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I'm just not going to put all of my financial records in once place under one vendor in the cloud. On the other hand, I'm not going to trust Quicken after year

I'm just not going to put all of my financial records in once place under one vendor in the cloud. On the other hand, I'm not going to trust Quicken after years of neglect and no sane way of getting my data out. I used GnuCash for a few years, and was generally satisfied with many parts of it, yet it was horribly broken in some ways. And it isn't easy to get data out, even though it can use a native XML storage format. These days I'm forcing myself to use Ledger http://ledger-cli.org/ http://ledger-cli.org/ The UI is essentially the UI of your favorite text editor (with all the efficiencies and pain that entails), but no one can argue that your data is held hostage! It's a text file!

soccerdave 11y ago
I'm curious how you are organizing your data. Do you have one file per account (checking, credit card) or is it all in one big file? I've looked at ledger a few times and get a little overwhelmed, part of it though is because Quicken is so easy since it downloads everything.
- zdw 11y ago
  There are tools for OFX download and import - there's a larger ecosystem site here: http://plaintextaccounting.org http://plaintextaccounting.org Ledger supports an "!include" statement that works exactly how you'd think it would and is super handy.
Karunamon 11y ago
Re: Getting your data out, Quicken has supported OFX and CSV import/export since at least the 90's, and it's enough of an industry standard that any other place you take your data will support the same.
cgrinds 11y ago
Likewise, I've moved to beancount http://furius.ca/beancount/ http://furius.ca/beancount/ and the awesome fava https://github.com/aumayr/fava https://github.com/aumayr/fava 21 years of Quicken data converted to a lovingly crafted text file. Ahh. Also a big fan of Moneydance http://moneydance.com http://moneydance.com and have written a budget plugin for my family's needs

soccerdave 11y ago

I'm curious how you are organizing your data. Do you have one file per account (checking, credit card) or is it all in one big file? I've looked at ledger a few times and get a little overwhelmed, part of it though is because Quicken is so easy since it downloads everything.

zdw 11y ago
There are tools for OFX download and import - there's a larger ecosystem site here: http://plaintextaccounting.org http://plaintextaccounting.org Ledger supports an "!include" statement that works exactly how you'd think it would and is super handy.

Karunamon 11y ago

Re: Getting your data out, Quicken has supported OFX and CSV import/export since at least the 90's, and it's enough of an industry standard that any other place you take your data will support the same.

cgrinds 11y ago

Likewise, I've moved to beancount http://furius.ca/beancount/ http://furius.ca/beancount/ and the awesome fava https://github.com/aumayr/fava https://github.com/aumayr/fava 21 years of Quicken data converted to a lovingly crafted text file. Ahh. Also a big fan of Moneydance http://moneydance.com http://moneydance.com and have written a budget plugin for my family's needs