Personal Ledger vs BalanceWright Checkbook Ledger

Personal Ledger is not a budgeting app. It is a verification app. If you already keep a cashflow plan in Excel — what should come in, what should go out, month by month — Personal Ledger imports that workbook and then checks your real spending against it. Every day, per category, per bucket, per income source. So you find out on the 8th that you are drifting, not on the 30th. WHAT IT DOES • Import your .xlsx cashflow plan Your workbook comes in as-is. Income, Living, Liability and Investment categories, with the planned amount for each month. No re-typing, no rebuilding it inside someone else's app. • Compare actual against plan The dashboard shows monthly cashflow against what you planned, broken out by category and by bucket. Plan health is pro-rated by day of month, so being 20% through your groceries on the 6th does not raise a false alarm. • Log transactions in seconds Enter them by hand, paste a bank SMS and let the app parse it, or set up a Shortcuts automation once and let incoming bank alerts log themselves. Add a keyword per bank, so cards at more than one bank all feed the same parser. Message parsing runs on your device, using Apple Intelligence where available and a local text parser everywhere else. • Cashflow by income source If money arrives from more than one place, you can see which source is actually covering which spending. • Net worth balance sheet Assets minus liabilities, sitting alongside your monthly cashflow, so you can see the stock as well as the flow. • Built for the UAE The app picks your currency from your region on first launch — AED, SAR, QAR, KWD, OMR, JOD, EGP, USD, EUR or GBP — and converts anything you log in another one at live rates. Merchant rules for the places you actually spend. And a configurable salary day, so each cycle runs pay day to pay day instead of pretending your money resets on the 1st. YOUR LEDGER STAYS ON YOUR DEVICE There is no account to create and no cloud sync. Your transactions, plans, assets and liabilities are stored locally on your iPhone. Your spreadsheet is read and processed on your device. Bank messages are parsed on your device. Your ledger is never uploaded. The app does include two Google Firebase services: Analytics, which reports anonymous usage and purchase events so we can measure which ads bring people here, and Crashlytics, which sends a report if the app crashes so the problem can be fixed. Both are described in full in the privacy policy, and neither ever includes your financial data. PERSONAL LEDGER PRO The core app is free. Pro unlocks deeper plan analysis, and comes with a 7-day free trial. • $3.99 per month • $24.99 per year • $99.99 once, forever Subscriptions renew automatically unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Manage or cancel in your App Store account settings. QUESTIONS Email jad@salhani.com. A real person reads it. Privacy policy: https://jadsalhani.com/apps/personal-ledger/privacy Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

Your checkbook register, kept the way you have always kept it. Write down what you spend. Tick off what the bank has cleared. Balance to the penny at the end of the month. That is the whole job of a checkbook register, and it is all this app does. THREE PROMISES No ads. Not on the free version, not after you pay, not ever, on any screen. No subscription. One payment and it is yours. Nothing renews. No account and no bank login. There is nothing to sign into, so there is nothing to be signed out of. YOUR REGISTER STAYS ON YOUR PHONE Everything you enter is stored on your own iPhone. It works with no internet connection at all, on a plane or out of signal. Your register is never sent to us and never sold to anyone. A copy leaves your phone only in ways you control. If iCloud Backup is switched on, your register is included in it, so it comes back when you set up a new phone. That copy sits in your own Apple account, not ours, and you turn it on or off in Settings. The app never shows you a permission prompt. It does not ask for your contacts, your location, your photos or your camera. WHAT IT DOES - Multiple accounts: checking, savings, credit, cash, each with its own running balance - Fast entry: date, payee, amount, check number, category, memo. Repeat entries take seconds, and check numbers advance on their own. - A proper register list with a running balance on every single line - Reconcile mode: enter the statement date and ending balance, tick off what cleared, and watch the difference count down to 0.00 - Scheduled and recurring entries: weekly, every two or four weeks, monthly, twice a year or yearly, or on a set weekday, like the second Wednesday of the month. They show up as scheduled and only affect your projected balance until you post them. Nothing is ever posted behind your back. - Transfers between your own accounts, entered once and mirrored on both sides - Search by payee, memo, amount or check number, with filters for what is outstanding, what cleared, and what is scheduled - Categories, both the presets and your own - Totals by category for a month, three months or a year, with the exact figures printed beside the chart. Scheduled bills are not counted until you post them. - Bring your history in from a CSV file, with a column mapper for spreadsheet users - Print or save a PDF of your register or of those category totals, or export a CSV of any account BACKUPS, BECAUSE THAT IS THE PART THAT MATTERS The app backs itself up on its own, every day you open it, and gives you a Restore screen to go back to any copy it has kept. You can also send a copy out of the app, so deleting the app does not reach it. Pick a folder and every copy after that goes there too. If you are signed in to iCloud with iCloud Drive turned on, the app also keeps a BalanceWright folder there by itself, and you can open it in the Files app. If you are not signed in, the Backup screen says so rather than claiming a copy it did not make. Your data is never held hostage. Export and backup keep working whether you have paid or not. TRY THE WHOLE THING FIRST Everything works from the moment you install it. Nothing is crippled, grayed out or hidden to push you into paying. The app asks for payment only after you have closed your first statement, so you decide once you have watched it do the exact thing you came for. If you never reconcile, a generous entry limit applies instead. BIG, PLAIN TYPE Built to be read. Large numbers, strong contrast, plain words, no jargon. WHAT IT WILL NEVER DO No bank connection. No budgets, no spending advice, no AI. No ads, no subscription. If a feature would need your register sent to us, it is not going in. ANSWERED BY A REAL PERSON Every review here is read and answered. The support address on this page reaches someone who can actually fix things. Written for anyone who keeps a check register or a checkbook ledger by hand, and wants the same habit on a phone.