Free personal finance software for Windows

Money by Zaweba is free personal finance software for Windows 10 and 11. It covers the everyday jobs of home accounts: keeping current, savings, credit card, cash, loan and investment accounts, importing bank statements, sorting spending into categories, setting budgets, planning bills and producing reports. It is free software under the EULA with no account, and there are Mac and Linux versions too.

Free tools in this area often turn out to be trials, or a spreadsheet template with a lot of typing. Money is a complete program, so this guide walks through what it does and how to get set up on a Windows PC.

What you get

Accounts come in six types: current, savings, credit card, cash, loan or mortgage, and investment. Each has an opening balance, an opening date and a currency, which is pounds unless you choose another. The register for each account shows date, payee, amount, category, memo and a cleared or reconciled flag, with a running balance down the side.

Statements come in from files you download from your bank: CSV, OFX, QFX and QIF. The CSV wizard knows the main UK bank layouts and remembers each one, and a review screen catches duplicates before anything is added. Payee rules, 92 of them to begin with, file transactions into a UK category tree, and when you recategorise a payment Money offers to do the same for that payee every time.

On the planning side there are monthly budgets per category, with bars showing spent against budget, and recurring bills and deposits with a panel of what's due in the next 30 days. Reports cover spending by category, income against spending, net worth over time, payee totals and account balances on a date, and any of them can be exported to CSV or a multi-page A4 PDF.

Setting it up on Windows

You don't need administrator rights. Tools, then Install for this user, copies the app to a folder in your own user profile, adds a Start menu shortcut and links .ozm files to Money. That makes it suitable for a family PC where you don't have the admin password.

Once it's running, you can look around safely with File, then Try the sample file, which makes an example household in Documents\Money by Zaweba. When you're ready for your own figures, press Ctrl+N for a new money file. Add your accounts from New account on the File menu, giving each the balance and date you want to start from. Then download a recent statement from your bank's website and import it with Ctrl+I.

A sensible first week

Import one statement per account and look at the review screen before you add the rows. Then open the register and fix any category that's wrong. When Money asks whether to always do the same for that payee, say yes if the answer really is always the same. A handful of those choices covers most of a typical month.

After that, set a monthly budget for the categories you care about from the Plan menu, and add your regular bills under Plan, then Bills and deposits. The Home dashboard, on Ctrl+H, pulls it together: balances, net worth, bills due, this month's budget and where the money went.

Things to know before you start

Money never connects to your bank, so figures are only as fresh as the last statement you imported. Investments are valued by hand with Update value, and accounts in other currencies show their own symbol but are not converted. There's no Save button and no undo, because every change is written immediately, and a backup is made each time you close the file, keeping the last 10. Everything follows UK conventions, from pounds to dd/mm/yyyy dates, whatever your PC is set to.

If those fit the way you'd like to keep your accounts, Money is a free and private place to keep them.