Can I do personal finance offline?

Yes, you can, and Money by Zaweba is built for exactly that. It is a desktop app that keeps every account, transaction, budget and report in one .ozm file on your own PC. There is no cloud service behind it, no telemetry and no bank login, so your finances never leave the computer unless you copy the file somewhere yourself.

Plenty of people assume that budgeting now means an online service connected to the bank. That is one way to do it. Doing it offline is another, older and perfectly workable way, and for a lot of households it's the more comfortable one.

How offline finance works in practice

The link between your bank and Money is a file you download. Almost every bank's website lets you export a statement, usually as CSV, and many also offer OFX, QFX or QIF. You save that file, open Money and import it with Ctrl+I. The CSV wizard finds the header row, recognises the layouts of Nationwide, Barclays, Monzo, Starling, Lloyds and Halifax, Santander and HSBC and First Direct, and guesses the columns for other banks from their names and the data.

Before anything is added, a review screen shows which rows are new and which you already have. Payee rules then put the new rows into categories, and your balances, budgets and reports update. The whole round trip happens on your PC. The only time you're online is when you visit your bank's own website to download the statement, which you'd do anyway.

What stays on your computer

Everything. Each money file is a single SQLite database with the .ozm extension, so a household and a side business can live in separate files if you like. There's no Save command, because every change is written straight away. When you close the file, Money makes a backup copy and keeps the last 10 in a backups folder next to it, and File, then Back up now, makes one whenever you want.

If other people use the same PC, you can give a money file a password. Money uses SQLCipher 4 with AES-256 encryption, and without the right password the file is refused. The app is blunt that a lost password means lost data, so it's worth writing it down somewhere safe before you switch it on.

What you give up, and what you gain

The honest trade is that nothing arrives by itself. Money never connects to your bank, so your figures are as up to date as the last statement you imported. Most people settle into a rhythm, importing once a week or once a month, which takes a few minutes once the wizard has learnt your bank's layout.

In return you get a few things that online services can't easily offer. Nobody else holds a copy of your spending history. There are no bank credentials stored by a third party. The app keeps working with no internet connection at all, and the file on disk is the whole story, so you can copy it to a USB stick or another drive as an extra backup. Money by Zaweba is free software under the EULA, with no account to create.

Getting started without risking real figures

If you'd like to see how it feels first, use File, then Try the sample file. It makes a fresh example household in Documents\Money by Zaweba, complete with accounts, transactions and a house held as an investment so the net worth figure looks realistic. Click around the Home dashboard, open the reports and try recategorising something. When you're ready, make a new money file with Ctrl+N, add your accounts with their opening balances and import your first statement.

Offline home accounts aren't a compromise. They're simply a different arrangement, where you decide when the data comes in and where it lives.