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Roadmap for 2026

· 5 min read
youngcw
youngcw
Actual Budget Maintainer

Hello Actual Budgeters! Another year has gone by with many fixes and upgrades to Actual. Let's look back over the year and also look at what's to come.

2025 in review​

It's always fun to look back and see all the progress made in Actual over the course of a year. It's easy to forget how many of the features we love weren't available back at the beginning of the year.

New features​

My favorites in approximately chronological order are:

  • OIDC and multi-user support
  • Adjustable upcoming time frame for schedules
  • Multiple new report types
  • NPM package for the sync server
  • Translations
  • Bank sync management page
  • Desktop app improvements such as the embedded server
  • Auto-hold income
  • Merge transactions
  • Transaction tags
  • Mobile pages for Rules, Payees, Schedules, and Bank Sync
  • Budget Currencies (still experimental)
  • Quickly add single schedules from the account view

Note on Translations: Translations are a never-ending project. Every month there are new or modified strings that need to be translated. We could use as many contributors to translation as we can get. If you are interested in helping translate Actual into other languages see our translation guide.

If you remember our roadmap from last year, you will see that we were able to accomplish all but one of our goals, plugins. I will touch on that more below.

Maintainer and contributor payments​

This year we started paying small stipends to the core maintainer team, and giving out SWAG items to other contributors. The maintainer stipends are based on points received for doing the necessary, but not very exciting, parts of maintaining Actual. This is only possible because of the generous donations from you the users. Many of you donate regularly and there are over 8000 Pikapods users whose hosting fees partially go towards supporting Actual. We offer a very hearty thank you to those who are donating. See the bottom of the post for ways to support the project if you would like to donate.

2026 Wish list​

Plugins: We have been working on adding plugins to allow users to more easily add functionality to the app without the need to add said feature to the base app. The feature is not quite ready as plugins have a tendency to break existing features, which slows down development a great deal. We are doing everything we can to not break existing features that we know you rely on. Our hope is to have plugins ready for you to build on in the first few months of 2026.

The first plugins we will be adding will be to migrate the existing bank sync providers. We also are looking at adding multiple new providers soon after. Multiple prospective providers have reached out to us in just the last few months and are patiently waiting for plugins before fully integrating into Actual.

Goals UI: The goal templates and cleanup templates experimental features are used by many, if not most of you. We plan on getting a proper GUI put together for these to make adding and editing templates less prone to error. This would also include the ability to predict the total needed to meet all set budget goals, see all active goals, and easily modify fill order.

Mobile view feature parity: The mobile view has received many updates this year but it still lacks a number of features that are available on desktop. We would like to bring that disparity down to close to 0 this year.

Rewrite the transaction table: The transaction table is probably the most important feature of the app, even more so than the budget itself. The code for the transaction table is complicated, and not conducive to new features. We plan to rewrite this code to be more maintainable, more accessible to new contributors, and more extendable for new features such as resizing columns.

Debt account type: Currently Actual only has a standard account, you can add transactions and there is a balance. This is perfect for checking and savings accounts, but less great for loans. We would like to bring back account types to make more specialty type accounts easier to manage in Actual, starting with loan accounts. The ability to automate this is technically already available with rules and schedules, but adding in a custom account type that does the setup for you would be that much better. We will look at what other account types would make sense for the base app, but with plugins the possibilities are endless.

Better and faster code tests: We have stared work on upgrading our CI/CD to use Rust based tooling. This speeds up the tests immensely and makes development and testing faster.

(Remember to vote on the features you would like to see get added to Actual. Use this link to see all open feature requests and vote by reacting with 👍)

Thank you all that contribute! Whether that be through donations, bug reporting, code submissions, documentation edits, or helping on discord, Actual wouldn't exist without you.

Happy Budgeting and have a happy new year!

youngcw

How can I support the project?​

  1. contribute - fix issues, add features, write documentation, assist with support queries in discord, etc.
  2. donate to the project via Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors
  3. some of the core maintainers have GitHub sponsors enabled if you want to buy them a beer