The best Mint alternative for self-employed people
If you replaced Mint with a budgeting app and it still isn't working for your business expenses, the problem isn't the app you picked. It's that you replaced one job and you had two.
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The short answer
Quick answer: what is the best Mint alternative for self-employed people?
Mint did two jobs for you, and most replacements only do one. For household budgeting, a personal-finance app like Monarch, Copilot or YNAB is the right category — they are good at it and you should pick one. None of them are built for business expenses: no business/personal separation, no tax-line categories, no receipt kept, no mileage. ExpenseBot is expense tracking software for the self-employed that covers that second job — it reads receipt emails out of your Gmail into a Google Sheet in your own Drive, separates business from personal, and exports to QuickBooks Online, Xero or Sage. The common answer is one of each, not one tool for both.
Intuit announced Mint's shutdown on October 31, 2023 and pointed users to Credit Karma; access ended March 23, 2024. The migration did not carry over transaction history, custom categories, budgets, goals, bill reminders or recurring-transaction labels — which is why the landing felt so thin, and why so many people went shopping rather than settling in.
Why personal-finance apps fall short when you're self-employed
To be clear about what this argument is and isn't: Monarch, Copilot and YNAB are good products doing their actual job well. Monarch describes itself as "your home base for money clarity" — checked August 18, 2026 — and that is an honest description of a household finance tool. The mismatch is category, not quality. Ask a budgeting app to do your Schedule C and it will disappoint you the same way a hammer disappoints a screw.
Five specific gaps show up, and they all surface at tax time rather than day to day:
- No business/personal split. One card, two lives, one undifferentiated feed. There is no business-use percentage for the phone bill you use 60% for work.
- Categories don't map to tax lines. "Shopping" and "Subscriptions" are useful for spending habits and useless for a tax return.
- No receipt substantiation. Budgeting apps read transactions. A transaction proves money left; a receipt proves what it bought — and the receipt is what a tax authority asks for.
- No Schedule C or T2125 view. Nothing rolls up into the shape your return actually needs.
- Mileage is unsupported. If you drive for work, a deductible cost the tool simply cannot record.
Monarch's pricing page mentions none of business expense tracking, Schedule C categories, tax reporting, mileage or receipt capture — checked August 18, 2026. That is not an omission to hold against it. It is a personal-finance product being a personal-finance product.
What to look for instead
These are buying criteria, not a pitch — apply them to anything you shortlist, including us. If a tool fails three of the five, it is a budgeting app wearing a business hat.
- Can it separate business from personal on one card? Including splitting a single mixed charge, not just tagging whole transactions.
- Does it keep the document? If it only stores an amount and a merchant, you have a spending tracker, not substantiation.
- Do the categories match a tax form? Ask to see the year-end report before you commit, not the dashboard.
- Can your accountant get at it without a seat or an export ticket? This is where most tools quietly cost you money in billed hours.
- What happens to the data if the product shuts down? You have now lived through this once. Ask it out loud this time.
That last question is not rhetorical padding. Mint's shutdown took the budgets, the categories and the history with it. A tool whose answer is "your data is in a file you already own" is answering a question you now know matters.
Personal-finance app vs self-employed needs
The left column describes what personal-finance apps are built to do, checked against monarch.com on August 18, 2026. This is a category comparison, not a scorecard — the left column is winning at its own game.
| Personal-finance apps | ExpenseBot | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Household budgeting and net worth | Business spending for a tax return |
| Business/personal separation | Not a built-in concept | Card auto-tagging, business-use %, split a mixed charge |
| Categories map to | Spending habits | Tax lines (Schedule C / T2125 style) |
| Receipt kept | Transactions, not documents | The receipt itself, from Gmail or a photo |
| Mileage | Not mentioned on the pricing page | Estimated from Google Calendar at your country's rate |
| Year-end reporting | Budget and spending reports | Expense reports; push to QuickBooks Online, Xero or Sage |
| Free for your accountant | Not applicable | Yes — accountants and bookkeepers use it free |
| Where your data lives | In the app | A Google Sheet in your own Google Drive |
| Budgeting and forecasting | Yes — this is the point | No — ExpenseBot does not budget or forecast |
How ExpenseBot handles the business half
ExpenseBot is expense tracking software for self-employed people that captures receipts from Gmail, photos and forwarded email into a categorised Google Sheet in the user's own Google Drive. A nightly Gmail scan reads receipt and invoice emails and files them — labelling what it reads so nothing is double-counted, never sending email, and never deleting anything. Photograph a paper receipt and it reads the vendor, date and amount off the picture.
On the specific gap that sent you here: business and personal can be separated by auto-tagging receipts according to which card paid, by setting a business-use percentage on a category that is only partly deductible, and by splitting one mixed charge into allocation lines each marked business or personal — the separating business and personal expenses page owns that topic in detail. Income is tracked alongside expenses, so you get a running profit-and-loss rather than a pile of costs, and mileage comes from your Google Calendar at your country's rate rather than from a background GPS app.
At year end, reviewed expenses push to QuickBooks Online or Xero in one click, or generate an import file for Sage — and because the ledger is a Google Sheet you own, sharing it with your accountant is the whole hand-off. Accountants and bookkeepers use ExpenseBot free. If you want the full workflow rather than the comparison, the freelancer expense tracking page covers it, and the comparisons hub has the rest of the category.
Switching over
There is no import from a budgeting app, and you do not need one. ExpenseBot does not read a Monarch, Copilot, YNAB or Credit Karma export — we are not going to claim an import path that does not exist. It rebuilds the business side from your Gmail instead, which is a different source than the one your budgeting app was using, so nothing is lost by not migrating.
- Carries over — nothing directly, but your receipt emails are still in Gmail and that is what gets read.
- Doesn't carry over — budgets, goals, net-worth history and spending categories. ExpenseBot has no equivalent of those and is not trying to.
- Keep your budgeting app — for the household half. Running both is the normal outcome here.
- Start with a backfill — connect Gmail and scan back over the months you spent without business tracking, so they come back from the receipt emails. The free scan covers the last 60 days; the rest of the current year comes with a subscription, earlier years need a one-time historical unlock, and each scan covers up to a year at a time.
What ExpenseBot does not do
It is not a budgeting app and not a Mint replacement for household finance. It does not budget, forecast, track net worth, or watch your personal spending. It is not a general ledger and does no double-entry bookkeeping. It does not file tax returns. It captures and organises business spending; it does not decide what is deductible, so treat every tax category as a starting point to review. Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Mint alternative for self-employed people?
It depends on which job you are replacing. If you want Mint's household budgeting back, a personal-finance app like Monarch, Copilot or YNAB is the right category and you should pick one of those. If what broke when Mint went away was tracking business spending for your tax return, a budgeting app will not fix it, because none of them are built to separate business from personal, categorise to tax lines, or keep the receipt. ExpenseBot is expense tracking software for the self-employed that does that half — it reads receipts out of Gmail into a Google Sheet you own. Many people end up running one of each.
Does Monarch Money handle business expenses?
Not as a business-expense product, and it does not present itself as one. Monarch describes itself as "your home base for money clarity" and its pricing page makes no mention of business expense tracking, Schedule C categories, tax reporting, mileage or receipt capture — checked August 18, 2026. That is not a flaw; it is a personal-finance app doing personal finance. You can certainly tag a category as business inside it, but its pricing page describes none of receipt capture, a business-use percentage, or tax reporting to hand an accountant.
Can I use a personal budgeting app for business expenses?
You can, and plenty of people do for a while. The trade-offs show up at tax time rather than day to day: budgeting apps categorise for spending habits rather than tax lines, they read transactions rather than keeping the receipt that substantiates a deduction, they have no concept of an expense being 60% business, and they produce no report an accountant can work from. If your business spending is a handful of transactions a month, that friction may be worth living with. If it is most of your spending, you are doing the reconciliation by hand in a spreadsheet anyway.
I got moved from Mint to Credit Karma and my budgets are gone. What happened?
Intuit announced Mint's shutdown on October 31, 2023 and pointed users to Credit Karma; Mint access ended March 23, 2024. The migration did not carry over transaction history, custom categories, budgets, goals, bill reminders or recurring-transaction labels — which is why Credit Karma felt empty rather than like Mint. That is the gap that sent most people shopping, and it is worth being deliberate about what you actually need back: the budgeting, the business tracking, or both.
How do I separate business and personal expenses?
This is the specific thing personal-finance apps do not do well. In ExpenseBot you can auto-tag whole receipts by which card paid, set a business-use percentage on a category that is only partly deductible, and split a single mixed charge into allocation lines that each get marked business or personal — without retyping it as separate rows. We keep a dedicated page on separating business and personal expenses that walks through it.
Do I have to stop using my budgeting app?
No, and we would rather you did not pretend otherwise. ExpenseBot does not budget, does not forecast, and has no household net-worth view — if you want those, keep the tool that does them. The two do different jobs on different data: your budgeting app watches the household, ExpenseBot builds the business side of your tax return. Running both is a normal setup, not a failure to consolidate.
Does my data move with me if I switch again?
In ExpenseBot the ledger is a Google Sheet in your own Google Drive, so it is already yours — if you stop paying, the sheet stays there, categorised, with the history intact. Given that the whole reason you are reading this page is a product that shut down and took the budgets with it, that is worth weighing when you pick the next one.
Does ExpenseBot track mileage?
Yes, but by a different method than a GPS app. It estimates drive distance from the addresses in your Google Calendar at your country's rate (IRS, CRA or HMRC) rather than logging trips in the background. Because it is calendar-derived, the distances are estimates — confirm them with your tax professional.
Keep the budgeting app. Fix the business half.
Connect Gmail and ExpenseBot files your business receipts into a Google Sheet in your own Drive — separated from personal, categorised, and ready for whoever files your return.
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