Banktivity alternative
Outgrown Banktivity? I did, after ten years.
Give me three minutes. I spent ten years in Banktivity, and I’m going to show you what those years cost me, why your net worth is probably wrong, and what I built when a lap through Monarch, Copilot and YNAB fixed none of it either. If you have one bank, one currency and one Mac, keep your app and enjoy your afternoon. If you have more than you can count on your hands, 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.
The same ledger on my laptop and on my phone: a browser tab, no Mac required, no file to sync.
Names, institutions, currencies and balances shown are illustrative.
I run 66 accounts at 18 institutions in four currencies on three continents. Thirty-six 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 left after ten years
The misfiled card payment in my story above was not a one-off. It was the monthly routine. Banktivity kept my money in a file on one Mac, so from a work laptop or an airport lounge my finances simply did not exist, and that is the first thing Quaestor fixed: it lives in a browser tab.
The second was the fifteen hours. A ledger that makes you its bookkeeper has the relationship backwards. I wanted software that did the matching itself, held all 66 accounts in four currencies, and answered questions about them. Nothing did. So I built it.
10 reasons your money needs a ledger, not another budget
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 97 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. 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.
A net worth you’d swear to.
Every bank, card, loan and investment on one screen. 12,000-plus institutions through Plaid.
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.
Your bank statements are not a study guide.
We do not train AI on your financial data. Ever.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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. 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 Banktivity ledger as QIF or CSV and import it into Quaestor with a mapping review, up to 2,000 rows per file. Live sync covers US and Canadian banks through Plaid. Everything else arrives by file and gets the same currency handling and AI chat; a transfer that touches an imported row you record yourself, in place of the imported legs. My own ledger goes back to May 2012, so yes, it holds history.
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.”
“Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.”
“You cross-examine money like a witness on the stand.”
Guilty. Quaestor is that cross-examination, running every day, across 66 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
- Can I bring my history?
- Yes. Import CSV or QIF files with a mapping review before anything is created, up to 2,000 rows per file. Live sync covers banks in the United States and Canada through Plaid; everything else comes in by file and gets the same currency handling and AI chat. 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. My own ledger goes back to May 2012.
- Will transfers to savings still show up as spending?
- No. Quaestor matches both legs of a transfer by amount, date and account and keeps the pair out of spending and burn rate. It has caught 97 of mine. If it flags a row that is not a transfer, dismiss the candidate with one click and it stays an ordinary transaction; a confirmed pair can still be opened, edited or deleted.
- What if my bank isn’t supported?
- Live sync runs through Plaid and covers banks in the United States and Canada, 12,000-plus institutions. For anything else, export a CSV or QIF from your bank and import it. Currency handling and AI chat work the same on imported history; a transfer that touches an imported row you record yourself, in place of the imported legs, since automatic pairing needs both legs live-synced. One of my banks overseas comes in that way.