What Actual Bench adds

Actual Bench helps with administrative, planning, reconciliation, sync, backup, and diagnostic tasks that are easier to review outside the day-to-day Actual Budget interface.

Is it for you?

Use Actual Bench if one or more of these tasks applies to you:

• You have enough accounts, payees, categories, schedules, tags or rules that maintaining them one at a time has stopped being reasonable.
• You plan several months at once, or draft the numbers in a spreadsheet first.
• Your rules have piled up and you no longer know which ones overlap, duplicate each other, or point at something that no longer exists.
• You reconcile from downloaded statements and want the comparison to survive closing the tab.
• You keep more than one budget file - per person, per business, per currency.
• You want to ask your data a question no screen answers.

Use Actual Budget if you mostly enter transactions, check balances, and adjust the current month.

Choose a guide from the task list on the documentation home page.

What it does not replace

It does not replace:

• Everyday transaction entry and mobile budgeting in Actual.
• Actual’s normal budget views and reports.
• Actual’s bank connections. Actual owns the link to your bank. Bench decides when the sync runs and reports what came back, but never touches the connection itself.
• Actual’s day-to-day reconciliation. Bench adds a separate workbench for the times you want to import a whole statement and audit it line by line.
• The official Actual Budget documentation.

What you need

• An Actual Server you already run, and a current browser.
• Actual Bench itself - or the live demo, if you are still deciding.
• For Direct mode: a browser that can reach the Actual Server URL, over HTTPS, with CORS allowed or the server proxied same-origin.
• For HTTP API Server mode: a running actual-http-api, its URL, and its ACTUAL_API_KEY.

Ready for your own data? Install it, then connect a budget.