🏦
Multiple Account Types
Track Checking, Savings, Credit Card, Loan/Mortgage, Investment/Brokerage, and Asset accounts, each with opening balances and running totals.
✦ Track. Forecast. Balance. Cross-platform.
Your money, in perfect balance.
BudgetLion is a cross-platform personal-finance ledger with double-entry accounting for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Track accounts, split transactions, forecast recurring income and expenses, and visualize your spending with confidence.
BudgetLion
Linux • macOS • Windows
Checking Savings Credit Card Mortgage Brokerage
DatePayeeCategoryAmountBalance
09/01PaycheckIncome:Salary+2,400.005,180.00
09/02GroceriesSplit−142.365,037.64
09/03To SavingsTransfer−500.004,537.64
Double-Entry balancedLedger ready
Features
Everything you need to manage your finances.
📒
Fast, Editable Ledger
Inline-edit date, payee, memo, amount, and category in a responsive grid powered by AG Grid.
⌨️
Type-Ahead Autocomplete
Payee and Memo fields suggest completions from the account's prior transactions as you type.
🔀
Transfers & Splits
Move money between tracked accounts, and split a single transaction across multiple categories and transfer legs. Loan payments auto-split into principal, interest, and optional escrow.
🏷️
Categories & Subcategories
Organize spending with a Parent:Child hierarchy, inline rename, and safe delete for unused categories.
🔁
Recurring Rules & Forecast
Define recurring income, expenses, and transfers with a projected balance chart and projected ledger.
📊
Charts
View spending/income pie and monthly bar charts, scoped by account and date range, exportable as PNG or SVG.
🧾
Paychecks
Record a pay stub as one balanced entry — gross as income, each deduction routed to a category or account, netting to your deposit. Prefill from a downloaded pay-stub PDF, parsed locally.
💰
Net Worth Report
Generate a one-page summary grouping accounts into assets and liabilities with subtotals and total net worth — ready to print or save as PDF.
📈
Investments & Assets
Track securities with buy/sell trades, a holdings panel, opt-in price quotes, and price history charts. Asset accounts track property, vehicles, and collectibles as valued items, all rolling up into net worth.
↩️
Undo & Redo
Step back through transaction adds, edits, deletes, and split changes with session-scoped, transaction-level undo and redo.
🧹
De-Duplicate Transactions
Find likely duplicates and review them side by side, with optional AI-assisted payee/memo matching.
🔎
Powerful Search
Filter the whole database by account, date range, payee, memo, category, and amount, with results in a ledger view.
📥
Import & Export
Import CSV, OFX/QFX, QIF, and bank-statement PDFs with duplicate detection; imported transactions are auto-categorized from your prior payees. Export to CSV, QIF, PDF, and PNG, or print the ledger.
📄
PDF Statement Import
Import transactions straight from a statement PDF. Rows are detected automatically on your machine; review, edit, and add rows before importing — or opt in to extract them with your configured AI.
🗂️
Category Report
Pick a category, an account (or all), and a date range to list every matching transaction with a total — ready to print or save as PDF.
💾
Portable Databases
Create, open, save, back up, and restore SQLite database packages; the last-opened database reopens on launch.
🤖
Optional AI Assistant
Works with OpenAI-compatible providers, Anthropic, Ollama, and custom endpoints, with a deterministic fallback.
🖥️
Cross-Platform Desktop App
Built with Electron for Linux, macOS, and Windows, including x64 and ARM64 build targets.
Screenshots
A clean workspace for tracking, forecasting, and balancing.
Editable Ledger
Inline-edit transactions with running
balances across all your accounts.
Recurring & Forecast
Project future balances from recurring
income, expenses, and transfers.
Spending Charts
Visualize income and spending by
category and by month.
Search
Filter across the whole database and
review results in a ledger view.
Pricing
Simple app licensing.
Buy BudgetLion once for the desktop application, then track accounts, forecast recurring activity, and manage your finances across your daily workflows.
$25 software license
A cross-platform personal-finance ledger with double-entry accounting for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
- Multiple account types with running balances
- Fast, editable ledger with transfers and splits
- Investment, brokerage, and asset accounts with net worth
- Paycheck entry with PDF prefill and a printable net worth report
- Recurring rules with forecasting and amortization
- Spending and income charts with export
- Import CSV, OFX/QFX, QIF, and statement PDFs; export CSV, QIF, PDF, and PNG
- Category and net worth reports, printable or saved as PDF
- Cross-platform desktop builds
FAQ
Common questions
What is BudgetLion?
BudgetLion is a cross-platform personal-finance ledger with double-entry accounting, built with Electron, React, and SQLite for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
What account types are supported?
BudgetLion supports Checking, Savings, Credit Card, Loan/Mortgage, Investment/Brokerage, and Asset accounts. Credit card and loan ledgers display charges as positive and payments as negative, statement-style.
Can I split a transaction across categories?
Yes. You can split a single transaction across multiple categories and transfer legs. The ledger shows "Split" and computes the memo from the leg memos. Loan payments are automatically split into interest and principal (with optional escrow) using the account's rate.
Can I track investments and other assets?
Yes. Investment/Brokerage accounts hold securities alongside cash, with buy/sell trades, stock grants, and a holdings panel, while Asset accounts track things like property or collectibles by valuation. Net worth per account combines the cash balance with the current value of holdings. Automated price quotes from Yahoo Finance are opt-in in Settings, and symbols are only sent to the provider when fetching is enabled; unresolved symbols fall back to manual entry.
Can I undo a change?
Yes. BudgetLion keeps a session-scoped, transaction-level undo/redo history of adds, edits, deletes, and split changes, so you can step back and forward through your recent edits.
Can I enter a paycheck?
Yes. A dedicated Paycheck entry records a stub as one balanced transaction: gross pay as income, each deduction (taxes, insurance, 401(k)/HSA) routed to an expense category or a transfer account, and the net deposited into your account. You can prefill the form from a downloaded pay-stub PDF — the text is parsed locally on your machine (no AI or image upload) and you review each line before saving.
Does BudgetLion track net worth?
Yes. Net worth per account combines the cash balance with the current value of any holdings, and the View menu's Net Worth Report produces a one-page summary of assets and liabilities with subtotals and a total — printable or saved as PDF.
Does BudgetLion forecast future balances?
Yes. Define recurring income, expenses, and transfers with fixed, average-of-history, or last-amount estimation, plus loan amortization, and view a projected balance chart and projected ledger.
Which file formats can I import and export?
Import CSV (with configurable column mapping), OFX/QFX, QIF, and bank-statement PDFs. Export transactions to CSV, QIF, PDF, and PNG, or print the ledger. Accounts, categories, and recurring rules export and import as JSON. Imported transactions are automatically categorized when a prior transaction shares the same payee.
Can I import transactions from a PDF statement?
Yes. Choose a statement PDF and BudgetLion extracts the text locally and detects transactions automatically. You review the results in an editable preview — fix any field, add rows, and choose which to import. Optionally, you can send the statement text to your configured AI to extract the transactions instead, then review and edit before accepting. Scanned/image-only PDFs have no text to read, so you can add rows manually or try the AI option.
How are duplicate transactions handled?
BudgetLion detects likely duplicates by date, amount, and from/to accounts, and detects duplicates on import via bank FITID or synthesized keys. A review dialog shows both transactions side by side.
Do I need an AI provider to use BudgetLion?
No. AI integration is optional. It can improve payee/memo similarity during de-duplication and, if you choose, extract transactions from a statement PDF. BudgetLion works with OpenAI-compatible providers, Anthropic, Ollama, and custom endpoints, and falls back to deterministic matching and on-device PDF text parsing when no AI is available.
Where is my data stored?
A database is a folder ("package") containing a SQLite file. You can create, open, save as, back up, and restore databases, and the last-opened database reopens on launch. Settings are saved to ~/.budgetlion-settings.json.
Which platforms are supported?
BudgetLion is built with Electron and supports Linux, macOS, and Windows, including x64 and ARM64 builds.
I'm having trouble downloading on Windows!
Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Defender make it very difficult to download software from the internet these days. See this page for instructions on how to download and install perfectly safe and free software from the internet.
Do I need a license for each computer?
No, you only need one license that is good for all platforms and all computers that you as an individual own. Send an email to Glowing Cat Software for information about commercial licenses.
Is BudgetLion open source?
Yes. BudgetLion source is available under the GPL 3.0 license.
Can I download and use BudgetLion without a license?
Yes, purchasing a license is optional, but it helps support open source software development.
Ready to take control of your finances?
Download BudgetLion to track accounts, split transactions, forecast recurring activity,
and visualize your spending across Linux, macOS, and Windows.
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