Build a modern financial tracking system for free

Free solution: Google Spreadsheet + Fina Money

Build a calculator on Fina to track my savings

Many people use Excel or Google Sheets to manage their finances, either design from scratch or use shared templates from others.

The major advantage of spreadsheets is their powerful functionalities; users value the flexibility of formulas and the ability to manually edit their data. For spreadsheet power users, this can be enjoyable. However, for many people, dealing with the complexities and learning curve can be frustrating.

That’s why Fina Money was developed: to retain the power of spreadsheets while making financial tracking easy for everyone.

Today, let’s explore a simple, free solution with Fina Money.

TLDR;

If you don’t have time to read all details, just follow these 4 simple steps to make custom system for yourself:

1. Sign up an account in Fina and Sign in.
2. Click “+ Account” button → click banks → track manually.
3. Fill balance value for the account with currency.
4. Click “Import manual transactions” to connect a Google Spreadsheet (template) where you maintain all your transactions.
5. That’s it! All features, scenarios, and templates available to you now.

An instruction to add manual account with Balance + Transactions

You can take further actions to customize your categories, browse some shared ones here to import from.

Or browse more templates shared by others, here are a quick list shared by myself, feel free to important them and use them.

• Track cost on vendors: https://app.fina.money/doc/OPezlvzRzflPyY
• Track spending history: https://app.fina.money/doc/5gxHxP2ThySAkH
• Cash flow calendar: https://app.fina.money/doc/lV8hlCF1pYV5hJ
• Basic budgeting: https://app.fina.money/doc/R6aX03aHc3wMSx
• Savings tracker: https://app.fina.money/doc/TRGoZrDrHhTzCe
• Business cost breakdown: https://app.fina.money/doc/yS8CQjvNj4kpcY

Feel free to join Fina community at Reddit to discover more sharings from other people.

Now, let’s drill into the details!

Fina Basics

Let’s start with a user-shared template to understand the basics of Fina:

• Document Interface: Using Fina is similar to working with Google Docs.
• AI Blocks: A Fina page consists of insightful blocks. Simply ask questions to generate these blocks on your page.
• Sharing: Share your page as a template to benefit and inspire others.

A screenshot of a user shared template

Now, the question is, how do we obtain accurate data? Fina allows you to securely connect to your financial institutions, providing access to balances and transactions for credit cards, deposit accounts, mortgages, and investments. However, there is a fixed fee for retrieving this data from banks.

Additionally, Fina is a powerful cloud-based data analytics engine that enables you to easily create accurate reports, charts, and trends. This helps you gain a comprehensive understanding of your financial situation and plan more effectively for the future.

Now — The Free Solution

As you can see, Fina is a modern, data and AI-driven financial platform designed to benefit as many people as possible, particularly those struggling with spreadsheets.

Fina offers free data integration with Google Sheets. Here’s how you can get started:

1. Sign Up: Create a Fina account.
2. Add Manual Accounts: Customize each manual account with your name, tags, balance value, and currency.
3. Create Google Sheets: Use Fina’s spreadsheet template to create one or more Google Sheets to track all your transactions. Associate these sheets with any manual accounts you created in step 2.
4. Enjoy Fina’s Features: Fina will sync with your data in real-time, allowing you to stay on top of your finances effortlessly.

This free Fina and Google Sheets solution helps you manage your finances in real-time.

Maintain Transactions By Yourself

Since your transaction data is stored in a private Google Sheet, you can either update it manually or use an automation tool to pull data from other sources, such as your bank’s API (though not all banks support this).

To ensure Fina stays in sync with your spreadsheet, your data needs to be organized according to the Fina schema. Here is an example:

Fina Demo Data

A demo dataset organized in Fina schema

1. Date: ISO8601 date format, or date time such as 2024–05–01 12:20:00`.
2. Name: Transaction name, description of the transaction, easy for search.
3. Merchant: the merchant name, helps you understand who you do business with.
4. Type: basically the category you want to assign the transaction too. You should use the category that you created in your Fina account, so that it will automatically categorized after syncing to Fina. (Optional)
5. Amount: the value of the transaction, use negative value for expense and positive for income.
6. Currency: the currency of this transaction, all transactions will be converted to the system currency if set differently by you in your Fina account. (Optional)
7. City: city name where the transaction happened. (Optional)
8. Region: usually state name. Good use for building map on Fina to understand location based analysis. (Optional)

As you can see, the most critical fields are Date, Name, and Amount. Including additional fields can provide more insightful analysis of your data later on.

Auto-Categorization

For every single transaction in the linked spreadsheet, you surely want them to be categorized to the categories you have set up in Fina. There are two options you can rely on:

1. You know what categories you have set in Fina. If you want to categorize them in the Spreadsheet, you can just fill the category name in the type column for each transaction. Fina will honor that value and not overwrite it.
2. What if you don’t set it? Then Fina will auto categorize the transaction using our internally trained ML model. If some of them mistakenly categorized by AI, you can still manually set it or create rules to overwrite it.

As time goes, we will keep improving the model’s accuracy to help you categorize your transactions faster. Please Check out this article on the details of how we develop this auto-categorization service by training our own machine learning model.

Summary

Fina Money is a modern cloud-based financial data platform designed to bring clarity to your finances.

Whether or not you are familiar with spreadsheets, this solution frees you from their complexities while offering the convenience and flexibility of Fina Money. And best of all, it’s free!

We hope you find this useful. Sign up for Fina Money today to try it out!