Is there any “Personal” Finance app that allows 2 administrators?
We use YNAB to handle our household budget - their latest version allows cloud sync between Android/iOS devices and various desktop installs.  I have the budget folder shared with my wife's Dropbox account so we both an view the budget, enter spending, and make changes. "We use mint for just that. We have a ""shared"" account. We each have the mobile app and share the same pin for the application (not our phones -- you can set a pin in the settings on the application). Thus we each share a login to the site, where we have setup all of our accounts. In the ""Your Profile"" link at the top of the page, you may select the Email & Alerts option. From here you may add a second e-mail account. This way if you go over a budget or have a bill upcoming each of you will get a notification. We have setup budgeting through the web site, and either of us can modify the budget via logging in." The best solution I've been able to find for this is MoneyWiz, where both are logged into the same sync account.
The HSA money is yours to keep. You can't add new money into the account and get a tax deduction for the new money, but you can spend the old money on medical expenses. First log into the website for the HSA and see if you have money left. This can be important because if there is still money left they might be charging you a monthly fee. You should have gotten a letter from the old company or the administrator when you left the High deductible insurance plan. This would have told you your options regarding the spending or transferring of old funds. HSA related numbers would have appeared on your W2, and you should have a 1099-SA from the administrator. It is likely that there is a copy of the 1099 on the administrators website. The numbers you enter on the tax forms depends on how much you contributed from your paycheck, how much your company contributed, and how much you sent (if any) from other sources besides payroll deduction. You will also have to know how much money was withdrawn from the HSA and how much was used for medical purposes. The last month rule is for those people who start in the middle of the year. If you start partway through the year you are allowed to make the maximum contribution if you still have it at the end of the year, and you expect to keep it.  The Last Month Rule The Last Month Rule states that if you are covered by an HSA eligible   health plan on the first day of the last month of a given year, you   are considered an eligible individual for the entire year. In turn,   you can then contribute to the HSA for that full year. If you are covered by an HDHP on Dec 1st of a given year, you may contribute the maximum for that year. For example, you could begin coverage and open up my HSA in November   of a given year. Come December 1st, you are covered and per the Last   Month Rule, considered an eligible employee for that full year. That   allows you to contribute up to that year’s contribution limit, even   waiting a few months to make a prior year contribution if you like.   Back up the truck and load up the HSA! However, there is a catch.  The Testing Period The Testing Period states if you use the Last Month Rule, you must   remain an eligible individual (covered by HDHP) for the following 12   months. If you fail to remain an eligible individual (change insurance   plans, lose insurance plan, receive other health coverage) any “extra”   contributions you made as a result of the Last Month Rule will be   taxed and penalized. If you contribute per the Last Month Rule and end your HDHP insurance within 1 year, you will have to pay tax on any excess   contributions you were allowed to make and pay a 10% penalty. In this case, “excess” contributions are determined by the   contribution limit / 12 months, compared to your time eligible. *What* big picture?  If you cannot tell the massive drain on an organization simply by looking, you are blind.  How do companies make money?  Income producers.  Who are the income producers?  There are three classes: People who assemble a product, people who charge billable hours, and people who make sales of more product and/or hours.  That's it.  Those are the only people who make money.    If you make a product, you may absolutely require a packaging and shipping department to bring your product to market, but those people will not ever make you more product to sell or bring in more sales, so you run that department as lean as you can.  How lean that is depends entirely on how you feel about business. (Personally, I think it's just as important to be able to enjoy the job as it is to make money, but that's neither here nor there.) Likewise maintenance, likewise IT, likewise accounting, marketing (although they'll never admit it), QC, legal, etc, etc, etc.  The only -ONLY- function of management is to organize operations and deal with problems.  The old PODS-C (Plan, Organize, Direct, Staff and Control(Finance)) falls entirely into organizing or dealing with problems.  Management is there to empower people to do their jobs -and allow them to not deal with crap that is *not* their job- through proper organization and problem resolution.    Just like shipping and maintenance and IT, you run your management staff as lean as possible while still accomplishing the goals of 1) organization to empower employees to do their jobs and 2) problem resolution.  That's it. Once you get that done you don't need any more managers, ever, until you're not able to keep up with 1&amp;2.  So what's the purpose of middle management?  They deal with fundamental problems, but they have no authority to resolve them.  You are paying an entire class of employee to pass the buck up to Higher and wait, hoping that a decision will eventually come back down.  Sometimes they are necessary to accomplish the goals of the organization (ie: during growth periods.)  But they are ALWAYS a drain, and would always be better off replaced by experienced and motivated senior line employees with the authority to make reasonable decisions on the spot. "So... from a business perspective, this way of building a piece of software doesn't make any sense at all. To take their example of a book trading app... how do you parse out the core function vs. the revised specifications adding features. The core function of most apps are dead-nuts simple. For the book trading app, the core functionality is a forum website, such as reddit. The need for an app which allows you to sell it is the value-add of the software, which is all in the features.   Call the ""standard"" way of doing things, from a set specification, a ""top down"" design cycle. Call the ""new"" way of designing a ""bottom up"" design cycle.   So now you have a ""minimum viable product"", which is now subject to all the pain of a top-down design cycle and you are back to where you started. Now, every bottom-up design cycle has a goal and its own minimum viable feature improvement... so you are really back to a progression of top-down design cycles superimposed on bottom-up product feature set evolution.   Making a real product that people use is always going to be a combination of top-down design driven from the business side, who determines the features that customers want (i.e. the minimum viable product), and bottom-up design cycles where engineering has to communicate what is possible to design in a certain time frame. There is always a tension between the forward looking business side which is trying to project what customers want and pushing engineering to schedule their creativity, and the engineering side which is trying to deliver creative product designs on an externally imposed schedule.   This bottom-up design cycle is not unique to software. Where developing software differs from developing hardware is that software allows for this design cycle to be very short and very discrete. Software can be developed in discrete modules and linked together. Hardware is more integrated, thus having longer design cycles, but can still be designed using a minimum viable product with design cycles adding features incrementally. Look at the cell phone/smart phone hardware business for a good case study in this. Yearly design cycles, each design cycle has a minimum viable feature set and some stretch goals, and work on feature sets stop when the clock runs out. But to think that software is magic, should be driven entirely bottom-up, doesn't have some sort of feature map superimposed on the workflow, is to get lost in an idealism. Better to use top-down and bottom-up design cycles as tools to navigate the business." You say that you inherited the money from your mother, and are now paying these people using money that is already yours.  Because of that, the money is considered a gift from you to them, and the fact that you are doing it in accordance with your mother's wishes doesn't change that.  For it to be considered a bequest from your mother's estate directly to these beneficiaries, it would have had to be handled via the regular by-the-book inheritance procedure and been given to them directly rather than bequeathed to you with informal instructions to pass it on to them. If one gives another person more than $14K in any calendar year, there is the potential gift tax issue to address. I'll explain why it's more a matter of 'addressing' than 'paying', as there are a number of legal ways around this.  Form 709 is what you'll use. In the end, you'll report the gifts over $14K but no tax will be due as they'll simply go against your lifetime gifting allowance, currently $5.49M per person.  Note, 2 ways to avoid even this obligation. If you have a spouse, you have a combined $28K/yr gifting (per recipient) with no reporting required. Similarly, if the recipient has a spouse, you can gift them $14K. i.e. couple to couple can gift $56K/yr. Last, why not just gift $14K before December, and in January, give the second installment? If I had money coming in separate from a will, I'd be happy that you honored a verbal request, and wouldn't be so greedy as to expect you to risk a dime of your own finances to transfer the funds immediately. "I'm not sure there's a good reason to do a ""closing the books"" ceremony for personal finance accounting. (And you're not only wanting to do that, but have a fiscal year that's different from the calendar year? Yikes!) My understanding is that usually this process is done for businesses to be able to account for what their ""Retained Earnings"" and such are for investors and tax purposes; generally individuals wouldn't think of their finances in those terms. It's certainly not impossible, though. Gnucash, for example, implements a ""Closing Books"" feature, which is designed to create transactions for each Income and Expenses account into an end-of-year Equity Retained Earnings account. It doesn't do any sort of closing out of Assets or Liabilities, however. (And I'm not sure how that would make any sense, as you'd transfer it from your Asset to the End-of-year closing account, and then transfer it back as an Opening Balance for the next year?) If you want to keep each year completely separate, the page about Closing Books in the Gnucash Wiki mentions that one can create a separate Gnucash file per year by exporting the account tree from your existing file, then importing that tree and the balances into a new file. I expect that it makes it much more challenging to run reports across multiple years of data, though. While your question doesn't seem to be specific to Gnucash (I just mention it because it's the accounting tool I'm most familiar with), I'd expect that any accounting program would have similar functionality. I would, however, like to point out this section from the Gnucash manual: Note that closing the books in GnuCash is unnecessary. You do not need to zero out your income and expense accounts at the end of each financial period. GnuCash’s built-in reports automatically handle concepts like retained earnings between two different financial periods. In fact, closing the books reduces the usefulness of the standard reports because the reports don’t currently understand closing transactions. So from their point of view it simply looks like the net income or expense in each account for a given period was simply zero. And that's largely why I'm just not sure what your goals are. If you want to look at your transactions for a certain time, to ""just focus on the range of years I'm interested in for any given purpose"" as you say, then just go ahead and run the report you care about with those years as the dates. The idea of ""closing books"" comes from a time when you'd want to take your pile of paper ledgers and go put them in storage once you didn't need to refer to them regularly. Computers now have no challenges storing ""every account from the beginning of time"" at all, and you can filter out that data to focus on whatever you're looking for easily. If you don't want to look at the old data, just don't include them in your reports. I'm pretty sure that's the ""better way to keep the books manageable""." I have also tried Mvelopes in the past, and my experiences match yours. I currently use the desktop version of YNAB:You Need a Budget (YNAB 4), and I like it much better.  Where we failed after a while with Mvelopes, we are succeeding with YNAB, and have been now for the last 3.5 years. I don't want this to sound like a commercial for YNAB (I will give important caveats about YNAB later), but here is why I believe we have done better now with YNAB than before with Mvelopes.  I hope that these reasons will be useful to you when you are evaluating your next options. As you said, we also found Mvelopes' interface to be slow and glitchy.  YNAB 4 is a desktop app (with synching capabilities) that we found to be much quicker and easier to work with than Mvelopes' Flash-based interface.  (That was 4 years ago; hopefully Mvelopes has redone their interface since then.)   We also struggled with Mvelopes' connection with our banks.  With YNAB 4, there is no connection to the bank: everything has to be entered manually.  I initially thought this might be worse, but for us it has been better.  I can either enter transactions as they happen on the mobile app, or I can hold on to receipts and enter them every day or two in the evening, categorizing as I go.  We always have an up-to-date picture of our finances, and we don't have to mess with trying to match up downloaded transactions that have been screwed up, duplicated, or are missing. We aren't really using YNAB much differently than we were using Mvelopes, but we have learned a few tricks that I think have contributed to our success.  One of the things we do differently is that I don't obsess about the cash accounts too much.  Cash accounts, for us, are the hardest to keep track of, because most of our cash transactions don't have a receipt: we are paying a friend or family member for something, or leaving a tip, or something like that which we forget about when it comes time to enter into the software.  As a result, the cash account balances get off.  I periodically enter a correcting transaction to get the balances right, and have a budget category specifically for this that we have to put money in for these unknown transactions.  Fortunately for us, our cash spending is a small percent of our total spending (we usually pay with a credit card) so this bit of untracked spending isn't that big of a concern. With YNAB, the current month's budget is right in front of you as soon as you open up the app, which makes it easy to adjust your budget during the month, if necessary.  With Mvelopes (at least how their app worked 4 years ago), the budget was somewhat hidden after you funded your budget categories, and it was a bit of a pain to move money around between categories.  The ability to adjust your budget in the middle of the month is crucial; if you don't do that, you'll get frustrated the first time you find that you don't have enough money in a category for something you need.  YNAB makes it very easy to move money around inside your budget. That having been said, you need to be aware that the current version of YNAB is not a desktop application but a web-based app.  YNAB 4, the old desktop version which we have been using, is officially unsupported as of the end of 2016.  However, I see that it is still available for sale, if you are interested in it, the YNAB4 help site is still up, and the mobile app you would need to work with it on your phone (called YNAB Classic) is still in the app store.   As I said, the current YNAB is now a web app, complete with automatic downloading of transactions from your bank.  I have no experience with it (other than playing around with it a little), and so I can't tell you how quick the interface is or how well the auto-downloading of transactions works. As an alternative, another web-based solution is EveryDollar, from Dave Ramsey's company.  (I have never tried it.)  The advantage of this one is that it is free if you choose not to link it to your banks; the automatic downloading of transactions is a paid feature. I wrote an answer a couple of years ago in which I describe two different approaches that budgeting software packages tend to take.  I'm not familiar with Buxfer, so I don't know which approach it takes, but perhaps that answer will help you evaluate all of your software options. On the behavior side of things, besides the relaxing of the cash accounting I mentioned above, we also involve my wife a little less in the budgeting process than we used to.  (This is by her choice!)  I am the one who enters all the transactions into the software (she hands me all her receipts), I reconcile the accounts at the end of the month, and I set the budget for the next month.  We have been doing this long enough now that she knows what the budget is, and we only need to discuss it if we want to do something different with the budget than we have been doing in the past.  She has the YNAB app on her phone and can see where we are at with all of our budget categories. A couple of things you can do to structure your accounts include: I like Quicken for personal use, and they have a small business edition if you don't want to move into QuickBooks.