Today Cashfulness leaves beta and is available to everyone.
It's an app for keeping your household finances with double-entry bookkeeping, the method companies have used to keep their books for more than five centuries. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, and on iPhone and iPad, in 45 languages.
Before telling you what it does, I want to tell you why it exists.
Why I built it
I've kept my personal and family books in double entry for more than fifteen years. Not out of a passion for bookkeeping, but because I've seen how much clarity takes away anxiety.
When you know exactly what you own, what you owe and where your money goes, you stop thinking about it all the time. The number is there, balanced, and you can get back to living.
The personal finance apps I tried did the opposite: notifications, charts turning red, goals to chase, badges. They want you to look at them every day. Many also want access to your bank account.
The method I used, on the other hand, was rigorous but tiring: software designed for accountants, everything to set up by hand, almost only on a computer.
Cashfulness is an attempt to keep the rigour and remove the effort.
What you'll find
Every transaction is recorded twice: where the money comes from and where it goes. For you this stays behind the scenes. You log an expense as you would in any app, and the books balance on their own.
The result, though, is what a company gets: a real balance sheet and a real income statement, except they're yours. Accounts in several currencies, reconciliation with your bank statement, budgets, recurring expenses, a schedule of upcoming payments, the current value of your investments.
There's one distinction I care about in particular: between the things you own that give you something back and the things that cost you. I owe it to Robert Kiyosaki and his Rich Dad Poor Dad. I don't like everything Kiyosaki writes, but I give him credit for this idea. With one difference: he calls the house you live in a liability, while I keep it among your assets, because in accounting terms that's what it is, and put it on the side of the ones that cost you. In the app they're called Assets+ and Assets−, and they tell you which way you're heading over the long run.
If you're coming from another program, you don't start from scratch. Cashfulness imports bank statements and CSV files, and brings in GnuCash books in full: the whole history, or only from a given date, with opening balances already worked out.
What you'll never find
There are no ads and no profiling. No badges, streaks or leaderboards, and no notification asking you to open the app when there's no need.
All you need to use it is a nickname. The documents you upload, such as receipts, contracts and insurance policies, are end-to-end encrypted: the key lives only on your device, and not even we can read them. Your data is stored on servers in the European Union, and you can export it to CSV whenever you like, on the free plan too.
Thanks to those who came first
For three months Cashfulness was used by around seventy beta testers. They found bugs, asked for features, pointed out sentences that didn't make sense. Much of what you'll find today started with one of their emails. My thanks go to every one of them.
How to start
You can try it for free for up to 200 transactions or 60 days.
Then there are two plans. Premium costs €5.99 a month or €57.99 a year; Ultra, with more accounting spaces, €9.99 a month or €95.99 a year. If you subscribe from the website by 31 December with the code EARLY30, your first year costs 30% less.
You'll find it at cashfulness.com.
The thread that ties it together
To me, money is a tool for buying time and freedom. It's not an end in itself, and it's not a yardstick to measure yourself by.
Cashfulness is there to help you think about it less, not more: keep your books in order in a few minutes a week, and then close the app.
If you try it, write and tell me what you think. I read everything.
Vittorio