Personal finance software
Personal finance software that keeps a ledger, not a budget.
Every account, every transaction and every transfer between them, in one ledger that adds up to a net worth you can open and check line by line. Mine holds 66 accounts at 18 institutions in four currencies on three continents, and I read the three numbers that matter in thirty seconds each morning.
Ten years and four apps went into looking for that screen. In the end I built it. Here is what it does, on my own ledger.
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.
One ledger. Every account in it.
The point of a ledger is that nothing is left out. Connect the dull accounts too: a transfer is only a transfer when the ledger sees both sides, and the cash outlook can only count money it knows about. Mine holds 66 live accounts, 36 of them credit cards, at 18 institutions, and I have not found the ceiling.
- Checking, savings, credit cards, loans and brokerage balances, grouped by institution, each in its own currency.
- Live, read-only sync through Plaid for 12,000-plus institutions in the United States and Canada.
- CSV or QIF import for the bank, card, cash and loan history that cannot sync, with a preview and a mapping review before a single row is created.
Paying your own card is not spending.
Pay a card from checking and most apps put you on a $13,878 shopping spree. That one filing error, every month for ten years, is why this ledger exists. Quaestor pairs the debit with the credit and files the pair where it belongs: out of spending, out of burn rate, in a lane of its own on the money flow. It has caught 97 in my ledger so far, across 66 accounts. I pay 36 cards.
- Both legs matched by amount, date and account, then kept out of spending and burn rate.
- Savings moves, card payments and brokerage funding count as transfers. Cross-currency pairs match on the converted amount.
- Wrong flag? One click marks it as not a transfer. Nothing is deleted.
Every account in its own currency. One net worth in yours.
A euro account stays in euros. Quaestor never rewrites an amount; it converts for the totals and leaves the record alone, so assets minus liabilities lands in the currency you think in and the report you read last year is still the report you read. Four currencies roll into one number on my dashboard every morning, and the arithmetic is no longer mine to do.
- 153 currencies, live rates between them, and one main currency you pick once in Settings.
- Today’s totals use today’s rates. Past periods keep the rates they were recorded at, so last March stays last March.
- If a rate is missing, the dashboard says so instead of guessing.
My own ledger, September 2026
- live accounts
- 66
- live bank connections
- 20
- institutions on three continents
- 18
- currencies, one net worth
- 4
- credit cards
- 36
- internal transfer pairs caught
- 97
- transactions, back to May 2012
- 5,410
- receipts on file
- 1,017
- recurring payments tracked
- 54
See where it went. Then ask why.
A balance tells you what is left. The money flow tells you how you got there, and the assistant answers the question you would otherwise build a spreadsheet for: what did I actually spend on groceries last month, transfers excluded? It reads the ledger and shows its evidence. We never train AI on your financial data, and nothing it does can move a cent.
- Sixty days of inflow, outflow and net, by account and by category, on any device with a browser.
- Internal transfers get a lane of their own, and so do the loan payments your bank feed identifies, so neither turns up as a spending category.
- Ask the ledger a question in plain English. The answer comes from your own records, read-only, and nothing else.
It also tells you what comes next.
A budget guesses at next month. A ledger can compute it. Cash Outlook takes up to 180 days of your real history and projects up to a year ahead: the days of liquid cash you have left, as a range, with the confidence and the assumptions written out beside the number. Arithmetic, not AI, and it counts only the accounts you have put in the ledger. Turn on the weekly briefing, and that outlook comes to you with the completed week, on the weekday and hour you pick, in your time zone, frozen at send time; summary mode keeps the amounts out of the email itself. Receipts are records too: photograph one and the ledger reads the merchant, every line item with its category, and the tax, total and currency, then looks for the charge it belongs to by amount, date and merchant. I have 1,017 on file.
Read-only is the design.
The ledger keeps the records; it does not hold the keys. You sign in at your bank inside Plaid’s hosted flow, so the password never reaches Quaestor, and what Quaestor holds is an encrypted, read-only token that returns accounts, transactions, balances and liabilities, nothing that can start a payment or a transfer. Your card lives at Stripe. The assistant works under the same limits, scoped to one session and to your own data, and Quaestor does not use your financial data to train AI. Subscriptions are the only way this company is paid: no ads, no selling of your data, no commissions.
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.
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.
Frequently asked questions
- How is this different from a budgeting app?
- A budget tells you what you meant to do. A ledger tells you what actually happened. Quaestor starts from your real accounts and real transactions, keeps every record underneath available to open and inspect, and builds the totals up from there. What you have, what you owe and where it went all come from the same ledger, so they agree.
- Which accounts can it bring in?
- Bank accounts, credit cards, loans and investments all sit in the same ledger. Live sync covers banks in the United States and Canada through Plaid, read-only. Bank, card, cash and loan history from anywhere else comes in by CSV or QIF with a mapping review, up to 2,000 rows per file. Once an account is in, it gets the same spending views, the same currency handling and the same answers from the assistant as a synced one.
- Can it move my money?
- No. Bank connections are read-only through Plaid, and the assistant is read-only too, scoped to your own data. It can read your money. It cannot touch it. Quaestor does not use financial data to train AI systems, and configures AI services to restrict training use where available.
- What happens to transfers between my own accounts?
- Moving money between your accounts should not inflate your spending, so the ledger keeps matched internal transfers out of expenses. Automatic pairing needs both legs live-synced and a supported transfer pattern. You record a transfer that touches an imported row yourself, in place of the imported legs.
- What does it cost to try?
- 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.
Keep exploring
A budget is a plan. A ledger is the truth.
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.