July 6, 2026 · The PlavaFin team

A Rocket Money & Monarch alternative for people with a side business

Rocket Money and Monarch are solid personal-finance apps. But the moment you start freelancing or running a side business, they hit a wall: they’re designed for one household, so your business income and expenses get mixed in with groceries and rent. Come tax time, you’re untangling it by hand.

If you’ve outgrown a single-household budgeting app, here’s what to look for.

The gap single-household apps leave

Apps like Rocket Money, Monarch, and YNAB do a good job of the personal basics — connecting accounts, categorizing spending, budgeting. What they can’t do is keep a separate set of books for a business alongside your personal money:

• No way to tag a transaction as “business” and get a clean business P&L.
• No separation, so your personal budget is polluted by business cash flow (and vice versa).
• You end up adding a bookkeeping tool on top, which is expensive and a second thing to learn.

What a better fit looks like

If you’re a freelancer or side-hustler, you want the good parts of a personal-finance app plus the ability to run a business cleanly:

1. Everything single-household apps do — bank sync, smart categorization, budgets, trends.
2. Entity tagging, so each transaction is personal or business (or a rental).
3. A per-entity P&L, so you can see the business on its own without exporting to a spreadsheet.
4. One subscription, not a personal app plus separate bookkeeping software.

How PlavaFin compares

PlavaFin gives you everything you’d expect from a great personal-finance app — automatic bank sync, categorization that learns from your edits, budgets, and trends — and adds what single-household apps can’t: multiple entities at once, each with its own profit-and-loss report. Your personal money stays clean, your side business gets a real P&L, and it’s all in one place.

That means one app instead of Monarch-plus-QuickBooks — and no more untangling personal and business at tax time.

If that sounds like your setup, join the early-access waitlist. Founding members get in first, plus 6 months free and locked-in early-access pricing at launch.