Privacy-focused expense tracker

Most budgeting apps open with the same request: connect your bank. It is presented as convenience, and it is convenient — but it means handing a third party ongoing read access to every transaction in your account, including the ones that have nothing to do with budgeting.

Rinalance does not ask for one today. There is no bank connection on any plan, no aggregator in the middle, and no credentials to hand over. You type in the balances and transactions you want tracked, so you choose what financial data Rinalance holds.

What "manual first" actually costs and buys

The cost is real and worth stating plainly: you type things in. A few seconds per transaction, and a weekly catch-up if you fall behind. If that sounds unbearable, an automatic tracker will suit you better and you should use one.

What you get for it:

• Nothing arrives that you did not put there. No misclassified merchant names, no transactions from an account you forgot was linked, no history imported from before you started.
• No credential risk. There is no stored bank login to leak, because there isn't one.
• You notice your spending. The most common thing people say about manual tracking is that entering a number makes them think about it. Automatic feeds are read later, if at all.

Leaving a spreadsheet behind

Plenty of people arrive here from a spreadsheet, and for the same reason: a spreadsheet is private, and that privacy is worth more to them than automation.

The problem is not privacy, it is maintenance. Every balance is a formula someone has to keep correct. Transfers between your own accounts get counted twice or not at all. A new month means copying a tab and fixing the ranges. The sheet works until the week you are too busy, and then it quietly stops being true.

Rinalance keeps the manual entry and removes the bookkeeping:

• Income, expenses, and transfers are recorded, and balances follow from them
• A transfer between two of your own accounts creates linked records on both sides, so it is never mistaken for income or spending
• Categories, charts, and monthly comparisons are already connected
• Nothing breaks when you skip a week

What we can and cannot say about your data

Vague privacy promises are cheap. Here is the specific version.

Rinalance is a hosted web application. Your records live in our infrastructure, encrypted in transit and at rest. That is not the same as end-to-end encryption, and we do not claim it is — if you need data that no operator can read, a local-first or self-hosted tool is the honest answer, and Actual Budget is a good one.

Public analytics are limited to sanitised pageviews. No custom events, no query or hash data.

Authenticated pages are excluded from crawling. Everything behind a login is disallowed in robots.txt.

Getting your data back out

Portability matters most at the moment you want to leave, which is exactly when products tend to make it hard.

Complete export is available on both plans, free included. The ZIP contains versioned JSON with stable IDs and relationships, plus CSV files for spreadsheet use. The JSON is the complete archive; the CSV files are convenient views, not a promise that another app can import everything unchanged.

Two honest notes. Export runs outward only: there is no import, so arriving at Rinalance means entering current balances by hand rather than uploading a file. And once you download an archive, keeping it safe is on you.

When you want to stop, account deletion controls remove your data rather than deactivating and retaining it.

Who this suits

Choose this approach if you would rather spend a few seconds per transaction than share a bank login, if you are replacing a spreadsheet you no longer maintain, or if you want to be able to answer precisely what a finance app knows about you.

Choose something else if you have hundreds of transactions a month and no intention of entering them, if you need years of existing history imported from files, or if end-to-end encryption is a requirement rather than a preference.