Does anyone else find these pretty difficult to make use of when you have a joint bank account with your partner and also your own personal accounts?
Is there a good way to set them up to work a bit better?
I feel like I don’t get a clear view of things as so many of the transactions are moving money from A to B or not taking into account that my partner will also add money.
Or maybe it’s just me not being great at working with those apps!
I use Emma with a joint account, what’s the difficulty you’re experiencing?
Personally I prefer to have separate bank provider accounts such as Monzo, Revolut, Barclays etc.
I see it as investing, do not put all your eggs in one basket!
I’ve mainly used Yolt. I’ve got 6 accounts on it credit/debit/joint and I feel like I just get a lot of notifications that don’t help me. And it also shows a total amount of money that isn’t right as some of that is “ours”.
It seems to predict my spend all over the place and constantly tell me I’m going to run out of money or I’m spending loads when it’s just transfers between the accounts.
I’ll be honest I’m not really sure it might just be these sorts of apps don’t add any value for me! Just wondered if anyone else felt similar and I was putting it down the joint account bit
I would just hide the joint account and keep it as a reference. 
In this case, your spending/what you transfer there is counted.
With Emma, you can do this pretty easily - source, I am the co-founder. 
I couldn’t get on with Yolt, I’ve tried others but Emma was best one to cover all my accounts and credit cards.
It’s very good, even if the visual look takes some getting used to. It’s a little like candy crush visually.
Have you used Emma Pro? Transaction splitting and manual accounts help with a lot of this.
Excluding “internal” transactions is a bit of a bugbear for all money management apps. Using consistent references on the bank end really helps though. With a bit of fiddling, Emma now ignores the vast majority of transfers between my accounts.
Not tried a pro/paid for version of any of them yet as I’ve not got much out of any of the free ones to want to.
I think on reflection it is all the internal transfers rather than the joint account that’s buggering it all up! I put money in savings and take it back out a couple of times per month. And my joint spending varies vastly month to month so I have the same multiple transfers there.
I think it might just be you only get benefit from these types of apps if you’re a consistent spender 
But most of my bills are in the joint account so I’ll end up losing a lot of the budgeting type tools
Just exclude all these! The only number you need is the savings account balance, really
This is not well supported, imo. With Emma Pro, I think there are only manual solutions. You can split the transactions and exclude half or create a manual account and hide the real joint account. Not great solutions.
Another option is just to double your budget for those bills and create a fake account with the extra half…
A toggle to mark an account as “just half mine” probably also wouldn’t work for common scenarios either
I have been using both as well as Money Hub and to be honest I prefer money hub for simplicity. Its not free but very cheap and doesnt irk me so often.
I have thought about emma pro but its so so expensive per month.
What you transfer in there is what you need to pay for bills. You can even move that in the Bills category.
What would be the best way to handle joint accounts in an app that aggregates?
It’s bills and eating out and toiletries and groceries - loads of stuff.
Makes sense, but so what way would work for you?
I don’t there is a way of logically making it work. I think that’s the problem and why I don’t find these app much use.
An important thing for the app to do would be work out when I’m transferring from A to B and not count that as spending
If you don’t split 50/50 in particular…
The only way really would be to go through each transaction and split it, so you can exclude the other half’s share. Perhaps automatic splitting of transactions based on past choices would work
I would just a) use the joint for bills b) just track the joint for everything. 
In any case, there are 10-20 different ways you can get close, some people use tags for each transaction.
A silo/profile approach. You mark xyz accounts as a separate profile/budget management settings and have an overview across its dealings and then your own personal silo. Kinda like how it works with the categories of accounts right now but more of a ramp up of that into overview sections.
This would be useful for people who are single who then move in with a partner and have a shared non joint account as well so they could overview their own budgets and then have a budget for their joint stuff that’s separate. It’s all a lot of work though I imagine but I would be nice to have a dashboard with your personal budgets etc and then joint commitments which could cover several accounts like a debit card account and then even a savings account. This profile could even link with your partner running Emma as well and you could assign x pays this whole bill and you both split y bill and alert if the person if the joint account could miss it or they need to transfer the right amount of money across from their personal profile.
Some of this is possibly in the interface already but it’s hard to exactly explain what I would love easily as I have an idea in my head of my perfect management app but no one has made it yet sadly.
I think a solution as simple as the ability to categorise and group accounts might be enough to solve a lot of things.