Quaestor Ledger

YNAB alternative: a ledger, not a budget

Outgrown YNAB? Your money needs a ledger now.

Give me three minutes. I’m going to show you why people outgrow YNAB once their money outgrows a monthly envelope plan, why I spent ten years in Banktivity and a lap through the modern apps before building my own, and what a ledger gives you that a budget can’t. If you have one bank, one currency and a monthly plan you love, keep your plan and enjoy your afternoon. If you have more accounts than envelopes, 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
Cash Outlook: how many days of liquid cash you have, as a range, with the assumptions written down. This render uses sample data and says so.Rendered from sample data.

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 YNAB

Not because discipline failed. Because a budget and a ledger answer two different questions, and eventually your money needs the second one. Years in, assigning every dollar a job turns into hours of monthly ceremony: typing split receipts in a store parking lot so you don’t forget what went where, or auditing cleared rows by hand because a silent match changed your register behind your back and threw your balance off the bank’s.

Open an account in euros or francs and a single-currency plan splits your life into separate rooms that still cannot add up to one net worth. A budget tells you what you meant to spend this month. A ledger tells you what is actually true across everything you own and owe, checks its balance against the bank in plain sight, and never changes a category behind your back. Quaestor keeps the discipline you value and drops the envelope ceremony.

What a ledger gives you that a monthly budget can’t

Once you stop funding monthly category caps, four things replace the busywork without taking away your control.

Cash Outlook instead of a red category after the money is gone.

A red envelope tells you after you overspent; I want to know weeks before cash gets tight. Cash Outlook projects my liquid cash up to a year ahead as a low, base and high range from my real balances, recurring streams and card or loan payment plans, and writes every assumption down beside the confidence grade.

Waiting for review in one card, category suggestions with no rules, and nothing changed until you accept.

I was never going to maintain a rules table that breaks whenever a merchant changes its statement text. After an uncategorized row has sat for a few days, the ledger can offer one of your own categories through category suggestions with a High confidence or Medium confidence label, counted right inside the Dashboard’s Waiting for review card alongside any unlinked receipt, transfer candidate or bank alert. Until you click Accept, nothing in your ledger has changed.

Store receipts split across categories from one photo, with Ledger, Bank and Drift on every synced account.

No more standing in a parking lot keying in a multi-category shopping cart by hand. Snap the paper slip from your phone and receipt matching reads every line item, links to the card charge when one clear match stands out, and splits an uncategorized purchase across your categories in proportion to the items while your linked checking, savings and card registers display Ledger, Bank and Drift right beside each balance.

60 days of money flow, with transfers and debt payments kept separate from spending.

Instead of funding next month’s envelopes by hand, I read 60 days of inflow, outflow and net by account and category on one chart. Matched internal transfers and bank-identified loan payments each sit in their own lane so paying off a card statement never masquerades as lifestyle spending.

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

YNAB’s register export puts every account in one CSV, while Quaestor’s self-serve importer loads one existing account per file, up to 2,000 rows, with a preview before anything is written: split the register by account first, or ask for Assisted Migration below. Budget targets and rules stay behind; make your categories in Settings before you import and each spending row finds its category by name. One thing I’d rather tell you first: for now the importer reads every inflow as income, so a refund filed under a spending category is either turned away, and shows in the import’s error count, or comes in as income. Check your refunds after the import. Live read-only sync covers 12,000-plus US and Canadian institutions through Plaid, 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

Is there a monthly budget or envelope screen?
No, on purpose. Quaestor has no budgets page and no envelopes to fund at the start of the month. I built it to keep the accounts, the transactions, the categories and the transfers, and to compute net worth, 60-day money flow and Cash Outlook directly from those records.
What if I want to set monthly spending targets per category?
If setting and policing monthly category caps is the part of personal finance you enjoy, stay with a budgeting app. I built Quaestor for the stage after that, when you care more about whether your total burn rate, upcoming card statements and liquid runway are healthy across all your accounts.
Does every uncategorized transaction get a category suggestion?
No, and I designed it to stay quiet rather than guess. The day I switched suggestions on in my own ledger, 172 suggestions were waiting on rows where the ledger had a High confidence or Medium confidence pick; the rest stayed blank for me to categorize by hand.
How do my category groups and subcategories map into Quaestor?
I wanted one clean category list for the whole ledger rather than a grid tied to a monthly plan. When you import a CSV, the importer reads the Category column, the names inside your groups, and does not read the group column: category groups do not come in, and two categories with the same name in different groups land on one category, while any name the ledger does not recognize stays on the row as plain text. Want your groups back? Make them parent categories in Settings first; rows match the names underneath.
How do I keep a human verification checkpoint without approving every routine transaction by hand?
Routine synced charges post without busywork, while anything that calls for judgment appears in the Waiting for review card on the Dashboard and as count badges on Transactions, Receipts and Accounts: ready category suggestions, possible transfers waiting for a second leg, posted charges a bank later dropped, unlinked receipts and bank connections needing a login. Click any line to open that exact filtered list, and compare Ledger, Bank and Drift across Accounts whenever you want to confirm agreement with your institution.

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