Rinalance

Manual-first multi-currency tracking without the spreadsheet

Rinalance is a manual-entry personal finance tracker built for people who want to control what they record. It runs on the web and as an installable browser app, and is built around tracking accounts, spending, subscriptions, and debts without requiring a bank connection. You own your financial data, decide what to record, and can export everything whenever you want.

This is genuinely niche. Most modern budgeting apps automate bank syncing through Plaid. Rinalance does the opposite. No bank API connections mean no ongoing access to your accounts and no credentials stored anywhere. The tradeoff: you enter transactions by hand, which is friction upfront but clarity by design. The site describes this as "privacy-focused expense tracking," and that is exactly what you get: you enter what you choose, your data stays yours, and you can delete everything and walk away.

How money comes in: manual entry only, with currency flexibility

Rinalance has one path to record income and expense: you type it in. Create an account (Personal, Business, or any financial context you want to separate), add its assets (checking accounts, savings, credit cards, investment accounts, cash), and log each transaction by hand with a date, amount, category, and optional notes. Transfers between your own assets are linked records so the app knows money moved internally and both sides stay consistent. The transactions list shows everything in reverse chronological order, searchable by date, account, merchant, category, or tag.

There is no automatic syncing and no integration with banks. Where other budgeting apps advertise how many institutions they connect to, Rinalance lists none, because it does not connect to any. That is design, not a hidden limitation. A reader coming from a bank-syncing budgeting app will immediately ask "where is the bank login," and Rinalance's answer is "you do not need one." If you are US-based and want Plaid-connected one-click setup, this is a step backward. If you are outside the US or philosophically opposed to sharing credentials, it is a step forward. You can also import accounts via CSV if you want to bulk-load balances or history from another tool.

The manual-only approach has one practical consequence: transactions update as fast as you type them, which means they are not live from your bank. If you want today's balance, you need to log into your actual bank account and type it in. This is the second most common reason Americans abandon a budgeting app after difficult syncing, and Rinalance does not solve it. It offers what it offers instead.

A workflow: you get paid Friday and type your income. A bill auto-renews and you add it as an expense tagged as a recurring commitment. You add spending from receipts or notifications weekly or as it happens. Rinalance charts your balance trend, shows category spending in a pie chart, and lets you review monthly changes. It works because you are present in your financial life, not because the app talks to your bank. That is a feature if you want to know your spending intimately, and a burden if you prefer to ignore it until tax time.

Budgeting and tracking: envelopes, subscriptions, and multi-currency in one view

Rinalance bundles budgeting, spending tracking, and subscription monitoring as members of the same object type. Everything is a named, tracked commitment: your monthly groceries budget, your Spotify subscription, your car loan. The Free plan lets you track up to 5 subscriptions, and each one auto-calculates as a monthly equivalent. The subscription calculator (a standalone free tool on the site) converts quarterly and yearly prices to a comparable monthly figure so you can see exactly what your recurring costs add up to. This is its own useful feature: most readers see only the charge frequency the merchant chose, not the standardized total.

On the paid plan you can track unlimited subscriptions, set monthly budgets with custom categories, and get a cash-flow forecast showing what is coming due and what you have left to spend. The app tracks both what you planned (your budget) and what actually happened (your spending), side by side. If you go over, it does not nag or alert you; it shows you the fact. That restraint is intentional: the site says it gives you "the records, charts, and planning tools needed to understand it" rather than guilt-trip features.

Rinalance's most distinctive feature is first-class multi-currency support. It holds EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, JPY, CAD, and AUD simultaneously, each in its own currency. A euro bank account stays in euros, a dollar travel card stays in dollars. When you add a transaction, you record it in that asset's currency at the real amount that moved. Conversion happens only when you ask to see a total: pick a currency to view in and Rinalance converts everything to it, showing both the real balance and its converted equivalent. Exchange rates are fetched server-side, cached, and labeled as stale if out of date, rather than silently presented as current. This transparency matters for readers living abroad, freelancers with international clients, or anyone holding balances across multiple currencies.

All your records are portable: the Free plan includes data export as a CSV file, so you can back up your full history, work with it outside Rinalance, or migrate to another tool without losing anything.

Pricing and the free tier

Rinalance publishes its pricing as a straightforward two-tier model. The Free plan is €0 forever with no credit card required. You get 2 accounts, 5 assets per account, 5 tracked subscriptions, unlimited income and expense records, charts and statistics, multi-currency support, CSV export, dark mode, and a browser-installable app. This is not a trial that cuts off after a month; it is a permanent free tier that does not expire. The pricing page says this plainly: "Manual records, charts, multi-currency support, and export stay available on the Free plan."

The Premium plan is €4.99 per month. The site does not publish an annual price on the pages captured here. Premium increases your limits to 20 accounts and 20 assets per account, adds unlimited subscription tracking, budgets, custom categories, cash-flow forecasting with spending history, email payment reminders, and priority support. That is the published price at the time of writing; check the pricing page before subscribing for any changes.

What the pricing pages do not settle is whether you need Premium for any serious use. The Free plan is truly generous for a single person or couple tracking one or two accounts and a modest budget. Upgrade only if you hit a limit: if you want more than 2 accounts (say, a personal account and a business account), or if you want budgets and cash-flow forecasting. The site invites you to "create a free account, set up one financial context, and upgrade only if you hit a limit that matters." That is honest product design and makes the free tier a genuine try-before-you-buy.

Who it suits and who it does not

Rinalance is best for readers who want to own their financial data and do not mind entering transactions by hand. That includes privacy-conscious users, people outside the US on banks Plaid does not reach, and anyone who finds manual entry clarifying. The multi-currency support is valuable for anyone with money in multiple currencies, whether you live abroad or just have a travel card in another country.

It is not for readers who want automatic syncing from their bank, or US readers who expect Plaid integration. You check your bank and type balances in yourself. If automatic syncing is non-negotiable, Rinalance will frustrate you. If you can live without it or prefer not to share banking credentials, it is one of the few apps that takes privacy seriously.