Here’s how to do what you’re trying to do:

Get a pen and pad of paper. Transcribe all your expenses last month from bank records, cc statements, cash receipts etc. write it like 7/23/26 citgo $17.45. Now total it up at the bottom. that total is the money you spent.

Flip over to the next page, transcribe all your income last month from payroll checks, pensions, investments, yard sales etc. write it the same way. When you total that up at the bottom you know your income.

When you compare those two, you will find out if you’re spending more than you make.

Now flip to the next page. Take all your expenses and transcribe them by category, like “food”, “gas” etc. now you know how much you’re spending on different things and can (if you have a shortfall, a situation where you’re spending more than you make) figure out where to find savings. Perhaps you spend time preparing take and go meals at home instead of eating fast food, or cancel some streaming subscriptions.

If you just did all that, and I did not intend this as a rhetorical device: stop and actually do what I just outlined, you will have a budget.

The point of doing this process isn’t to shake the austerity dead chicken at you, but to help you figure out what your version of the budget process outlined above looks like.

Did you find it time consuming to manually transcribe transactions from ledger to ledger? Perhaps your “budget software” is a spreadsheet package with csv formatted imports from your bank and credit card comapnies.

Did you have a hard time handling lots of cash receipts? Perhaps you need to switch to a debit card or use a receipt scanner or ocr software at the point of purchase.

Is it not clear what category something fits into? A software package that automatically sorts things into categories or a name lookup table in your spreadsheet will make that faster and easier.

Maybe the pen and paper method worked out just fine for you but you could benefit from an accounting ruled pad and a more comfortable pen.

You should be choosing software to solve a problem, but you don’t know what the problem is. The problem isnt that you don’t have a budget. Getting a budget is the goal. Working it out on paper will help you understand what is standing between you and that goal. That thing is the problem your software needs to solve.

There’s no point in auditioning software or taking software suggestions if you don’t know what the problem is. It’s like asking how best to move your dirt pile. Komatsu makes a phenomenal solution to this, but it’s 300k to buy and 2k to rent for a day. A shovel and wheelbarrow might be a better approach but if you just ask for the best software you’re gonna get people pointing you at very complex bulldozer packages like actual or intuit in the commercial accounting software world.