter, transfers excluded?” Ask your ledger. The answer comes from your data, not from a CSV you built at eleven at night.

  7. Receipts become records.

    Snap it. Quaestor reads the merchant, the line items, the tax, the tip, the total and the currency, then matches it to the card transaction it belongs to, or leaves it for you to confirm when it isn’t sure.

  8. Know the money facts before they happen.

    A budgeting app that tells you on the 31st that you spent $4,000 more than you should have is not worth its air. It’s insulting. Cash Outlook reads your real history and tells you how many days of liquid cash you have, as a range, with the assumptions written down, while you can still do something about it.

    Cash Outlook: liquid cash, monthly inflow and outflow, the projection, and the runway as a range. This one is rendered from sample data and says so.Rendered from sample data.

  9. Your ledger writes to you.

    Every week, the completed week and the outlook, in your inbox, before you think to look.

    The weekly briefing email: the completed week, the outlook, and what is worth a look. Sample data, labelled as such.Rendered from sample data.

  10. It lives in a browser.

    Work laptop, phone, an airport lounge. No Mac required. No file to sync.

The morning check

First thing every morning I open the dashboard and look at three numbers: cash outlook, real net worth, and what’s due. If a category suggestion, a transfer candidate, an unlinked receipt or a bank login needs my call, Waiting for review counts it on the same screen and disappears the moment the list is clear. Thirty seconds. Then I close it. That is the whole point of a ledger you trust. It gives you your attention back.

Why it’s called Quaestor

A quaestor was the Roman magistrate who kept the treasury. The name means money with accountability and authority in the same hands, and I chose it for a reason: authority without accountability is corruption. That applies to software too. Any app that can move your money has authority. Quaestor can read your money. It cannot touch it. And it answers for every number it shows you.

Bringing your history over

Export your Quicken transactions to CSV on a Mac or to QIF on Windows, or to CSV out of Simplifi on the web, and import them into Quaestor one account per file, with a preview before a single row is created, up to 2,000 rows per file. Bank, card, cash and loan history comes across; investment transactions stay behind for now. Live sync covers 12,000-plus US and Canadian institutions through Plaid, and automatic transfer pairing needs both legs live-synced, so a transfer that touches an imported row you record yourself, in place of the imported legs.

What it costs

7 days free, then $12.99 a month or $89.99 a year. Less than one overdraft fee, or about 25 cents a day. Card required, cancel anytime before your first payment.

A few lines on money I keep coming back to

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Dickens, through Mr. Micawber
“Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.”
Benjamin Franklin
“You cross-examine money like a witness on the stand.”
A relative of mine, not entirely as a compliment

Guilty. Quaestor is that cross-examination, running every day, across 60-plus accounts, without me.

7 days free, then $12.99 a month or $89.99 a year. Card required, cancel anytime before your first payment.

Free trial for first-time customers; if your organization has subscribed before, the paid plan starts at checkout. Renews automatically until you cancel in Settings. Taxes may apply.

Frequently asked questions

Why doesn’t Quaestor track investment trade lots or compute return percentages?
Because I would rather give you the brokerage’s own numbers than guess at tax math. I built the Investments view to show facts your brokerage actually reports, what you hold, what you paid where reported, and what it is worth today, and to record daily net worth snapshots from the day you connect, rather than inventing time-weighted return numbers from incomplete lot history.
What comes across in a QIF or CSV import, and what stays behind?
Each row’s date, amount, payee and memo load into the bank, card, cash or loan account you pick. A category name your ledger already has is matched, and any other stays on the row as text. An inflow comes in as income for now, so look over your refunds afterwards: one under a spending category is either refused and counted as an error, or lands as income. Transfers touching imported rows are recorded manually instead of keeping both imported sides (if I handle your move through Assisted Migration, transfers between migrated accounts stay paired where your old file had them). Investment trades and lots do not come over. Neither do budgets, rules, reports, scheduled bills or receipt images.
How do recurring bills and subscriptions work without a manual bill calendar?
On synced connections, the bank feed reports recurring inflows and outflows, 140-plus of them in my own ledger, and Quaestor pairs those with the statement balances, minimum payments and due dates that synced credit cards and loans report. Upcoming Payments and Cash Outlook use both so you see what is due before it hits; file-imported accounts contribute their balances and posted history, not feed-detected recurring streams.
Can I re-import a QIF or CSV file without creating duplicate transactions if I stop halfway?
Yes. I built the importer so a row knows the line it came from: import the same file into the same account again and every row already in your ledger is skipped, and the preview counts them before you confirm. A different export that overlaps the first is another matter, so export the dates you are missing, not everything again.

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