An Emma app alternative, for the part Emma does not do

Emma connects to your accounts through Open Banking and puts them in one place. It surfaces the recurring payments you have stopped noticing and helps you cancel them, categorises spending, tracks budgets, and on its Pro and Ultimate tiers it tracks net worth. It is a London company, going since 2017 and still shipping.

In October 2023, when Money Dashboard shut its apps, its users went looking for a replacement and asked a specific question: what replaces the Forecast feature? Emma offered three things, which were budgeting, True Balance and everyday balance, and it did not claim a forecast.

True Balance, in Emma's own words, shows how much you would have left over in an account after recurring and subscription payments are taken. Read that carefully, because it is easy to mistake for a projection. It is a better statement of today: your balance, minus the commitments you already know about. Emma's help page describes no run through months you have not reached and no income that has not arrived, and none that carries a balance out to a date years away.

Emma does look a little way forward: True Balance nets an account against the recurring payments you already have, which is a forward question. Emma's help pages describe no view that carries a balance out to a date years away.

For some households it does not matter yet. If your income is stable, your outgoings are steady and no large decision is coming, a tracker may be all you need for now.

It starts to matter when a question arrives that today's balance cannot answer. Whether the mortgage is still affordable when the fix ends. What one of you going part time does to the next five years. When a debt is actually gone, and whether overpaying it beats putting the money elsewhere. Whether a second child works on these two incomes. Every one of those is about money that has not moved yet, so no amount of transaction history contains the answer.

That is the class of question CrestCast is built for. It projects a three-way model forwards, which is cashflow alongside profit and loss alongside net worth, and lets you save two versions of the plan and compare them before committing to either.

No bank connection, and the trade is deliberate. Emma will import and categorise your transactions; CrestCast asks you for the figures, and in return nothing reads your accounts and the model holds exactly what you chose. Here is why I built it that way.

No subscription detection, so nothing will tell you about the gym membership. No spending categorisation engine. No credit score. If you want one app rather than two, and the past matters more to you than the next five years, Emma is the better single choice. If a decision is coming that the past cannot answer, you need the forecast.

Keep Emma on free or Plus for the aggregation and the subscription hunting. Add the forecast when a decision is coming that you cannot take back; the side-by-side is on CrestCast vs Emma. Nothing needs to be integrated and no data moves between them, and running both usually improves the forecast, because a tracker tells you what your recurring costs really are rather than what you assumed, and those are the figures the model wants.

If you would rather see the mechanics before signing up to anything, the debt payoff and mortgage overpayment calculators are free and need no account, and the UK personal finance flowchart sets out what order to do things in before any app is involved.