Copilot: Track & Budget Money

I run a sole proprietorship. For what I need, Copilot Money does mostly a great job. It lacks some functions, however, that I feel should be standard on any financial app. For instance, there is no way to export the results of a filtered search, INCLUDING BY DATE. If I want to see how much I’ve spent in a specific category YTD, there is no way to do that natively in CM. I have to export ALL my transactions, dating back to when I first started using the app, to a spreadsheet, then filter my searches there. This is particularly vexing at tax time. Other, less-pressing problems (for me) have to do with look-and-feel issues, and so are completely subjective. Navigating to text fields within the app has never felt intuitive. Year-end summary does not allow me to page to whichever category I want to see - I can only move forward-back one page at a time in the order Copilot has arranged for me. If you’re going to include a “feature,” fine, but design it in a way that anticipates users wanting to do more with it than just passively follow the directions onscreen. There was an issue with my PayPal account needing to be re-synced daily. This seems to have been fixed recently, but other accounts also lose sync occasionally. Again, for the price, this app is a solid choice for tracking and organizing finances. But it could be so much more if the designers made up their minds to do a better job of meeting the needs and expectations of their users.

I’ve reduced my rating to one from the previous review because the support team is unwilling to fix the issue I’m facing. The problem is that when I pay using one of my American Express cards, Copilot sometimes fails to capture the transaction. However, Copilot does capture the transaction when the transaction status changes from pending to posted, which is good. But this behavior has a critical issue: it posts to the wrong date and sometimes copies notes from other transactions. This makes it very difficult to keep track of when these transactions actually occurred. After spending a long time with a support representative from Copilot, he told me that this is a Plaid issue and that they can’t do anything about it. I argued that the issue of copying notes from different transactions is Copilot’s problem, not Plaid’s, because the notes are Copilot’s, not Plaid’s. However, he concluded that it was a Plaid issue because Plaid linked these transactions. I’m not convinced because I believe that the copying note behavior is done by Copilot, not Plaid, even though Plaid had the wrong transaction linkage. I asked him to escalate the issue or conduct further investigation with the developers, but he didn’t. So, I ended up leaving this negative feedback in public. Even though it’s a Plaid issue, I don’t care. Plaid’s issue is Copilot’s issue from end user perspective, and they need to fix it. Transaction dates are one of the critical data elements in finance, and I don’t appreciate the Copilot team undervaluing its importance. I hope they read this review and hope to fix this bug, regardless of whether it’s from Plaid or Copilot.

TL;DR - Co-pilot is the best, does what I want, some quirks, better than the competition by a long shot. If you learn to use it (support is very helpful), you will love it. I am a very analytical person who has tried almost every budgeting app people have thrown my way. I started in excel sheets, then I moved on to a terrible system I made in notion, then every app I could find, then a flushed out system in Notion that I loved. I could not find a piece of software that did what I wanted it to do - then I found co-pilot. There are some quirks that I need to learn to work around, but even those get resolved in future updates (the dev team is on top of requests, support is unmatched). The monthly recaps are a godsend, as I often sit down once a month to review everything. Co-pilot essential spoon feeds you the recap. I love that I can track everything in one spot, split charges, add tags to internal transfers/income (makes categorizing credit card cash backs and earned interest very easy). All in all this is the best, I love it, and nothing I have used in the past has been this useful, this helpful, or this beautiful (seriously, the design is very pretty). Keep it up Co-pilot team!!