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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

• rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
  I've used GnuCash for years before switching to beancount (https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/ https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/ with smart_importer: https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer) and fava (https://github.com/beancount/fava/ https://github.com/beancount/fava/). Much easier to work on your journals (ledger, trades, prices...) since they are just text files. Really great if you're using the beancount package for Sublime: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Beancount https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Beancount. More importantly, the importers (for all my banks and financial services) let me import and reconcile all transactions, but also archive all documents (including PDF, text files, etc) in one, well organized directory: each file is saved into a folder that corresponds to my account structure such as Asset:Current:Cash, Liability:Mortgage, Income:Salary, Expenses:Health:Dentist. It's great to rely on fava (example: https://fava.pythonanywhere.com/example-beancount-file/income_statement/ https://fava.pythonanywhere.com/example-beancount-file/incom...) to check your accounting (with all files listed in the journal by date, with tags and links and other neat features) and still be able to browse documents in your file browser.
  • boromi 6y ago
    Thanks for this. Looks compelling. Is there a simple installation guide, I find it hard to figure out how to get going.
    • jonahbenton 6y ago
      As a longtime beancount user- it should be easy to install- there are packages for most OSes, they mostly work, the maintainer, Martin Blais is amazing and indefatigable, and the community is active and friendly and technical. But the "how to get going" part is where I find the real difficulty lies. There is a conceptual friction in double-entry accounting, which beancount enforces. If you do not have prior exposure to it, even if you are financially and mathematically inclined- grokking double entry can be a life-changing practice. It is the Iyengar Yoga to the 7 minute workout that is just tracking transactions as per GnuCash or Quicken or whatever. One has to have the appetite to consume a worldview. As someone living in that world, FWIW, I highly recommend it. I would not undersell the conceptual work required. It is not for everyone. But if the approach speaks to you, reach out on the mailing list and people will help with the mechanics. Cheers.
      • jkhdigital 6y ago
        A thousand times yes! the abstraction of double-entry accounting is absolutely central to understanding the modern economy and why (large) economic agents behave the way they do. It’s also essential for understanding fiat money, which is more or less just numbers in a double-entry ledger.
    • djhworld 6y ago
      The installation is really just a python library, but if you want to keep everything contained you can put them in a Dockerfile
    • freddie_mercury 6y ago
      The documentation says to type "pip install beancount". That doesn't seem hard, so I'm guessing you're having some other problem? If you post on the mailing list, people will help you.
  • riffraff 6y ago
    I'm also a happy beancount user. It's also pretty simple to extend, if not too documented. I was able to write a plugin to get data from the Milan stock exchange in a few hours, which was very nice. The vim plugin is also pretty ok.
  • djhworld 6y ago
    Been an avid beancount'er for about two years now too! I've never used the import features, the manual inputting of transactions into a text file doesn't take too long.
  • haberman 6y ago
    Wow, your setup sounds very similar to what I've converged on. Except I wrote a fairly substantial pipeline that preprocesses the data before giving it to beancount and Fava. Maybe I missed something, but it seemed like beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal file. I really wanted a pipeline where each bank statement PDF would output one file with a corresponding list of transactions (this stage can run completely in parallel and I use "ninja" to make it very fast). Then another process can run over these files looking for matches (+$X, -$X), and spit out "transaction groups", where each transaction group is a set of transaction ids that sum to zero. And then a different interactive tool lets you categorize transactions and spits out transaction groups with embedded "expense" transactions. It's all non-destructive; each tool only adds data, and nothing ever modifies existing files. Then a final step can combine all these files and spit out a beancount file for Fava. How does this compare with the way beancount's importer does it? How does its importer handle transfers and categorization? Is it destructive or non-destructive?
    • mattbillenstein 6y ago
      You're parsing PDF? I'd imagine most places allow some sort of data export like csv or something? That's how I get the data out of Chase and BofA.
      • mehrdadn 6y ago
        There are a few problems with exporting data... here's what comes to my mind at the moment: - It's an additional step and unnecessary when you're already downloading PDF statements, which you probably should be doing regardless - Data is often unavailable for export after a few months or a year or two (depending on the bank), far earlier than PDFs - If you have PDF scans (especially from earlier days) then you need to parse the OCR anyway - If you're using official APIs (instead of writing a scraper or or downloading by hand) then you may need to pay extra
        • mattbillenstein 6y ago
          To each their own, csv for me has been the easiest thing moving forward every month or three. I did do a historical net worth calculation and the only data I had going back far enough was PDFs, so through a mix of bash scripts and pdftotext, I was able to get a number for each month back about 10 years. But I ended up just putting that monthly balance for each account in a google sheet so I could sum and plot it there. Now I just stick the month-end balance for each account in a sheet to keep this updated.
  • anonymousDan 6y ago
    How do you parse the pdfs?
  • simonebrunozzi 6y ago
    This sounds amazing. It would be great if one day you could publish a detailed how-to / tutorial.
  • aostiles 6y ago
    I made this VS Code extension to help with manually entering Beancount transactions: https://github.com/aostiles/Beanquick https://github.com/aostiles/Beanquick
  • seltzered_ 6y ago
    "each file is saved into a folder that corresponds to my account structure such as Asset:Current:Cash, Liability:Mortgage, Income:Salary, Expenses:Health:Dentist" Beancount user here, even if you don't bother with any finance tracking, organizing financial documents following the folder structure is useful - see "Filing Dcouments" in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e4Vz3wZB_8-ZcAwIFde8X5CjzKshE4-OXtVVHm4RQ8s/edit#heading=h.zeye36yurb5 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e4Vz3wZB_8-ZcAwIFde8X5Cj... Shameless promos: - People are starting to make Fava extensions for things like envelope budgeting, portfolio tracking, etc. Usually these are announced on the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/beancount https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/beancount - The sublime plugin is great but I have a really useful improvement to search by org-mode headlines that never seemed to get merged - see https://github.com/norseghost/sublime-beancount/pull/14 https://github.com/norseghost/sublime-beancount/pull/14
    • BeetleB 6y ago
      > People are starting to make Fava extensions for things like envelope budgeting I've been hearing about making extensions for envelope budgeting for years, with little progress. I haven't checked in the last 2 years though - any progress on this? To be frank, it was fairly annoying that the author kept declaring it as "not too hard" and yet no one came up with one.
      • seltzered_ 6y ago
        Brian Ryall is working on one: https://github.com/bryall/fava-envelope https://github.com/bryall/fava-envelope discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beancount/RXvOvHHdsek https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beancount/RXvOvHHdse...
        • BeetleB 6y ago
          Thanks. Too soon to see if it will be workable. I'll stick to Ledger until this becomes mature.
• brnt 6y ago
  Hold up. Did Gnucash get better reporting or did he make his own? Last time I used Gnucash, which admittedly was 10 years ago, but for a business, I found reporting and the lack of budgeting lacking. The latter could be solved by envelopes (but I find hacky), but the former only by learning Guile, something I was and am not up to. Alternatives like Money dance have a more complete solution, certainly for personal use, in my view. I guess I'm asking what happened in the past decade to Gnucash ;) 2014 is the last time I really used it, and reporting had then not really changed.
  • igpay 6y ago
    The very first plot shown in the article was generated with custom scripts, published here (https://github.com/csun/simple_gnucash_budget_plots https://github.com/csun/simple_gnucash_budget_plots) I'm not sure how much it's changed since 2014. I think the "budgeting" system is still probably as bad as it was back then, though (and by bad I mean not really applicable for personal use, probably good for businesses). That's why I wrote this budget plotting script.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • jldugger 6y ago
    It did not get better. I am contemplating making a GNUCash adaptor for Grafana.
• ISL 6y ago
  Does GnuCash integrate well with exports from credit-card companies or banks? It seems like the big blocker is the time spent logging transactions.
  • abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    Worked fine with my bank. I had to sanitize the csv file a bit, which can be done with a simple script.
  • sjamaan 6y ago
    It supports imports from QIF and OFX/QFX files, CSV files, MT940 and MT942 files and DTAUS files. It also has an "online banking" integration thing, but I have no idea what kind of bank has username/password logins that would work with this. Personally, I don't mind manually entering the stuff, because you'll need to classify everything into the correct accounts anyway.
    • jldugger 6y ago
      > It also has an "online banking" integration thing, but I have no idea what kind of bank has username/password logins that would work with this. That stuff is the OFX/QFX setup. Basically it logs in and fetches those files for you. Banks are notoriously bad at this however.
  • jdofaz 6y ago
    I always use QFX import and haven't had any issues
• neogodless 6y ago
  > We don’t care about how much money we’ve spent at Amazon That's like, your opinion man. While I'm sure that's one perfectly valid approach, I find a lot of value in knowing where my money has gone beyond categories. To make it more concrete, how much I spend at Amazon my Rewards Visa determines whether the 2% bump in rewards is worth the cost of Prime. (I know - most people find enough value in the videos or not thinking about shipping. But I find that I simply spend more at Amazon when I have Prime, so I avoid having it!) To counter myself, my own software is probably too granular and I waste time on those little details of where I've spent money. I could stand to simplify a bit.
  • UncleEntity 6y ago
    Last time I looked they seem to have a pretty decent python API so splitting down transactions by retailer shouldn't take too much python-fu methinks.
    • jldugger 6y ago
      na, the problem is the data doesn't commonly exist in the model. If I buy a book from a local independent bookstore, that's a debit on checking and a credit in the 'Books' account. If--perhaps due to coronavirus--I buy the sequel on Amazon, that again results in a transaction from checking to books. The payee data isn't there. I think you can do it via vendors but the small business feature set is somewhat cumbersome.
  • igpay 6y ago
    And that's definitely an important shortcoming in GnuCash. I don't know of a great way to deal with transactions that go beyond "categories". You could use the description field + custom reporting, but that seems a bit error-prone. Luckily, I haven't run into many cases where I felt like I needed something like this.
  • gen220 6y ago
    You can track these kinds of things in GNU Ledger (cousin of GNUCash) The expense category is still something like `Expenses:Books:SciFi`, or whatever. The payee for the transaction is then `Amazon`. If you prefer to make the payee the specific retailer that's selling to you, using Amazon as a platform, you can do that, and instead "tag" the transaction with `:Amazon:`. You can also track points as a byproduct of the transaction, but that's another rabbit hole.
• elric 6y ago
  "Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools. That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which can almost certainly handle all your bookkeeping needs. But simple, it is not.
  • pmoriarty 6y ago
    Given the typical audience of HN.. if you already know how to program you already know how to use something that's way more complicated than GnuCash. GnuCash is very simple if you already know double-entry accounting... and learning double-entry accounting would probably be the work of a weekend or less for anyone who knows how to program. Not hard.
  • holri 6y ago
    Double entry booking is complicated but it pays off to learn if also for personal finance because errors are much less likely than with a spreadheet.
    • ahnick 6y ago
      This is commonly stated, but I found it relatively straightforward once I saw the extended accounting equation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_equation) and knew every entry needed a corresponding entry to make the equation balance. Assets = Liabilities + Equity + (Income - Expenses) For some reason the (Income - Expenses) part gets left off in many introductory explanations of the accounting equation. I think that leads to a lot of confusion about how to treat Income and Expense accounts in programs like GnuCash for newcomers to double entry accounting.
      • Jorge1o1 6y ago
        I agree this is important to understanding double-entry accounting. Keep in mind that the Income - Expenses gets elided because the Retained Earnings go towards Equity
• fossuser 6y ago
  I'd be curious if anyone has used this and also used YNAB (and can compare them). I'd put YNAB along with 1Password (and probably Fastmail) in the class of best single purpose pieces of software that I pay for.
  • boromi 6y ago
    Why 1Password? I've tried it throughout the years, and IMO nothing has beat KeePass.
    • codazoda 6y ago
      +1 for keypass. The apps aren't quite as polished, but they do what I need, and I can store my encrypted password file in my Dropbox folder so that I've still got it if any single company in this small chain folds.
      • jorvi 6y ago
        1Password its vault format is open source, so even if the company goes belly up a 3rd party tool that can decrypt your vault can easily be written.
    • fossuser 6y ago
      It works really well across all of my devices and operating systems (and will continue to do so as those systems change). I’m glad keepass exists, but I’m happy to support polished software in this domain. I like paying for software I think is really good and focuses on a narrow problem.
  • whycombagator 6y ago
    I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their homepage line: > Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money. As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better about 1Password?
• spodek 6y ago
  I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here: > If you’re happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less than a certain amount each month, that’s great! You don’t need GnuCash. I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or what. Do you track your personal finances? If so, in how much detail? Maybe it would make an interesting Ask HN.
  • codazoda 6y ago
    I'll bite here... I used to track my finances and balance my checkbook. But, it took hours of my time. The best thing I ever did was create a separate account for my disposable income. My bills account gets the exact amount it needs and everything is payed automatically. The rest of my income goes into my fun account and I rest easy knowing I can spend until it's gone and my bills still get payed. After that worked well for me, I now put small amounts into various savings accounts, like "tires", "vacation", or "emergency". I use an Ally account with "buckets". I don't balance anymore, and haven't for 20 years. Just a quick glance at recent transactions to make sure I recognize everything. It's also amazing how quickly some of those savings accounts add up when I'm not thinking about them much.
    • movedx 6y ago
      My wife and I do something similar. We have our "Expenses" account that salaries go into. We have our "Offset" account that has our emergency fund in it and offsets the interest for our mortgage. And finally we have a "Goals" account that we use to save up for big ticket items like a new car, holiday, or something. We take 10% of our respective incomes each into a personal, "off the books" account and we do whatever we like with that. Simple.
  • samastur 6y ago
    I do, each bill or bank transaction being its own entry. I'm sure I belong in minority of people who do this. It's all manual labour too without any imports from banks etc. (never tried). I do it for two reasons. Occasionally I found a problem with double-billing that I would otherwise miss, but mostly it is to be able to check where my money went and plan realistically.
• fensterblick 6y ago
  I want to like GnuCash but I just can't. I have found the UI to be confusing. I still use a freeware, abandoned version of Microsoft Money: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20738 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=207... The UI is still excellent. It is the only reason I have Windows installed on a spare computer. Despite never being updated, the principals of personal finance haven't changed that much.
  • gyrocode 6y ago
    I am still using Microsoft Money too, it's great! There is also Money Plus Sunset Home and Business edition available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7564 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=756... which includes features for small businesses, see comparison at http://moneymvps.org/faq/article/499.aspx http://moneymvps.org/faq/article/499.aspx
  • lancer 6y ago
    I'm in the same boat! One Windows laptop in the house dedicated to MS Money. With 27 years of financial history, and counting, it still does everything I need it to. Once a year I export it into Excel to do some forecasting and analysis. I'd really love if there were a reliable and future-proof way to get at the data. Sunriise[0] is the only way I know to export raw data but it has a few issues and the source code isn't public. [0] https://bitbucket.org/hleofxquotesteam/dist-sunriise/wiki/Home https://bitbucket.org/hleofxquotesteam/dist-sunriise/wiki/Ho...
• BrandonBradley 6y ago
  Until the open source options have direct download options that 'just work', Quicken is the best. I've tried GnuCash and Skrooge, can't ever get the direct downloads to work for more than two months without breaking.
  • Voyiatzis 6y ago
    Quicken died for me ten ir so years ago, as did many other personal finance software applications. It is the syncing between devices that’s imperative these days, and this is where Quicken is failing, especially when your database gets larger: it syncs, but as your database grows its latency becomes ever more apparent. Quickbooks Online, which I have been using for a little over a year, does syncing exceptionally well; but at the cost of a polished UI. Ideally I would love to be able to access my Quickbooks desktop database using iOS or web, alas that’s not doable.
    • zie 6y ago
      Quicken is out from under the Intuit Monster now, so it may be worth looking at again.
• every 6y ago
  I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level, it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are staggering... [1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html [2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html
  • jonahbenton 6y ago
    Beancount as well, very similar in philosophy and staggering in capability, slightly different flavor and rendition compared to ledger. http://furius.ca/beancount/ http://furius.ca/beancount/
  • pmoriarty 6y ago
    I looked in to switching from GnuCash to Ledger about 5 years ago, and found that it would have been too painful to use for manually inputting the thousands of transactions I had because it just didn't have the nice auto-complete and GUI nicities that GnuCash had. I'm a hardcore command-line and keyboard-only power user, so I would have absolutely loved to have made Ledger work for me rather than use the mouse-heavy GnuCash interface, but couldn't, and went back to GnuCash with my tail between my legs. I'd still rather use it, so maybe I'll give it another try some day.
    • every 6y ago
      Assuming GnuCash can do some sort of plain text record dump, I would probably try to cobble something together to convert that to an acceptable ledger format. Maybe with AWK or something similar...
    • igpay 6y ago
      This is exactly what made me switch away from ledger. I thought that a command-line/plaintext only workflow would be great, because that's what I usually prefer. However, a GUI + autocomplete just ended up being way more useable for me in this case.
    • 6y ago
• spurdoman77 6y ago
  I never understood the point of these personal finance apps. When I run out of money I just withdraw a some more out of our familys multimillion trust fund.
  • chad_strategic 6y ago
    are you looking for any relatives. :)
• clircle 6y ago
  I was an avid GnuCash user for a year or two in grad school, keeping track of my finances using GnuCash Mobile on my android phone. Then I bought a new phone and exported my finances database. When I loaded it into my new phone, I found the xml had been corrupted. That was a sad day because I'd like to use an offline finance tracker on my phone. BTW GnuCashMobile is not GnuCash, it's some third party android app.
• cproctor 6y ago
  My partner and I have been tracking all our spending for the last five years with hledger (ledger reimplemented in haskell) and some custom import and management scripts inspired by "Full-fledged hledger" [1]. More recently we added Plaid [2] for auto-importing from financial accounts. I love having a plain-text history and being able to ask complex queries. One unexpectedly-sweet benefit is that your spending is a high-granularity record of where you have been and what you have been doing, encoding some signals you might not have thought to write in a diary. Things like "that was when we were saving for our down payment" or "I was going to coffee shops every day trying to finish my dissertation" or "that was when we had a pandemic." I enjoy looking back through our ledger the same way I enjoy going way back in my gmail history. [1] https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger [2] https://plaid.com/ https://plaid.com/
  • karlicoss 6y ago
    also highly recommend its tui https://hledger.org/hledger-ui.html https://hledger.org/hledger-ui.html
  • jibcage 6y ago
    +1 for full-fledged hledger! I just got it set up last week, and putting together the small scripts for parsing all of the CSVs was (to me) a fun programming exercise that reaped huge visibility into how I spend my money :) It's hugely valuable to have all of your financial data in one, human-readable place. Not only to you, but to whomever might be executing your will ;)
    • cproctor 6y ago
      Imagining my will as a poorly-documented API makes me feel present stress on behalf of my unborn descendants :)
• mattbillenstein 6y ago
  This all seems too complex for most people. I use Google Sheets, I import a year-to-date csv from my bank and credit card every month, categorize each transaction, then use QUERY to aggregate expenses by category. This data I feed into a rough budgeting sheet which I use for expense trimming. This monthly maintenance takes maybe 30 minutes. And I have another sheet to compute net worth - retirement and brokerage accounts hold funds for which I can get a price using the GOOGLEFINANCE function, so the numbers change over time and I know pretty much down to the penny what my net worth is after I sorta manually enter in a couple bank balances.
  • NicoJuicy 6y ago
    Do you have a similar public sheet as example?
    • mattbillenstein 6y ago
      Yes, I've tried to get a few friends who don't budget at all into some sort of system - so I made this template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c24ZmUy19_n_QggMOjcEFUO9oqULpNDAT7JHL4N62yU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c24ZmUy19_n_QggMOjcE...
  • igpay 6y ago
    I'd definitely agree that this is overkill for most people. In your case, though, I think that you could put the same amount of work into GnuCash and get the same results without writing any code. Plus you'd have a GUI with built in reports and whatnot. Not sure if that matters to you. In the article, I briefly touch on skipping manual transaction logging and just importing statements from your bank / credit card. And I gloss over this, but it looks like GnuCash offers similar functionality for automatically updating stock prices https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Online_Quotes https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Online_Quotes - not sure if it's a pain to set up or not, but it's probably not as easy as just calling a google sheets function. Seems like you wouldn't have any reasons to switch over given that you've already got a nice system going, but just wanted to point out that you can use GnuCash in a way that's not quite as... rigid as the way I use it :)
• komali2 6y ago
  It's kinda fun to idly scroll through gnu's list of free software https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU As far as I can tell, everything there was made simply because somebody out there thought it's important for a Free version of said software to exist. That's pretty cool. There's gnucash of course, but also a gnutrition calorie/macro/micro tracker, a flight simulator, some sort of comic saving software... the list goes on. Fun!
  • chaos_a 6y ago
    There's even GNU Social, a decentralized version of twitter which is either dead or nearly dead. That list also mentions GNU Health and GNU Med for hospitals. I'm curious as to whether they're actually used, and if so, who uses them.
• suyash 6y ago
  Most banking services - at least mine already provides reports and graphs along with simple budgeting features for free with online banking. I prefer to use that, as that is where most of the data lives anyways.
• chad_strategic 6y ago
  I tried GnuCash and generally liked it. However, it was a little more complicated than I wanted. In addition, I wanted to be able to access via the web, when I was away from my computer. (cause at the time, I thought it was only available locally) I also wanted my life partner (my lovely wife) to participate. This was going to be the hard part. Behavior modification. So I built a very simple "tracker".(php/codeigniter/mysql) Date, description, category, spender, cost, that could be accessed anywhere. I asked my wife to start tracking spending. As we had just bought a new house and 1 1/2 year old. She was extremely resistant to the idea. Six months after using the "tracker" she told me that she didn't plan on doing it more than 2 days before she gave up. However since starting it 3 years ago she and I have increased our "frugalness" and really looked where we should spend money (vacations, artisan food and not items to impress other people… such as fancy cars.) I think part of the trick is not necessarily import or export or "api"ing data. The trick is doing a manual entry for each transaction. Kind of like a spending journal, food journal or just a journal. There still seems to be power in manually entering a transaction, although it might not be by pen and paper.
  • pseudoramble 6y ago
    > The trick is doing a manual entry for each transaction. Kind of like a spending journal, food journal or just a journal. There still seems to be power in manually entering a transaction, although it might not be by pen and paper. This was a big realization for me. I tend to prefer getting the "robots" to do things for us (in other words, automate things). Developing an intuition of what's happening with your money is hard when you use an automated tool though. The process of managing the ledger bi-weekly really adds something more for me. Working on each entry to determine a category, writing down amounts, noticing how many entries I've entered into a category each session, and looking at it in aggregate afterward gives me some greater sense of how my financial life works. I can almost picture writing the transactions in GnuCash before I even do it. I get what you mean about it being complicated though. I learned the bits I needed to get by and mostly stick to that. So that works for me. In the long run, the double-ledger manual style is what I think is most important.
  • projproj 6y ago
    >The trick is doing a manual entry for each transaction. I would second this for anyone whose goal is to spend less money. I think some people keep track of purchases just to see all spending and may not care about reducing spending. In that case, importing data can save time. This article also agrees with your suggestion. She suggests it's th that knowing you are going to have to write down your purchase helps you think before automatically spending: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/smarter-living/budget-money-lessons.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/smarter-living/budget-mon...
• cascom 6y ago
  I’ve been using Gnucash for my personal finances for a several years now, and really love it - it’s not dead simple, and requires an understanding of double entry bookkeeping, but where it really shines is flexibility. A couple of examples are as follows: 1. Expenses in the future - If I book a bunch of plane tickets for later in the year today, I can book those expenses in those months in which I’m traveling (pre-paid asset until then) there-by seeing when I’m incurring those expenses vs. the cash flow of those expenses. 2. Corporate expenses - I can book expenses that I will be re-imbursed for as receivables and not have them run through my “income statement” (nothing like putting some business class plane tickets on your personal card to make things look weird) 3. Loans - whether it’s an auto loan on your car or simply a loan to a friend it’s great to be able to see your entire balance sheet (and remember that some items are outstanding!) 4.variable granularity - decide how detailed you want to get for some accounts you may decide you don’t need that much detail (because you track it some other way - like your 401k) and you can just track your total balance at month end (+/- deposits) 5. Track illiquid investments in your net worth (not saying the marks are right, but at least you have a placeholder value for them on your balance sheet (your home - private company stock etc.) 6. Privacy - it’s your data - no sharing it with anyone else
  • jkhdigital 6y ago
    Future-dating transactions allows me to run my household finances like a comptroller. Cash is never idle in my bank accounts!
  • hammock 6y ago
    These are great examples, thank you for putting this list together. I use mint to track transactions + a running spreadsheet of account balances. These are exactly all of my gripes with my current system.
• pstrateman 6y ago
  Importing records in GnuCash is a pain. Credit card payments end up with two records of the payment, one from the credit card and another from your bank. There's no way to merge records in GnuCash, ideally you would be able to mark them as the same record, but keep them both to keep the import logic happy.
  • jldugger 6y ago
    How are you doing this? The OFX import tool has a bayesian matcher that will update and reconcile existing records, and classify them based on past behavior. The big challenge IMO is that each transaction has a date, but sometimes the ends disagree on when it happened. E.g. you transfer money from checking to a brokerage, it takes multiple days but you have to choose one date for that transaction.
    • pstrateman 6y ago
      Using the import tool it identified them as separate transactions... which they kind of are. They're separate records whichiwould like to keep... but as a single merged ledger entry.
      • jldugger 6y ago
        Still not sure I follow. If I make a payment on a credit card, it shows up as a transaction from asset checking account to the liability credit card. It shows up on both accounts already. When I later import OFX transaction files, it sees the payment in the OFX and matches it up to the existing transaction: https://lists.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/importing-from-files.html#importing-matcher https://lists.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/importing-fro... Apparently not all import assistants do this for some reason.
  • brewdad 6y ago
    I manually input my checking account since it is almost entirely payments towards other GnuCash accounts. When I import the credit card payment from my CC company, GnuCash matches the OFX payment record with the existing entry and automatically reconciles it. So I don't get double payments.
• mcguire 6y ago
  "For my stocks and non-money assets, I opt not to track them super closely in order to avoid having to update the values of each stock every time." GnuCash's Price Editor can fetch values automatically. It used to be able to use Yahoo finance, but they cut that off a while back. There is a replacement, but I cannot remember what it is at the moment (and am on the work laptop). GnuCash is actually pretty easy to use, once you get used to the double-entry system and how it handles some things. I have a moderately complex situation (and it's been stupid complex in the past), and I don't spend more than a few minutes a month on it (unless I'm trading stocks; it can take more time to set up each stock's account for proper tracking).
  • pseudoramble 6y ago
    You need to setup an AlphaVantage API key. See here: https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_Why_doesn.27t_online_quoting_work.3F https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_Why_doesn.27t_online_qu.... I set it up a few years ago and it seems to keep work. If I break my setup messing around, I'll just copy the values directly from my investment site into GnuCash. This is definitely one of the clumsier parts of GnuCash. Still works though.
  • memling 6y ago
    > GnuCash's Price Editor can fetch values automatically. It used to be able to use Yahoo finance, but they cut that off a while back. There is a replacement, but I cannot remember what it is at the moment (and am on the work laptop). It's possible to get Yahoo! data through web scraping, but it's certainly less convenient than it used to be. IEX also has an open API for querying historical data.[1] I don't think it has as much historical data as Yahoo! has, and it's changed a bit since the last time I thought about putting together a backtester. [1] https://iexcloud.io/docs/api/ https://iexcloud.io/docs/api/
• candiddevmike 6y ago
  Shameless plug, our product, Domestica, is better for personal finance tracking as it uses the envelope model of categorization. It also includes to do lists, meal planning and more--in the cloud or self hosted. https://about.domestica.app https://about.domestica.app
  • xupybd 6y ago
    Just paid for a year of ynab. Do you have anything I can sign up for to be reminded you exist in a year's time?
• balnaphone 6y ago
  In the first pie chart [0], am I the only one having a hard time with colours in the legend? For example, the second colour in the legend is #ff851b [1], but that doesn't appear in the pie chart. Going by the amount (33.69%), it must be the segment with colour #ffa85f [2]. [0] https://www.csun.io/images/gnucash/expenses_piechart.png https://www.csun.io/images/gnucash/expenses_piechart.png [1] https://www.color-hex.com/color/ff851b https://www.color-hex.com/color/ff851b [2] https://www.color-hex.com/color/ffa85f https://www.color-hex.com/color/ffa85f
• briocheco 6y ago
  I needed a way to track my kids' allowance, so I built this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fivesaver https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fivesaver - very simple and very free. Hopefully, not too massive-aggressive self promotion:)
• TheApexTheater 6y ago
  Like many people here, I tried GnuCash. I enjoyed it, but when I would import data from my bank, it would crash. That, and not having any real way of categorizing my expenditures was annoying. The other thing that annoyed me was not being able to select multiple items I recently moved to KMyMoney and everything just clicked. I found the interface to be nicer, especially combining the filter functionality with the ability to select multiple things and tag them appropriately. I appreciate the article trying to explain Double-Entry bookkeeping, and I would suggest people look into KMM as an alternative to GnuCash.
  • mtrower 6y ago
    No way to categorize your expenses? Could you elaborate and compare to KMM? I've used both programs, so I'm curious which of us is missing something.
    • TheApexTheater 6y ago
      I think I may have misspoken. What I meant to say was that, at least for me, KMM is a little easier to view both accounts and categories, and search within them. A more accurate phrasing would have been "Filter all the payers that contain this string, and allow me to select them and see how much money was transferred to/from them."
• raz32dust 6y ago
  I've been using YNAB. I want to switch out because YNAB is too expensive. What I miss with open source alternatives is the mobile app. I don't like to link my bank accounts, so I enter expenses manually whenever I buy anything. The mobile app is critical for that to work.
  • dsd 6y ago
    Too many of these personal finance apps aren't putting the web first
    • taftster 6y ago
      YNAB (web version) has a pretty excellent web-first experience. And I'm not sure that I want a total web experience if half of my battle is recording transactions at the time they occur, right in the store. This is super convenient, no reason to keep receipts and enter them when I get home.
  • hybridtupel 6y ago
    For the same reasons I am still using the classic version of YNAB (paid once). But unfortunately the Mac version is not compatible with Catalina so I am also forced to search for a new app.
    • raz32dust 6y ago
      I paid once as well, but was forced to upgrade to Catalina for other reasons. Felt cheated, but I understand why they do it.
    • nickloewen 6y ago
      I have recently been experimenting with the mac app "Buckets," which seems conceptually similar to YNAB. It costs $50, but offers a full free trial with no feature or time limits. Downsides are the data import process, which can be complicated, and the lack of a mobile app. https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com
  • 6y ago
• tmerse 6y ago
  The last time I used GnuCash, it was not able to import it's own export. Does anyone know if this has been fixed?
• cosmie 6y ago
  Firefly[1][2] is also a really useful personal finance app. It's more akin to a self-hosted version of Mint. Combined with the Plaid connector[3], I find it the easiest to use for my workflow. And despite the instructions, you don't need a paid dev account. The free Plaid account will let you access up to 100 live financial institutions. [1] https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii [2] Live demo: https://demo.firefly-iii.org/ https://demo.firefly-iii.org/ [3] https://gitlab.com/GeorgeHahn/firefly-plaid-connector https://gitlab.com/GeorgeHahn/firefly-plaid-connector
  • dsd 6y ago
    I use this too. Maybe I like the beancount more, but having my finances available on the web to share with my so is valuable. Too many told are meant for one pers,on and don't support modern ideas like tagging.
    • cosmie 6y ago
      The multi-user aspect is super handy. It's also nifty that it exposes pretty much all of the functionality via a REST API, complete with the ability to manage OAuth clients/tokens. Not something I expected to really leverage, but have been surprised how frequently it's come in handy.
    • AdamGibbins 6y ago
      Have you tried fava recently? A web interface for beancount. Its become very powerful in the past year or so, allows editing etc too.
  • _Anima_ 6y ago
    I've used mmex for years and it's been not so stable recently so I gave firefly a try. There were too many simple use cases that could not be done simply, compared to mmex. One example is credit card partial chargeback/refunds. The dev suggested to edit the initial charge and substract the refunded amount. I dont want to do that. I like to keep a 1:1 mapping of transactions. Also income vs expense accounts, instead of payees. If Amazon refunds me partially (let's say $10 from a $100 purchase) it now creates an Amazon income account with $10. I had an Amazon expense account of $100. Both accounts are not linked in any way and it's impossible to know your Amazon balance ($90). I buy a lot of stuff for my girlfriend and she pays me back around the end of the month. Keeping track of her balance is not possible with Firefly. A few other things were not working properly or at all. Dev is very nice and active but I doubt he has any accounting background. Firefly turned out to me as a prettified excel sheet, not a double entry book keeping.
• monkeydust 6y ago
  I kinda want to try it but just not convinced I will see a good return on my time esp with manual entry. I wish some of these features were baked into my main bank account though.
• johanlarsson 6y ago
  A macOS and iOS alternative: https://hochgatterer.me/finances/macos/ https://hochgatterer.me/finances/macos/ > No data is stored on servers, except when you enable Cloud Sync to keep your data up-to-date on all your devices. In this case the data is stored encrypted on iCloud.
  • jamil7 6y ago
    This looks really nice, thank you for sharing.
• m0zg 6y ago
  No sync with banks - a complete non-starter for most people. Even if you enthusiastically start using something like this, in a month or two it'll get super old.
  • detaro 6y ago
    It supports multiple methods of sync with banks, although I don't know how common these methods are in various parts of the world.
• mulmen 6y ago
  I love the introduction to this post. It reads like an absurd GNU infomercial. Someone is dissatisfied with their current software? There must be a better way! I imagine Richard Stallman himself rappelling down a sold rock face to spread the good word of GNU.
• darcys22 6y ago
  To all the people who are running ledger with bash scripts and piping thru sed & awk I’ve been working on another open source alternative. https://godbledger.com/ https://godbledger.com/ I’ve always thought that having the data recorded in a single text file made the software only suitable for extremely small financial accounts. So I’ve put a SQL database that you have control over as the place where the data is saved (using a similar schema to what GNUCash does). Also added GRPC endpoints so scripts can talk to it easily. It’s still early stage but plan is to make a bunch of front ends so that every financial task within a business can talk to the same backend (bank reconciliations, payroll etc)
• lbotos 6y ago
  Is anyone regularly or reliably getting bank/credit card data via OFX? I've considered switching from Personal Capital to these libre/open solutions, but I'd love to automate the data gathering.
• dang 6y ago
  See also: 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109545 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16857884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16857884
• downerending 6y ago
  Related: Does anyone know of free-ish software to do cash-flow/retirement projections, etc.? For example, I'd input some guesses about income, 401ks, Soc Sec, rent, major necessary expenditures, rates of return and inflation, etc., and have it output balances for several decades. Extra credit for multiple runs with random variation on assumptions. I could write this myself, and have done a trivial one in the past. Is there anything better?
  • ziga 6y ago
    https://www.firecalc.com/ https://www.firecalc.com/ is a good retirement calculator.
  • DavidPeiffer 6y ago
    www.cfiresim.com is also a great resource. It does monte carlo back testing of your probability of success, with success defined as "not running out of money" on a given timeline. A big takeaway (adjustable on "Spending Plan") is "if you can reduce your expenses modestly during a downturn in retirement, your chance of success is much higher". Sequence of Returns risk is also shown pretty well. The failure instances are commonly when your backtest year is immediately prior to a recession or The Great Depression.
  • awinder 6y ago
    I keep a personal capital sync around for pretty much their retirement planner which pulls data from your synced accounts and does some light portfolio checks / some good visualizations of sectors that you’re invested in. https://www.personalcapital.com/ https://www.personalcapital.com/
  • PascLeRasc 6y ago
    I use Wealthfront to handle this. It lets you do everything you described and can make recommendations based on your goals. You can play with things like "what if I moved to another city" and it'll tell you about housing costs, or "what if I took a 2-year sabbatical, could I still retire at 50?". I really value using them as a roboadvisor too, as someone who used to be addicted to Robinhood. I'm a huge fan.
• lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh! I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically. I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken. I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word. And, finally, none of this matters if I have trouble with the real problem - sticking to a budget. Solving that one is what I want personal finance apps to help me with. Keeping track of my finances should be a solved problem, locked in a box and forgotten about.
  • djhaskin987 6y ago
    Tracking your own finances independent of any other party is very much not a solved problem and is more a matter of trust than of technicalities. This is your finances were talking about here. As to financial discipline no amount of tooling is going to help you out with that. Tools can help you you what you already want to do but they can't make you want to do something that you don't want.
  • andrepd 6y ago
    Every bank I've used lets you download your transactions as a csv or qfx, which is then trivial to import onto gnucash (I still need to spend ~20m each month carefully sorting things in categories).
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Do they let you download it programmatically? Because if not, it's next to worthless for any kind of frequent use.
      • xupybd 6y ago
        Once a week I do this. It's far from worthless. It's how I do my budget. Ever dollar earned goes into a spending category. I spend out of the categories. It works amazingly well. Before I had a mortgage I just had 11 bank accounts one for each category. That paired with a stack of automatic payments to allocate each pay check and had pretty well automated my budget.
• clum 6y ago
  I've been using GnuCash for years. It has a great many fantastic features and it has some annoying quirks for sure. I haven't found anything to replace it, but if I could I would. One of the most annoying things: Export account names with Umlauts -> Import them again. Now they are all broken. I have to manually fix the csv file to prevent that and there's never been a fix/devs don't see this as an issue.
• woodruffw 6y ago
  I might be the edge case, but I don't actually find double-entry bookkeeping all that useful as a consumer trying to track my expenses. Instead, I tend to think of my budget as having cycles (monthly, currently), with a net "debit" or "credit" for different aspects of my life. I'm required to credit myself a certain amount in savings every month, and I'm allowed to debit a certain proportions of my income every month for different categories. I end up tracking this with a set of plain text expense ledgers and a small Rust program: https://github.com/woodruffw/pledger https://github.com/woodruffw/pledger
• alexmingoia 6y ago
  I will never understand why people spend time on expense tracking spreadsheets and apps. I mean, you’re the one spending money you already know what you spent it on... Your bank already has a history of transactions if you want to look at it. Put 30% of your income in a savings account, the money for necessary bills in another account with auto-billing, and the rest for spending in a spending account. I see so many people categorizing everything with spreadsheets and budget apps and I just ask myself... why? If you set aside savings and necessary expenses what’s the point of categorizing your spending?
  • echelon 6y ago
    It's even easier if you don't spend at all. So many of the things we buy are temporary, ephemeral pleasures. I'm not saying don't invest in fun and experiences; life is short, and you should enjoy it. But picking up random things at Target and idly browsing Amazon might not be necessary. And might be keeping you working harder, longer. Cheap drinks are just as enjoyable as expensive ones. I've started putting money I would spend on stupid things into savings and investments. Nothing would be better than buying my freedom to work on whatever problems I want to 100% of the time. I've got mutual funds and growth stocks, but my favorite thing is my dividend stocks. I like watching those returns come in because I'm doing nothing to earn them. It feels magical and has helped curb the desire to buy anything I don't need. If I put it into an investment, the money works for me instead of me working for the system.
  • sanderjd 6y ago
    It's because once I started doing it I found that I didn't actually know what I spent money on, not really. I found that my rough estimates for where my money was going were way off and lagged actual changes in my behavior by a number of months. Just as an example, I still don't feel like my family is spending close to double what we used to on groceries during the pandemic, but I know that we are because I have months of history to compare against. So then you could say, great, so you know that for sure now, so what? Well, this is actionable! Continuing with the example, now we can look at the upward trend in groceries and ask whether we're happy about that. Is it an overall upward trend, or is it coming from something else that we've deprioritized? In this case, yeah, it's pretty directly coming out of eating out and socializing, so not something we need to worry about. But in other cases it has provided data to inform hard decisions about where to cut. And that actionable trade off thing isn't even my favorite part! My favorite part is peace of mind when we buy stuff. I don't have to wonder whether we can afford things, we either have the money for it, or we can move money for it from some other thing we were gonna spend it on, or we just can't afford it. But there's no guesswork, which is so much more relaxing than what I used to do (guess and hope). Your mileage may vary, but for me, it's some of the best invested time I spend.
• cjlovett 6y ago
  Yep, this is the same reason I've been using https://github.com/clovett/myMoney.Net https://github.com/clovett/myMoney.Net for the last 20 years and I have to say the data I have now is invaluable. But I have noticed a lot of banks are shutting down their OFX gateways which is disturbing. I think Intuit is moving them all to online backend closed systems which sucks. We should start a citizen initiated referendum to stop that trend and force banks to remain open, letting consumers download their data!!
• S-E-P 6y ago
  I have a slight question, why is the install binary 150+ MB? How many libraries you got?
• misterspaceman 6y ago
  I really like the system described in this video; it's kind of a mix between double-entry and envelope accounting. It's what finally helped me get my budgeting under control. https://youtu.be/eIcsMHL0NJ0 https://youtu.be/eIcsMHL0NJ0 In the video, the guy recommends MoneyDance, but the same system would probably work in GnuCash too.
• arunaugustine 6y ago
  The article mentions Gnucash iOS app but the links in the official wiki was a dead end. Can someone point me to the correct link please?
• koevet 6y ago
  In the last 6 months I have built a set of Python scripts around Beancounter, that import and categorize and archive various bank and CC statements into the ledger. Paired with Fava budgeting capabilities, my personal finance tracking is almost frictionless. It takes literally 5 minutes to go through 5 accounts. Since I live in Germany, I still have to use cash, which is a bit a pain to track. For that, I use an Android app that writes data directly into the Beancount ledger.
• unhammer 6y ago
  We've been using GnuCash for my gf's photo business for years now, it's powerful enough to give everything to do her taxes, but (unlike plain text accounting) very usable for a non-programmer. Invoicing though, she's still been doing with a different program since the ones in GnuCash are hard to get good-looking. I was about to ask for tips here, but then I see there's a whole bunch of stuff out there we could try first: https://github.com/search?q=gnucash+invoice https://github.com/search?q=gnucash+invoice :)
• quietbritishjim 6y ago
  I was a bit flummoxed right at the first example. You bought something at a bakery, so the balance in your credit card increased? It's right there in the increased column. Surely it decreased to a larger negative number? (Credit card accounts are almost always negative, although mine occasionally goes slightly positive when I pay it off and round up to the next pound.) And why are the columns different to the example shown later for the checking account (or current account, as we say here in the UK)? You've got "increase" and "decrease" vs "deposit" and "withdrawal". Obviously you're likely to use your credit card and checking account in substantially different ways, but surely the fundamentals of transferring money in and out is similar enough that they ought to look the same in your finance software?
  • xupybd 6y ago
    No a credit card is a line of credit so a more positive number is more debt you owe. Spending from it increases the balance. A savings account goes the other way. I don't know why but it's an accounting convention. Sometimes I think those conventions just exist to confuse people into needing an accountant.
  • aceofspades19 6y ago
    Every credit card I have had shows the balance increasing every time you make a purchase with it, when you pay the bill, the balance decreases. None of my credit card accounts have ever shown a negative balance unless I over paid the bill.
  • growse 6y ago
    The "credit card" account is a liability account, unlike a bank account which is an asset account. If you spend something on a credit card, your liability increases. > Credit card accounts are almost always negative This is only true if you think of them like a bank account. Every credit card statement I've ever receive has shown the amount I owe as a positive amount.
    • quietbritishjim 6y ago
      > > Credit card accounts are almost always negative > This is only true if you think of them like a bank account. Every credit card statement I've ever receive has shown the amount I owe as a positive amount. I just checked my online banking - I bank with Nationwide, a UK building society (a bit like a US credit union but functions like a bank). In the main statement of accounts, which looks like this [1], the credit card balance is shown negative. So is my mortgage, which makes for a depressing overall sum! I won't bore you with more detail but generally they mostly stick to this pattern in other screens. Oddly, in that example screenshot, the credit card balance is shown as positive - I'm not sure if that's because it's just an example and they faked it wrongly or because the way balances are shown have changed since that picture was taken. I've never had a credit card with anyone else, so that's why I'm surprised that the debt is presented as a positive number. It's interesting to see (from your comment and others) that's it's normally done that way. My initial cynical reaction was that this is a marketing ploy to make you feel a bit less bad about it, and I'm not surprised that Nationwide doesn't follow suit given that it's not run for profit. [1] https://i0.wp.com/money-watch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/nationwide-online-banking.png?w=512&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/money-watch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/... > The "credit card" account is a liability account Interesting, thank you, I hadn't heard of "liability account" before. So it seems that it is something accountants really do use, not just the cynical marketing plot I initially thought. But it still does seem an unnecessary complication to me compared to just having all accounts working the same way (but some happen to be negative). Maybe it's a just mathematician / computer scientist thing of preferring things that make mathematical sense rather normal intuitive sense, a bit like zero-based indexing or end iterators that point one past the end.
• vitoc 6y ago
  I used GnuCash for a few years too, then switched to something else because: 1) I couldn't make transaction importing work for the statements that I want 2) I couldn't get to the report that igpay got (this was many years back) for some reason, I also wanted more custom reports and it seemed really complicated to create one 3) I wanted a tool that was more malleable. Although GnuCash is completely open source, the codebase does not look too approachable for me After trying a few other approaches (including spreadsheets), I settled with Ledger CLI. I also built importing tools over 3 years of coding on weekends and finally got a complete set of features and financial institutions that I want :) Started with the reporting / analytics part recently... You can check it out here: https://prudent.me https://prudent.me Any feedback will be very appreciated :)
• voska 6y ago
  After have using GnuCash, Mint, and about 100 other finance tracking apps, I'm convinced that Tiller Money is the best. Highly recommend checking it out. https://www.tillerhq.com https://www.tillerhq.com Easy to set up and requires the least amount of ongoing work to accurately categorize transactions.
• kumaranvpl 6y ago
  I have been using Monefy pro[0] android app for past 4 or 5 years to keep track of my expenses. I log in all my expenses and income in appropriate category. The main free version should be enough for most people but the pro version grants the ability to add custom categories. All the data is stored locally and it has the ability to export our expenses as csv to make reports. Also, Optional google drive and dropbox backup support is included. P.S. I am not associated with this app. I am just a happy customer. [0] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monefy.app.pro&hl=en_IN https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monefy.app...
• slavoingilizov 6y ago
  I've tried many different apps over the years. I was in the "manual entry is better" camp until I stopped due to friction several months later. The only app I've used which I haven't given up on is Emma (https://emma-app.com/ https://emma-app.com/). On it since beta and been doing that for more than 1year. It automatically pulls all your accounts, categorises spend and gives you analysis on what you can do to improve. Many others promise that, but fail to deliver. Emma works for me, consistently. At the end of the day each of us manage our finances differently and the workflows have to be personalised. It's about finding the one that makes sense to you rather than "the best".
• andriosr 6y ago
  I love the ideas from Ledger and GnuCash, so much that I even created a product inspired on them. I actually think many companies will benefit a lot from having such a simple way to control money movements, instead of having to use something like an ERP system. The product is https://decimals.app https://decimals.app, and the way I thought about bringing the simplicity to it was to wrap the API behind decimals and currency libraries already in use. If you want it for personal use, let me know, but it's something closer to LedgerCLI at this point, as it doesn't come with reports and other things from GnuCash. I can sync all your data to an S3 bucket, so you would have all the data in the json format on your AWS account. As I use DynamoDB, it would be pretty straight forward to do. So, let me know what you thing and if you are interested in using a lib or REST API to create entries to a ledger, hit me up.
• tshanmu 6y ago
  the comments thread on this is much more valuable to me than the article itself (not to say the article is not valuable) :)
• 8589934591 6y ago
  This looks really promising. My current challenge is that I use Ubuntu and my wife uses windows. We definitely need something cross platform. This in turn should help us to share data (version control maybe?) between ourselves, and input the data as and when we feel like it? I work in software dev but my wife doesn't. A simpler layman tech/commands is what she prefers. Are there others who have faced this issue similar to mine? Did you use GnuCash or something else? I'm more of CLI but she's more GUI. So...