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. Its subscription detection is the standout: it will surface the recurring payments you have stopped noticing and help you cancel them. It categorises spending, tracks budgets, and on its Pro and Ultimate tiers it tracks net worth. It is a London company that has been going since 2017, still shipping, and precise about its own scope.

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 answered it directly, and the answer is the most useful thing on this page. It 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 the month you are in: your balance, minus the commitments you already know about. It does not run forward through months you have not reached, it does not model income that has not arrived, and it cannot carry a balance out to a date years away and tell you what it will be.

Emma does look a little way forward, and the line falls in a specific place. True Balance is the shipped version of something Emma once described as working out what your current account balance will be after all your bills go out, which is a forward question. The limit is how far. On Emma's own community forum in 2022, its co-founder said the company wanted to add forecast, and that it would still fit within the current month or budgeting period. That is a company drawing its own boundary, in public, and it is the clearest evidence both that the longer gap is real and that Emma has not quietly filled it.

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 tells you everything you need and a forecast tells you what you already assumed.

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 models 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 and CrestCast will not, which means an evening of typing before you see anything. Here is why we 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 a forecast only if a decision is coming that you cannot take back. 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.