Ask about your own money
Where did the restaurant budget go, what is left for the month, where could $200 come from. The assistant queries the open budget with its own tools and answers from your real transactions.
macOS · Local-first budgeting
Your budget stays on your Mac.
The assistant asks first.
Actual Next is a redesigned Mac app for envelope budgeting, built on the open-source Actual engine and its file format. Accounts, categories, and transactions live on your machine. The built-in AI assistant reads them, tells you where the money went, and proposes changes you approve one by one.
macOS 12 or later · $19.99 one-time · Opens existing Actual budget files
A budget you can talk to, and still control.
Nothing changes without you
Recategorize, edit, create, delete: each change arrives as an Approve or Deny card listing the exact rows it touches. Set the assistant to Ask, Auto, or Read-only and it stays there.
Local-first, by default
Your budget is a file on your Mac. No account to create, no server to trust with your transactions. Point it at your own sync server later if you want more than one device.
Envelope budgeting
Zero-based, month by month: every unit of income gets a job before the month starts, and you move money between categories when life disagrees. Multi-currency, formatted for your locale.
Reports and a dashboard you arrange
Net worth, cash flow, spending, calendar, sankey, and custom reports, as widgets you drag and resize on the dashboard. No separate edit mode to switch into.
Your other AI tools can read it too
A local MCP server on 127.0.0.1 hands the same budget tools to any Model Context Protocol client on your Mac, Cursor included. Read-only unless you say otherwise, and off until you switch it on.
The assistant
Ask, read the plan, then approve it.
The assistant lives in a sidebar next to your budget. It searches transactions, reads categories and account balances, and shows you which tool it ran for every answer, so you can check the number it just quoted. When it wants to change something, it stops and asks.
- Answers built from your transactions, not guesses
- Every write waits for Approve or Deny
- Bulk edits shown as one table before they apply
You bring your own Anthropic API key. Actual Next calls the model directly with the key you paste into Settings, so you pay Anthropic for what you use, and nothing goes through us. Want no AI at all? Leave it switched off. The rest of the app does not need it.
Accounts
Everything you own and owe, in one list.
Checking, savings, credit cards, loans, investments, and the house. On-budget accounts feed the envelopes; off-budget ones stay out of the monthly maths but still count toward net worth. Assets and debts sit at the top over the range you pick.
- Per-account colors that carry across the app
- Net worth from one week to all time
- Import from CSV, OFX, QFX, and QIF
Budget
Every category, spent against planned.
Groups hold your categories, each row shows what you have spent this month against what you set aside, and the ring at the top tells you how far through the month’s money you are. Recurring payments get their own screen so subscriptions stop being a surprise.
- Spent versus budgeted, per category
- Rules and schedules for the repeat work
- Seven themes, light and dark
Works with your Actual budget
Actual Next reads and writes the same file format, so you can open an existing budget and move back whenever you want.
Sync only if you ask
Nothing leaves the Mac until you connect your own Actual sync server. Run one and you can share budgets between devices and link banks through GoCardless, SimpleFIN, or Pluggy.ai. There is no Unified Sense account either way.
Built on open source
The budgeting engine underneath is the open-source Actual project. Actual Next adds the Mac interface, the assistant, and the local MCP server on top.
Actual Next for macOS.
One purchase, no subscription, no ads, and no upsells inside the app. Your budget stays yours.