question about budgeting
I'm trying to find a program that will automatically categorize credit card purchases into a line-item budget. I wish to manually upload both my monthly budget as well as the history of the monthly credit card purchases. This will give me an idea of where I'm spending my money. Obviously, I don't want to have to upload every single credit card purchase, but rather the entire monthly history via the statement. I want this program to work offline because I am concerned about hackers having access to my personal data. Is this something your product does? Thanks
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Support Staff 1 Posted by Maddy on 07 Oct, 2025 12:31 PM
Hi Dave,
Thank you for contacting Moneydance support.
If you haven't already, you could download our free trial version and experiment with the program. You can download the trial version of Moneydance from our website on this page.
The trial version is fully functional and allows you to manually enter 100 transactions.
Imported transactions are not limited, so you'll be able to fully test downloading data from your bank, and importing data from other personal finance software.
If you decide to purchase the program at a later date you can keep all data you have entered during the trial period.
In order to get started, please refer to this article of the Knowledge Base and follow the links listed on the right hand side of your screen.
Also, you may want to refer to this article describing the First Steps with Moneydance in an easy and comprehensive manner.
You can find the steps for manually importing your data in this article.
Lastly, there are two types of budget available within Moneydance, and you can read about them both in this section of the knowledge base.
Go to Tools —> Budget Manager, and select ‘New’. You can then enter the budget name and select the ‘period’.
Selecting either Weekly, Biweekly, Monthly or Annually will create budget using this time period, and the 'Newer' budget format.
Selecting Mixed Interval will create an older style budget, which can have categories with different time intervals.
I would recommend using the 'Mixed Interval' format. Using the budget type, you can amend the start and end date for each budget item, and they're not set as the specific month/year etc.
Please note the budget feature picks up all expenses based upon the categories used. So you could not limit the budget to one account for instance, unless you built a separate set of categories to only be used by that account. Using the Foresight feature under the Tools tab on the other hand, will allow you to predict your future balances for just one account based upon your current balance and your reminders.
For further information please refer to this article of the Knowledge Base.
I hope this information is helpful. Please let us know if you have further questions or need more assistance.
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Maddy, Infinite Kind Support