In a recent announcement, Yolt revealed their decision to close down their budgeting app.
If you’re a regular Yolt app user then you might be a little confused as to why this is happening, and more importantly, what the alternatives are and what you can do to make the transition to another budgeting app as smooth as possible.
We wanted to take the time to cover what we know about Yolt closing down their app, and if you’re looking for an alternative, why Money Dashboard might be the right one for you...
What’s happening to Yolt?
If you head to the Yolt website, you’ll see the following text on the front page:
“We’re sad to announce the Yolt App is closing as of 4 December 2021.
This means that from then, all Yolt App Profiles, Yolt Cards and Yolt Top-Up Accounts
with a zero balance will be automatically closed.
If you have any questions please check out our FAQs below.”
Based on this announcement, it is now official that Yolt is closing down and users will need to look elsewhere to do their budgeting.
What can you do?
If you are a diehard Yolt fan and user and this is the first time you hear this news — then we are sorry to be the ones to break it to you. Breaking up with your budgeting app is certainly no easy thing (that’s what Michael Bolton says about brokerages, in any case).
The good news is that there are alternatives to Yolt. There is no easy way to switch to a new budgeting app without losing some or all your information and having to start from scratch. Most importantly, you may have to resort to going back to the copy pasting and Excel spreadsheet days.
Before you start using another budgeting app, however, make sure to export all your information from Yolt onto an Excel spreadsheet (yes, you’ll need to use Excel this one time). That way, you can ensure your information is safely stored away and you can confidently go out on a mission of finding an alternative to Yolt that suits your needs.
Money Dashboard is another UK budgeting tool that offers very similar capabilities to Yolt. We understand that Money Dashboard might not be the best fit for everyone, and that for certain people, other budgeting apps might be at times a better option.
That’s why we thought it would be worth taking an honest look at the pros and cons of switching from Yolt to Money Dashboard, and then letting you choose for yourself based on your own budgeting needs.
Why switch to Money Dashboard? The pros
You can access up to 3 years of your financial data
Just like Yolt, we use Open Banking to sync all your financial accounts so you can easily see them all on one screen. With that same technology, we are able to go as far as three years in the past to gather your financial data.
That means you can easily categorise your expenses from a couple of years ago without having to re-input any information. It also means that if you’ve been using Yolt for less than three years, it won’t be as much of a hassle to switch budgeting apps since your data will automatically appear (although we’d still recommend exporting your Yolt data into Excel just in case!).
Even better news: we are also planning to include a product feature into Money Dashboard where users can import their data via an Excel spreadsheet. That means that if you do have data that goes further than 3 years, you’ll eventually be able to plug in your spreadsheet into Money Dashboard and update your information.
Your bank will definitely be on our list
We pride ourselves on being the UK budgeting app that is connected to the largest number of banks and building societies in the UK (so far, 90!), including alternative accounts such as Wealthify and Coinbase. That means you don’t just see what your spending is doing, you also see how your stock investments, crypto and pensions are too!
And if your bank is not on our list, you can create an offline account for free. The offline account essentially acts as a separate account where you can manually input your total balance and it’ll also count towards your budget.
Only use us for budgeting
Money Dashboard is a read-only app for budgeting. That means we won’t force you to sign up for a card, and you won’t use our app to pay for items. We don’t plan on offering bank accounts so we’ll never be in a position to hold your money or offer you credit.
Also, we make signing up easy. Since we’re not a bank account, you won’t have to worry about verifying your identity with an ID and a selfie and waiting for days to sign up. In 2 minutes, you’re done! We are also authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and a registered Open Banking provider.
Other benefits
Some other Money Dashboard features that make us very useful are:
- Desktop web app: with Money Dashboard, you can see and manage your entire budget on the big screen.
- Lots of categories: you can easily personalise your budget by adding your own categories — as many as you want.
- Customer service: we take customer service seriously and respond as quickly as possible. We also won’t block your account without notice (we can’t because we do not manage your money), and we offer amazing and timely support.
The cons
This would not be a truly honest review if we did not cover the cons of switching to Money Dashboard too. So here are three of them:
No payments or bank account
One of the main benefits of going with us can also be a drawback: since we are never planning on becoming a bank account and issuing cards, you won’t be able to use our app to pay for bills, send money or split a bill. If this is very important to you, then Money Dashboard is not the right app for you and we would recommend checking out other alternatives.
You won’t earn cashback
Since we don’t manage payments nor issue you a card, we cannot offer cashback or offers on certain purchases. Yolt users can earn anything from 0.5% to 7.2% on a purchase, so we understand that you will be giving up quite a bit of cashback by switching to us.
Having said that, we are proud to say that Money Dashboard users do save money by being on top of their money, which according to our research is as much as £10 every time someone logs into the app. Not as sexy as cashback, but you’re still getting a nice return.
Fewer insights
One of the main features users like about Yolt are the spending insights and ideas into how you can save more and improve your spending.
This is not something we do at Money Dashboard at the moment, although we are working on implementing more Machine Learning in order to offer users better insights into their spending. We do have a Spending plan that helps you forecast how your budget will do in the future, but we won’t provide personalised insights into how to improve that - yet.
As we mentioned above, it is up to you to make the decision when it comes to picking an alternative to the Yolt budgeting app. At Money Dashboard, our goal is simple: to help you manage your money more efficiently by allowing you to see all your finances in one place. We won’t be issuing cards or bank accounts — we just want to help you with your budgeting.
If all that we’ve described sounds like something that would work for you, then we would like to propose you test us out as an alternative to Yolt. Want to check us out? Sign up for free now!
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