Quaestor Ledger

Monarch Money alternative for multi-currency

Outgrown Monarch? Your money did.

Give me three minutes. I’m going to show you why people outgrow Monarch the day they open a second currency, why I spent ten years in Banktivity and a lap through the modern apps before building my own, and what changes when every account keeps its own currency. If you have one bank and one currency, keep your app 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 dashboard the morning I took this: all my active accounts reporting in USD, and Cash Outlook giving me a day of liquid cash at medium confidence, with five quality notes it wants me to fix. It tells me what it sees and how sure it is.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 people leave Monarch

It starts the day your money stops fitting inside one country and one clean feed. Get paid in pounds through a payment platform and the ledger records it as dollars, then counts the deposit a second time when it lands in checking. Put a EUR account beside a USD account and the total adds them as if they were the same money, leaving you with a spreadsheet on the side just to know what you are actually worth.

Then the quiet failures pile up. A bank link breaks and fixing it spins up a second copy of your accounts, a posted charge disappears without a note while your balance drifts, and support tells you to wait on the aggregator or clean it up by hand. The moment you are doing the software’s bookkeeping for it, you have outgrown it, and Quaestor was built for that exact moment: every account in its own currency, synced transfers paired once both sides match cleanly or held for your call when they don’t, and every gap between your ledger and your bank shown in the open.

What changes when every account keeps its currency and nothing drifts in silence

Once your accounts across currencies sit in one honest ledger, the side spreadsheet and the guesswork have nothing left to do.

153 currencies, live conversion, and past months that never shift.

Your euro and franc accounts stay in euros and francs while your dashboard reports in the currency you think in. Pick your reporting currency once in Settings, and multi-currency net worth converts today’s balances at live rates while locking historical months to the exchange rates from the day each transaction settled.

Wiring money between currencies is a transfer, not spending.

When I move cash from my dollar account to my bank abroad, I record it once as a transfer, and neither side counts as spending or income. Between two synced accounts, internal transfer detection pairs the legs on its own, across currencies too, and keeps both sides out of your burn rate.

Waiting for review in one place, Ledger, Bank and Drift in plain sight, and links that repair or renew in place.

Instead of letting broken links or dropped charges fail in silence, the Dashboard’s Waiting for review card and navigation badges count every open decision and disappear at zero. Every synced checking, savings and card account shows Ledger, Bank and Drift on the Accounts page, a posted charge a bank feed later drops is kept in its own review filter, repairing or renewing a link keeps the same connection, and when a bank link has to be made again, the app recognises the accounts you already track and selects them, so nothing starts over.

Plain-English answers across currencies, with the rows underneath.

When I want to know what I spent on dining or travel across four currencies last quarter, I ask the read-only AI assistant instead of exporting a CSV. It totals the answer in my main currency, labels any mixed-rate caveats, and lists the exact transactions it used so I can verify every line.

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

Monarch exports one CSV for every account, while Quaestor’s self-serve importer takes one account per file, up to 2,000 rows, with a preview where Quaestor proposes the column mapping from your headers before a single row is created: split the file by account first, or ask for Assisted Migration below and I split it for you. Live sync covers 12,000-plus institutions in the United States and Canada through Plaid; accounts abroad come in by CSV or QIF, 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

What happens if I switch my reporting currency when I move countries?
Change it in Settings and the ledger converts in the background; Settings shows it while it runs. No original amount or account currency changes. Two things I would rather tell you before you move: a rate you typed in yourself is replaced by the market rate for its day, and the net worth history starts again in the new currency.
Why doesn’t Quaestor offer live bank sync outside the United States and Canada?
Because live sync runs through Plaid, and here that means the United States and Canada. My own bank abroad comes in by CSV, two minutes a month, with the same currency math and the same answers from the assistant.
Can I split one combined CSV export across my accounts myself?
Yes: filter the export on its account column in a spreadsheet and save one CSV per account. Or ask for Assisted Migration, and if I take your move on, the splitting is mine.
How does the ledger behave if a daily exchange rate hasn’t arrived yet?
I refuse to show a made-up net worth. If a rate for one of your currencies is missing, the dashboard names the currency, marks those converted totals unavailable until the rate arrives, and leaves your native-currency account balances untouched.
Will fixing a broken bank link create duplicate accounts, and how do I cancel if it is not for me?
When a connection asks for a fresh login or its access is about to end, you repair or renew it on the Accounts page and it stays on your existing accounts, so every past row and category stays in one place. If a bank ever has to be linked again from scratch, the app recognises an account you already track and selects it for you. And if Quaestor ever stops earning its keep, you open Settings and cancel in the billing portal yourself without emailing anyone.

Keep exploring