Quaestor Ledger

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Outgrown Banktivity? I did, after ten years.

Give me three minutes. I spent ten years in Banktivity, and I’m going to show you why I finally left, why your net worth is probably wrong, and what I built when a lap through the newer apps fixed none of it. If you have one bank, one currency and one Mac you never leave, keep your setup and enjoy your afternoon. If your life has outgrown a file on one computer, 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

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 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 left after ten years

That $13,878 card payment in the story above was not a one-off; it happened every month in my old app. And because my ledger lived on my Mac, it wasn’t there when I was on a work laptop or a phone in an airport lounge. Ten years in, I was still cleaning up transfers by hand and still tied to one machine. I took a lap through the newer apps, and none of them held 60-plus accounts in four currencies without me doing the app’s work for it. So I built Quaestor.

What replaces the local file and the manual cleanup

I didn’t leave a ten-year desktop ledger to settle for a toy budget. Quaestor keeps the accounting backbone a serious ledger needs and drops the clerical work.

Automatic transfer pairing across my synced accounts.

When a debit in one synced account and a matching credit in another land inside a short date window, rules on amount, date and account turn them into one internal transfer, including across currencies at that day’s rate, and keep both legs out of my spending and burn rate. If a candidate flag is wrong, I dismiss it in one click.

Ledger, Bank and Drift on every synced checking, savings and card account.

Instead of reconciling against a monthly statement by hand, my synced checking, savings and credit card accounts show three numbers on the Accounts page whenever the bank reports a balance: Ledger, Bank and Drift, with a reconcile button beside any gap. And if a bank feed later drops a posted row, Quaestor keeps the transaction and flags it for my review rather than quietly erasing history.

A ledger back to May 2012 that you can cross-examine in plain English.

My live ledger holds 25,000-plus of my transactions, back to May 2012, across 60-plus accounts. Instead of building custom filter reports by hand, I ask the read-only AI chat assistant a question in plain English and get the total with the exact rows, dates and merchants shown underneath so I can audit the answer in seconds.

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 Banktivity accounts to QIF or CSV and import them into Quaestor one account at a time, up to 2,000 rows per file, with a preview before a single row is created, or ask for Assisted Migration below; my own records came over from Banktivity that way. Live read-only sync covers 12,000-plus institutions in the United States and Canada through Plaid; accounts abroad come in by QIF or CSV, 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

Will a decade of transaction history make the browser app sluggish?
No. Fifteen years of my own records live in Quaestor, and the Transactions register pages and filters on the server so opening an account, searching a payee or filtering by category stays snappy in a browser tab.
What happens when I click reconcile on an account that has drifted?
I’d rather see a balance gap in the open than have software hide it. When you click reconcile, Quaestor writes a labelled balance adjustment for the gap so your Ledger balance and the Bank balance agree again, keeps that adjustment visible in the account register, and excludes it from spending, income, 60-day money flow and Cash Outlook so a bookkeeping fix never masquerades as cash flow.
Do my old receipt attachments come over when I import transactions?
No, and I’d rather say so here than have you find out after the move: receipt images attached inside a desktop file do not come over in a QIF or CSV import, or in Assisted Migration. For new receipts you snap or upload into Quaestor, the reader extracts the store, date, total and line items and links the receipt automatically when one transaction is the clear match, or holds it on the Receipts page for you to confirm.
What happens when a bank connection expires or asks me to sign in again?
I wasn’t going to make you add the bank again from scratch. When a bank asks for a fresh login, Fix Connection appears right away on the Accounts page; when a bank sets a consent expiration date or Plaid announces a scheduled disconnect seven days ahead, the page offers a renewal beforehand, keeping your existing accounts, categories and transaction history intact without duplicates.

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