Tracking Finances in Japan

[xie2kuro4]

I use Quicken, au Money Manager, and a spreadsheet to track my spending/finances. Quicken is fine, but it only reports things in US dollars, which is annoying. au Money Manager is shutting down at the end of March and will no longer track external (non-au) accounts. And my spreadsheet is mainly for tracking my investments.

Because of the au Money Manager shutting down, I am looking into other apps that will help me track my accounts in Japan and give me a snapshot into how things are playing out every month.

au specifically recommends Money Forward, and I have tested it out this morning and it seems basically fine, but the free version is useless as you can only track four accounts. So, before I decide to subscribe to Money Forward, I wondered if there were any other apps or websites that I should consider.

I can see in this forum references to Money Forward, MoneyTree, Zaim, and Cost Track.

From what I have read, these are the opinions shared so far, although some of them are from quite old posts.

• Money Forward - more comprehensive, more banks than Moneytree

• Moneytree - easier to use, better interface than Money Forward, available in English

• Zaim - no details shared

• Cost Track - no details shared

Money Forward is 5300 yen per year, while Moneytree is 3600 yen per year. I am not sure about Zaim or Cost Track.

Is anyone using any of these apps/websites and able to give any insights into them? Any preferences? Are there any other apps or websites that should be considered?

[RetireJapan]

I use the free version of Moneytree to keep track of my bank accounts and credit cards.

I keep track of investments using a simple spreadsheet: log into my accounts once a month and update the spreadsheet. Don't feel good about/see the need to give a third party login details for my broker accounts

[zeroshiki]

I use MoneyForward and I quite like it because I'm lazy to keep track of all of my info one by one so its a good place to get a view of all of them. They cover pretty much everything (although there's a very big omission in Paypay). The annoying thing is the updates are not real time (it goes and checks your accounts on a schedule) and, especially with the late posting of card purchases here in Japan, you tend to forget about certain purchases and you're confused when they show up on your account.

I say its worth it if you have multiple accounts and you'd like to be able to keep yourself honest on budgeting.

[Matt]

I'm late to this thread, but is there a spreadsheet template that anyone recommends?

Excel and Google sheets spreadsheets can can automatically update share prices and recalculate, but is this possible for Japanese stocks and mutual funds?
And maybe I'm old fashioned or a Luddite, but I'd prefer to have this saved locally rather than in the cloud.

Currently trawling the web in the hope that someone has already set this up as a template, but if anyone here can recommend one that would be great!

Cheers

[Tsumitate Wrestler]

I would suggest paying for Money forward. The time savings are worth the small cost. Everything, at a glance.

[Yokohama]

+1 for Moneyforward

[eetc155]

I'm late to this thread, but is there a spreadsheet template that anyone recommends?

Excel and Google sheets spreadsheets can can automatically update share prices and recalculate, but is this possible for Japanese stocks and mutual funds?
And maybe I'm old fashioned or a Luddite, but I'd prefer to have this saved locally rather than in the cloud.

Currently trawling the web in the hope that someone has already set this up as a template, but if anyone here can recommend one that would be great!

Cheers

I couldn't find a template either so I did a basic Google sheets one based of off some of discussions I found on Reddit.

Stocks, sourcing data from https://finance.yahoo.com - that works, I copied that code to my spreadsheet (link below).
The stock codes you enter will need to match the yahoo finance ones.

https://www.reddit.com/r/googlesheets/c ... _overview/


For mutual funds data, I went and sourced it from nikkei.com - emaxis and rakuten funds for me.
It is also possible to get them from yahoo finance Japan.
https://www.reddit.com/r/JapanFinance/c ... se_mutual/


You can try using the template of the one I did, nothing fancy, it just shows cost value and current value in JPY, USD and GBP
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... =725491321

The yellow parts - stock code, avg price and position, are the ones you need to fill in, everything else should auto calculate.

Note: on the stocks tab, you'll see I have an example row each for JP, HK, US and UK stocks, each of those rows will have a different FX calculation, so copy and paste from the row that is relevant to you.

Have fun

[Matt]

Thanks everyone for the replies and suggestions.

This gives me a few options as I figure out what is going to work best for me.

Cheers

[William]

I'm not quite sure if it's the kind of software you're looking for, but I use GnuCash — and the free version of MoneyTree to get the latest updates on my credit cards and bank accounts.

It's cold, but it also forces you to get familiar with accounting concepts, even to manage your personal finances.

It can manage multiple currencies.