Why I built Forge Ledger

Forge Ledger started in a way that probably won't surprise you: as a spreadsheet.

My parents had just retired, and they wanted to keep their money in the higher-interest accounts and pension pots for as long as possible. To do that properly they needed to know — months in advance — when they'd need to pull funds out for a holiday, or a new car, or any of the bigger one-off costs that retirement throws at you. Where would their balance be in March? What about August? If they bought the car in September, did that leave enough headroom for Christmas?

So I built a spreadsheet. It basically replicates a statement sheet, but has future months feeding from previous regular transactions and ready to populate with known upcoming items. Each section had a purpose - one for annual, one for standard monthly recurring items and one the adhocs. I'm completely self taught, so whilst it may not have been the most concise way of going around things. It did the job of answering the question "where are we going to be?" instead of "where are we now?".

It worked. They used it for a few years and the panicked end-of-month feeling faded out of their lives entirely.

The moment it became personal

I'd been using a copy of the same spreadsheet for myself for a while, mostly as an experiment. It was useful — but I didn't need it the way they did. Not yet.

Then one December I had three bills land in the same month I hadn't properly planned for: my car needed roughly £500 of unexpected work on top of the MOT, an annual gaming subscription I'd forgotten about renewed itself, and — of course — Christmas. None of them were individually huge. All three together turned that month into a small disaster.

The galling thing was: every single one of them was predictable. The MOT date was on my calendar. The subscription had renewed the same week every year for ten years running. Christmas happens, you know, every year.

The spreadsheet would have caught all three if I'd kept it properly updated. But I hadn't, because spreadsheets are quietly hostile to keeping properly updated. You forget. You change a number in one place and not another. The discipline runs out by February.

That December I sat down and realised I needed what I'd built for my parents — but I needed it to be something I'd actually open, every week, without it feeling like homework.

The leap from spreadsheet to app

I had ideas for what would make the maths feel less like maths and more like a clear view of what's ahead. The problem was honest: my Excel skills weren't going to deliver them - when I did research online everything came back looking like hieroglyphics and nothing on the market quite did what I wanted either. The market apps I'd tried were either bank-attached "spend tracker" things (focused on the past), envelope-budget systems (focused on the present), or US-centric services that didn't speak GBP, DD/MM/YYYY, or council-tax-in-March properly.

An AI-built website/app turned out to be the way to bridge what I knew I needed with what I could build. So here we are.

What Forge Ledger actually is

It's the spreadsheet, evolved — but designed around the forecast, not the record. You put in your recurring income, your recurring bills (including the quarterly ones, the annual ones, the awkward ones), and any one-off events you can see coming. The maths runs, and the chart shows you exactly where your balance is going to be — six, eighteen, or thirty-six months out, depending on which tier you're on.

If a shortfall is coming, you see it in time to do something. If a quiet annual subscription is about to bite, you see it coming. If you're trying to decide whether you can afford that holiday in September, you can put it in and watch what happens.

What it deliberately isn't: a stockbroker, a tax adviser, a pension calculator, or an AI that tells you where to put your money. Those decisions are yours (and properly belong to FCA-authorised humans, not software). Forge Ledger is the cashflow forecast underneath those decisions — the bit that lets you decide if you have the money for it.

Who it's for

People who'd rather forecast than firefight. People who've been caught out by their own predictable bills more times than they'd like to admit. People who tried a spreadsheet, tried a bank app, and still get the cold-sweat feeling on the 24th of the month.

If any of that sounds like you, the Ember tier is free — no card, no trial expiry. Six months of forecasting is enough to know whether the way we do this clicks for you. The paid tiers exist if you want to increase your information, reduce your manual input and to see further ahead than that.

Either way: I hope it brings you the same quiet stability it brought my parents, and (eventually) me.

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Forge Ledger is a budgeting and forecasting tool, not a financial adviser. Posts here are educational only — for advice on specific products like ISAs, pensions, mortgages, or investments, speak to an FCA-authorised adviser, or visit MoneyHelper for free guidance.