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Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

• johntash 3y ago
  This looks pretty great! I used to use beancount + fava a lot, but have been slacking lately because it just feels like work to input everything and catch up. I might give this a try and then see if I can convert my beancount files to ledger.
• Brajeshwar 3y ago
  Nostalgia. I led a small team in 2009 and built Paisa.com - a financial/investment Startup. I still have the initial mockup designs I did in a hotel room in Delhi/Gurgaon to pitch to NDTV.
  • 19f191ty 3y ago
    I remember that! I really liked it. What happened to it? And what are you upto these days?
    • Brajeshwar 3y ago
      It is a long story, but here is the short from my perspective. I left after a year and made the mistake of spending two years building an audio-video dating app. Poor men’s FaceTime-ish tech, but the business failed. However, I sold/transferred the tech to an investor. When we released its beta, early users were happy with the new-age design and one of the best user experiences in a web app for India. Later, I heard MoneyControl sued Paisa.com (I’d consider that a success). The Paisa team went on to become Helpshift.com. One of the founders became an investor, and another is now the co-founder of teamohana.com. Another key member started his own Startup, later acquired by GoJek. And a lot of stories in between. It all started in 2007-2008 when I started in a spare attic in my erstwhile boss’s office and assembled a small but brilliant team. I retained that Startup’s domain for a long time and sold it this year. I need to write about all of this one day. A few publications have written strange stories about it, and I’ve not been interested enough. Now, I’m doing things with Satellite and stuff for Climate and the like.
      • 19f191ty 3y ago
        Interesting journey for all of you then. Why did Moneycontrol sue? I wish they had the foresight of buying the tech from you guys instead? The interface really was ahead of its time then. They could have used that. Cool! What are you doing with climate?
        • Brajeshwar 3y ago
          I left by then, and I'm not aware of the details about MoneyControl. We are entering the Climate Tech scene via MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification) tools by leveraging super-resolution algorithms and Multi-Spectral analysis, aiming for cost-effective and detailed insights. By integrating RADAR/SAR with RGB/MS data, we ensure consistent data collection, even in cloudy conditions, fostering broader engagement in climate action. We are selling to enterprises beginning with some of the ML tools that we wrote.
          • jkka 3y ago
            Do you think enterprises/private corps are interested in proactive climate action? Seems more like something government orgs would invest in, no? Also, you guys hiring interns/FTE? :D
            • Brajeshwar 3y ago
              They have to, and enterprises are the only ones that can have an outsized impact. The government mandates them, and the incentives are getting more substantial to be part of the action. I won't go into details, but YCombinator's RFS[1] does an excellent explanation (albeit from a more commercial angle). We are not proactively seeking but are always open to interesting people. Email me at brajeshwar@oinam.com and we can talk. 1. https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-climatetech/ https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-climatetech/
      • FlyingSnake 3y ago
        Please write the paisa.com story from your PoV. It was such a breath of fresh air and I loved the site. I was really sad to see it shutdown.
  • shauryamanu 3y ago
    I remember seeing it promoted on Gpay, if I remember correctly.
    • Brajeshwar 3y ago
      Really? For the initial Paisa.com, I doubt that. We predated GPay by years.
• freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  I honestly just use excel but that's because I use it as a book of record for receipts as well. Since you're looking for open source alternatives, OpenOffice would fill that need.
  • ntoni 3y ago
    Also used excel previously. Then I switched to an ios app that sync with all my different bank accounts so I don't have to record stuff manually.
  • girishso 3y ago
    I tried Excel few years back, it’s only easy when all you are tracking is income and expenses. But when you buy some stocks or MFs, the amount is debited from Bank but it’s not really an “expense”. And good luck tracking fund flows between your own accounts. I’ve finally settled on hledger for now. There’s some issues, mainly the reports are generated by calendar year, there’s no support for Financial Year reports (Apr-1 till Mar-31 in India).
    • 5ol 3y ago
      You can do this in a few ways, depending on what exactly you want to do: 1. Using period reporting feature (`-p`): hledger bse -p "yearly from 2019-04" --depth=2 --layout=bare -e 2022-04-01 -X₹ 2. Separating journals into April 1 – March 31 financial years. 3. Using `-b` and `-e` to demarcate begin and end dates when generating reports.
      • girishso 3y ago
        That's terrific, thank you!
    • simonmic 3y ago
      Here's a trick for reporting your transfers https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/16d2xkg/add_monthly_mortgage_payment_to_incomestatement/ https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/16d2xk... (alias the account names to expenses/revenues temporarily).
• velcrovan 3y ago
  I am probably the target audience for this kind of thing, but I’m having trouble seeing myself slog through hundreds of household transactions every month (or putting in the time to automate transaction imports from my credit union and credit cards). I’m happy to huck money at YNAB to do all this for me, on top of which they give me an app that my wife and I can both use to check the budget and enter transactions on our phones. Reconciling the accounts and budgeting for the next month becomes maybe a half-hour exercise. Whereas with Paisa I see nothing but entire weekends lost in service of the machine.
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    There is import option available on Paisa, but I agree, it won't match YNAB level experience.
  • chrbr 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I've used YNAB for almost a decade now, but wish it were more powerful for things like investment tracking. I tried last month to get into the ledger systems (beancount, specifically), but it's a huge additional time sink. And implementing YNAB-style envelope-based budgeting on top of them is always a bit of a hack. Went back to YNAB quickly.
    • waynesonfire 3y ago
      > wish it were more powerful for things like investment tracking. Community needs an open-source version of YNAB, not another gnu cash clone. Plaid solves the transaction import problem, the hardest part, unfortunately at the expense of privacy.
  • abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    GnuCash can import directly from your bank [1]. There are also some mobile apps [2], but they are not super well integrated with the desktop application - I think you have to manually export and import every time. [1] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-manual/tools-on-line-banking.html https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-manual/tools-on-li... [2] https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/GnuCash_and_Mobile_Devices https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/GnuCash_and_Mobile_Devices
• mr-karan 3y ago
  Love this project! I've been trying out Paisa off late and it's been great at just de-cluttering my investments in various assets (which are spread all over).
• jaipilot747 3y ago
  This is incredible! Great job building this and also writing the documentation that explains concepts as well as how they are implemented. I can't believe how many comments here are dismissive. If you are happy using a paid solution to manage your finances and don't want to get into the weeds yourself, you are probably not the target audience for this. One suggestion would be to make the country-specific pieces like tax calculations module so others can contribute their own.
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    > One suggestion would be to make the country-specific pieces like tax calculations module so others can contribute their own. This is something I have been thinking about, I need to figure out the base abstraction. Even the current implementation (which is basically written for my personal use cases) has too many conditions/grandfathering etc, I suspect it might not be accurate.
  • redact207 3y ago
    I've been looking for a personal finance app for a long time. I don't want a Saas that charges me monthly and can shutdown at anytime. Most other homebrewed apps are incomplete or abandoned. Of all things I ended up paying for an Excel sheet to track it all - https://cspersonalfinance.io/ https://cspersonalfinance.io/ This tracks all my cashflows, investments, net worth etc, and since it's in excel there's no risk of it disappearing after 10 years
• danscan 3y ago
  Thrilled to see something like this building on Ledger (a great tool by itself). Will definitely check it out!
  • miroljub 3y ago
    I like the fact that the author supports both ledger and hledger.
• mekster 3y ago
  What's with the thousand separator being placed on every 2 digits except for the last 3 digits? How do you even do that, unless you manually regex it? If that's the case, already looks weird on technical decisions. There's never a decent open source self finance management app somehow. It's either bloated or just doesn't look easy on the eyes for simple day to day use.
  • jaipilot747 3y ago
    That's how they are delimited in India and the author is probably from there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    The author is from India (myself) and this is how numbers are formatted there. Locale can be configured via configuration page, so it's just a matter of changing it to `en-US` if you want thousand separator.
    • sdfghswe 3y ago
      Boom headshot
  • lelo_tp 3y ago
    lol, this is such an aggressive reaction. People won't always live where you live. Be kind to others, don't assume there's something wrong until you gather the full context.
• robcohen 3y ago
  This looks awesome. I love that it's built on ledger. I have been wanting to move away from Simplifi Money for some time for obvious reasons (owned by Intuit). It seems that the real moat is pulling the data in a consistent and correct way. Yes, you COULD try to find every single export option for every bank, but I think Plaid is really the only service that pulls this data somewhat correctly, due to the U.S. not having a PSD2 equivalent in our laws. So the question is, would it make sense to have a Plaid plugin for this? Obviously because they are a 3rd party, it negates some of the benefits, but I simply cannot use this system manually because I have so many accounts. Maybe one workaround is to pull from Tiller (which uses plaid), then export a csv/excel. Any chance there's a good plan in place to get automated data imports working, even if we need a 3rd party to do it?
  • itissid 3y ago
    Mint already uses Plaid, but I the transaction information it gets is too low in information to categorize anything reasonably. For example my Amazon Grocery transaction happen on my amazon Chase Credit card(gives me 5% discount). But connecting to Chase.com using plaid pulls in transaction statement is still information poor. The obvious consequence of this is that budget information is not correctly reflected in Mint(that info is actually in my Amazon.com silo). The only way to fix this rn is sadly manually. As a tangent, I do feel though that LLM agents that can one day act on individuals behalf, reading info and making this manual job far more easier in absence of any govt regulations.
    • ydant 3y ago
      Fighting with Mint and categorizing Amazon purchases was what initially pushed me down the path into plain text accounting (PTA). I ended up long down the rabbit hole with auto-downloading Amazon orders (originally with https://github.com/jbms/finance-dl https://github.com/jbms/finance-dl, but then my own custom scraping) and importing and matching them up with credit card transactions using beancount-import (https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import). This ultimately resulted in me spending a lot less on Amazon - to the point that now doing it manually wouldn't be too bad...
    • 3y ago
• Gualdrapo 3y ago
  Today I learned "paisa" is a subunit of the Indian rupee - here we call "paisa" to all things related to a specific region of Colombia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisa_(region) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisa_(region))
  • codegeek 3y ago
    The word "Paisa" is also used generally for "money" depending on the context. But specifically, 100 Paisas = 1 INR (Rupee).
  • cultofmetatron 3y ago
    its also a term used to refer to women with a certain "look" from medellin. my ex was an example. "paisa as an areppa" is a pretty common term there.
    • sdfghswe 3y ago
      Tell us, what does it mean? "as an areppa" suggests flat and round...?
      • criloz2 3y ago
        It's the same as saying "American as a burger", arepa is just a traditional food in Colombia, a bread made of corn
        • sdfghswe 3y ago
          Ok but I was wondering if you'd describe the "look".
          • cultofmetatron 3y ago
            this should help https://www.tiktok.com/discover/Paisa-girls https://www.tiktok.com/discover/Paisa-girls
      • 3y ago
• tmikaeld 3y ago
  This is great! If you could add multi-language support, then I'm sure my family will use it :) > I am interested in knowing what people normally want to understand about their finances For my family use cases - seeing upcoming expenses and how much is left in the account on the specific dates in a calendar time-flow view, this way we can see how and when things are spent and if new entries are added we can plan for how much is left at a specific target date (like a trip). I've seen nothing like this, so would be extremely useful.
  • jaipilot747 3y ago
    Haven't used it but it sounds like this feature would work? https://paisa.fyi/reference/budget/ https://paisa.fyi/reference/budget/
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    I don't know what you mean by multi-language support. But calendar view on Budget page is something I can think about. I will soon add a calendar view to Recurring page.
    • tmikaeld 3y ago
      Basically translating it to Swedish, which I don't mind helping with! In other words, i18n support.
      • ananthakumaran 3y ago
        Got it, it's too early for i18n
• asdajksah2123 3y ago
  Here's something that always trips me up when I look into non professional software for double entry accounting (or more accurately, instructions around them). It's been a long time, so I may be getting it wrong, but I do have some introductory information of accounting. And according to that, in a transaction such as salary received, the accounting would look something like: Income: Salary - Credit Assets: Checking - Debit. The Golden rule/s that apply here (Debit the receiver, credit the giver) However, looking at the tutorial, the example given is: 2022/01/01 Salary Income:Salary:Acme (Debit Account) Assets:Checking (Credit Account) This is the opposite of what I expect, however, I see this all the time when looking at tutorials/information written by SW devs. What am I missing or is everyone else just getting it wrong?
  • thuruv 3y ago
    Thats correct with DE accounting. However I always assumed, the logic followed here is that the money has been "debited from" the INCOME account and "CREDITED to" Assets/Checkings.
    • john2x 3y ago
      Debit from employer's account, credited to your bank.
    • asadjb 3y ago
      My somewhat limited understanding of this is that from your perspective, an increase in your asset/cash account would be a debit. A big confusion for me initially was that my banks always talked about crediting my account whenever money was deposited/added to my account. I finally understood it when I realized that from the banks perspective, an increase in my account is an increase in their liability towards me; they now owe me more money. Which is why they call it crediting my account. So now I think of it like this: an increase in an asset is always a debit, an increase in liability is always a credit.
  • PopAlongKid 3y ago
    "Debits and credits are nothing more than “increases” and “decreases” to accounts." Don't try to apply logic; it is just a convention: debits to the left, credits to the right. In particular, the first example above is correct. An asset account is increased by debits; a credit increases a revenue account. Salary received: Income: Salary - Credit Assets: Checking - Debit.
• GingerMidas 3y ago
  Awesome! I've been using Beancount/Fava for over 2 years now and this looks really slick. One thing off the bat I noticed, it doesn't look like custom Tags are supported? I use tags all the time in beancount, say to filter for a trip #trip-europe-2022 which would break down my cash flow and balances (and the rest of the fava UI) for a subset of transactions.
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    > One thing off the bat I noticed, it doesn't look like custom Tags are supported? Not as of now, Tags are used only for recurring transactions as of now. I first need to figure out how to bring the filter into the UI. Everything now works based on Account names only.
    • GingerMidas 3y ago
      Makes sense - great work so far! This is easily the best looking PTA app I've seen.
  • seltzered_ 3y ago
    Just FYI if you're used to beancount & fava I started prototyping a more integrated experience for it: https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage . Still early days though.
• cultofmetatron 3y ago
  wow, now I can say I like my personal finance manager the way I like my women.
• lionkor 3y ago
  Slightly off topic but how do people use these? Depending on where/what I pay, I pay with an assortment of credit cards, bank account, debit cards, paypal, etc. Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something?
  • GingerMidas 3y ago
    > Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something? Yes, exactly that. You can do automatic imports of your bank statements but that's arguably more hassle. It takes 10 minutes at the end of my day to record all my transactions and it gives me a complete understanding of where my money is going.
    • brewdad 3y ago
      I do the bank import once a week. I set aside an hour on my calendar to update all of my spending accounts. It usually takes more like 15-20 minutes unless I find something unexpected. For longer term accounts like my 401k, IRAs, and brokerage accounts, I track money going in our out but only update the gains/losses every 6 months or annually on Dec 31st.
    • n6242 3y ago
      I only do it every few days but pretty much the same. I find it's too easy to lose track of how much I've been spending, so by doing it manually I always notice before it becomes a problem. It also helps me save because I notice right away if I get charged for a subscription I'm not using and I can cancel it.
    • teeray 3y ago
      > It takes 10 minutes at the end of my day to record all my transactions I’d love to be able to do this, but realistically (for me), I’d need something that works reliably on my worst days. If I’m out late, on vacation for a few days, dealing with some on-call thing all night, etc., I don’t want to be beholden to a 10-minute per day commitment that accumulates linearly. Discipline can only get me so far in the face of chaos—automation can take me the rest of the way there.
• charles_f 3y ago
  This looks very similar to Beancount, which has been around for a while and has quite the community and extensions. How does this differentiate?
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    It is quite similar to Beancount Fava. I want to focus and improve some of the things like app distribution (desktop/single cli binary) and the UI (reporting) and make it accessible for more users.
• bakul 3y ago
  Looks good! Paisa Vasool! Especially as it is free :-) You don’t have to, of course, but do you plan to open source it? That way others can contribute to it too. How tightly is it bound to ledger? How hard would it be to adapt it to other plaintext accounting programs like beancount?
  • simonmic 3y ago
    It includes hledger support I believe.
  • dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    https://github.com/ananthakumaran/paisa https://github.com/ananthakumaran/paisa
    • bakul 3y ago
      Very good! Thanks!
• mcshicks 3y ago
  This looks really cool I've used beancount/fava for tax planning, but of course I had to code up my own tax models. In the US tax table change every year (by a predictable formula) and some forms of income are weird, like I bonds are exempt from federal tax, but are taxed by state income tax. It seems unlikely that you could support all the cases, but is there a straightforward way to plug in your own model? I did see in tax.go you had long term, short term, but couldn't quite find the income tax tables, like long term capital gains has different rates depending upon filing status and amount.
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    I have replied at another thread, but there is no plugin support as of now. My country changes the rules every year and add grandfathering, xyz rules etc. I think, I have to figure out a DSL or some other way to make it general. This is something I am interested, but haven't figured out how to solve it yet.
• mahoro 3y ago
  This is awesome! I like how it's built and I looks like it's open for integrations of any kind. I'm also too impatient to manually enter all transactions but import from PDF statement form a bank looks like a doable task. The only transactions that would be required to enter manually is cash/crypto/etc but for them there are no other choice. Contrats with the the release Anantha and I hope your project will gain attention it deserves!
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    Feel free to open an issue if you can't get PDF import working. This is something I am interested in improving. I have tested with few PDFs and they are hit/miss based on how the data is encoded.
• VinLucero 3y ago
  Love the clean interface example into ledger-cli!
• sdfghswe 3y ago
  What is the difference between this and GnuCash? GnuCash also allows you to generate reports from double-entry accounting.
• sbehere 3y ago
  I think it helps if personal finance managers explicitly describe at least the following: 1. What automation, if any, exists for entering transactions? This is the most laborious/cumbersome part of personal finance. Some tools use financial data aggregators (plaid, yodlee etc.) that involves sharing login credentials with a third party, sometimes disabling 2FA, or other steps that are anti-security or anti-privacy. It sucks that in the USA at least, there is practically no way for customers to fetch their bank data via an open API. Until recently, many financial institutions supported OFX, but that is being phased out. 2. How is categorization of transactions accomplished? Ideally, I want autocategorization based on my own previously categorized transactions, since the bulk of my transactions are repeats at the same merchants. 3. What sort of reporting, dashboarding, and potentially sharing capabilities exist? Ideally, I want to share some reports with my partner A while ago, I created my own homegrown system to automate my personal finances[1]. It is capable of doing all of the above, without sharing data with a 3rd party. Unfortunately, the automated transaction retrieval mostly does not work because financial institutions are dropping support for OFX. [1]: https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/ https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/
  • mgkimsal 3y ago
    > How is categorization of transactions accomplished? Ideally, I want autocategorization based on my own previously categorized transactions, since the bulk of my transactions are repeats at the same merchants. One of my aggregators categorizes any alcohol purchases (purchases from a state 'ABC' store) as 'home improvement'. While technically the house looks better when I'm drunk, I still thinks it's a mistake, and I submitted feedback to them. 2 years ago. No change.
    • Telemakhos 3y ago
      Would you rather your aggregator sell your alcoholism data to your health insurance company, or your joy of maintenance and taking good care of your property to your home insurance company?
      • mgkimsal 3y ago
• edoceo 3y ago
  I want to know where my money goes. I like to look at stacked-area (or column) charts of the categories of spending. To make this work I have some software I made ~20 years ago that does double-entry book-keeping. At the end of the month, I import statements from financial service providers (eg: Wells Fargo, Chase, PayPal, Stripe, etc). Lots of stuff is repeat purchases (eg: Shell Gas) and my software automatically categorises. Some transactions I have to categorise manually. Each category / vendor becomes an expense-account and my banks and CCs exist as assets and liabilities. Once the import and reconciliation is done I pull up a my column chart that shows where the money went -- and can compare over time -- see a full year of movement. I've been through various charting libraries with it and most recently moved to ECharts[0] -- so I'm planning to expand with Treemap and Sankey style visuals. The import process, which I do monthly takes maybe an hour. I'm importing from like 5 bank accounts, 3 payment processors, 4 CC providers. The part that takes the longest is signing into their slow sites, navigating past pop-up/interstitial, getting to their download page and waiting for it to download. Loads of these sites (WF, Chase) have been "modernised" and have some real bullshit UI/UX going on -- lags, no keyboard, elements jump around, forms can't remember state, ctrl+click won't open in a new page cause that damned link isn't actually a link but some nested monster of DIVs with 19 event listeners on each one -- and somehow still all wrong. I think the most-best feature would be to have some tool automatically get all my transactions from all these providers into one common format. Gimmee some JSON with like 10 commonly-named fields for the normal stuff and then 52 other BS fields that each provider likes to add (see a PayPal CSV for example). Does that exist and I just don't know? [0] https://echarts.apache.org/ https://echarts.apache.org/
  • bbkane 3y ago
    I don't know about a service that does this, but you might be able to script the website logins with https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/
  • alchemist1e9 3y ago
    I’m in a similar boat and this comment has an interesting link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37613525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37613525
• halotrope 3y ago
  This looks great! We've been building a wealth tracker with https://markets.sh https://markets.sh and were a bit flabbergasted when people started "abusing" our automatically syncing Yodlee connection to hook up all of their checking and credit card accounts (technically we market only for brokerages and investment accounts). We have a free and simple API and plain CSV download which in itself seems to be a real pain point for people. Apparently, just being able to pull your financial data into open-source tools and excel could be a product since Yodlee and other aggregators are often too expensive and technical to set up for individuals. I think we need to force all financial companies to have a modern API and OAuth available for everyone via legislation.
  • lukebennett 3y ago
    > I think we need to force all financial companies to have a modern API and OAuth available for everyone via legislation. That already exists[0] in the UK [0] https://www.openbanking.org.uk/ https://www.openbanking.org.uk/
    • halotrope 3y ago
      Europe has a shot too but what i’ve found is that the API’s are often so clunky and bad that they might as well not exist
    • domh 3y ago
      It's been a little while since I've looked into the Open Banking API stuff - how easy is it to use this API as a consumer? Or do I have to create a business and apply for a license in order to use it?
      • jon-wood 3y ago
        Open Banking is in some ways misnamed - you can't as an end-user just do OAuth and get a data feed out of your account, you'll have to go via a third party who've jumped through all the hoops.
        • 3y ago
• scubakid 3y ago
  It's interesting how many tools can analyze where your money has been going, but few go deep on the planning + forecasting side. Have you thought about building out the "retirement" module more? If you need any inspiration, I've been working on a personal finance simulator [1] for the past two and a half years as a side project. Really great job with the docs on this, and I love that you include a demo environment! I imagine that eventually we'll see an app that pulls budgeting, tracking, and planning all together in a fully seamless way. Whoever manages that will probably be a force to be reckoned with. [1]: https://projectionlab.com https://projectionlab.com
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    I have seen projectionlab before and agree with you. There are few tools on the forecast side. Most of them stop at budgeting. I do have plans to make retirement page generic (aka Goals/Target), but I am yet to figure out the details. In an ideal world, double entry accounting would be your database and there would be lot of tools that use that and focuses on a specific niche. But we are far from that and everyone wants to create their own data island.
    • sanat 3y ago
      This is a nice interface that you could emulate for some of the goals/target level details. I quite like the simplistic UI. It's a lead magnet for an Indian PMS service. https://plan.capitalmindwealth.com/ https://plan.capitalmindwealth.com/
  • jldugger 3y ago
    Realistically, the data you need for retirement planning doesn't intersect much with double entry personal finance data. How much you spend on subway last week has nothing do to with your risk of financial ruin at age 90. All you really need from that dataset is your current portfolio. Everything else you need is specific to investing -- variance of investment, portfolio mix, covariance of returns, age of retirement, life expectancy, etc. From that standpoint, it's practically an entirely new product. There's also something to be said about the 4 percent rule, and whether additional forecasting work actually improves outcomes. Heuristics seem do to a decent job.
• MenhirMike 3y ago
  Has anyone compared this to YNAB4? (Not the cloud-only subscription-only YNAB, but the good one that was killed off in 2019) It's by far the best household bookkeeping tool I've ever used, but it won't ever get updates again (running it in a VM just so I can make sure I will always be able to run it), and it would be nice to have something that can track stocks and maybe even foreign currency - but for now, I would be happy with something that can just replace YNAB4. The lack of Quicken OFX Import is a bummer :( But if the CSV import is good, it would still work. (As much of a pain as OFX is to implement for developers, especially since there's at least two major versions, it is pretty widely supported by US banks to download my transaction history) Will probably give it a spin on the weekend, since the demo actually looks promising!
  • JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
    I use YNAB 4 every day on macOS thanks to patches available online for the Adobe Air framework (from 32 to 64 bits). What OS are you using?
    • MenhirMike 3y ago
      I use Windows, though I did download the 64-Bit macOS patch just in case I ever need it. Mostly just playing it safe in case there are future incompatibilities because they'll have to pry YNAB4 from my cold, dead hands - unless I find an actual alternative :D
    • cec 3y ago
      Is a MacOS build of YNAB 4 still available?
      • MenhirMike 3y ago
        https://github.com/banesto/YNAB4-64bit/ https://github.com/banesto/YNAB4-64bit/
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    OFX is unheard of in my country. I would look into it if someone could open a issue and attach a few sample OFX files.
• eviks 3y ago
  Is there any good non-web non-plaintext (which is unsuitable for rich data despite its initial allure) alternative?
  • aidenn0 3y ago
    gnucash?
• wreck 3y ago
  @ananthakumaran, can this be installed via Docker and ran in the browser like your demo[1]? [1]: https://demo.paisa.fyi/ https://demo.paisa.fyi/
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    Yes, check the installation page https://paisa.fyi/getting-started/installation/ https://paisa.fyi/getting-started/installation/
    • gassi 3y ago
      Sorry I don't see any instructions to run this on Docker on that page. Do you publish an image to the Docker hub?
      • ananthakumaran 3y ago
        I meant, you could download the cli using wget and run it inside the docker. There is no prebuilt docker image as of now. I will look into it later.
• ffpip 3y ago
  Love the app, will try it for a few days. Thanks for making it. Hopefully I can contribute after trying it for a few days!
• ibdf 3y ago
  How are people automating the data import? I can't imagine someone entering everything by hand. Lots of places don't even provide an export file you can work with... most of them offer a PDF. It seems like most financial places rely on Plaid for the data integration, but that's a paid service I don't think Open-Source or free personal finance apps would use.
  • eredengrin 3y ago
    As far as standard checking/savings/credit card accounts go, I haven't had one that didn't have a csv export option yet. Some of them are very buried and much harder to find and use than I wish, but they are there at least with the banks I use.
  • BeetleB 3y ago
    Most banks/CC have some sort of export - be it in CSV, OFX, Quicken, etc. Then you import it using your financial story. The real pain is in the categorization (was this Groceries, Supplies, Dining, Medical Expense)? I use KMyMoney which usually picks the same category as the last transaction from the same place. Saves some of the work, but it's still painful. I then wrote a script to export from KMyMoney to ledger format.
    • astral303 3y ago
      Categorization seems like low-hanging fruit given the age of AI we are in today.
      • ska 3y ago
        You think so? They have such inconsistent reporting, and the data is the exactly hard kind to aggregate massive sets of.
      • BeetleB 3y ago
        > Categorization seems like low-hanging fruit given the age of AI we are in today. AI can assist, but that's it. When I go to a Kroger's store, I may buy food. Or I buy supplies. Or medicine. Or gifts. Or something else. And almost always a combination of these. We are already at 5 categories, without mentioning others. All my CC will report is a transaction at Kroger's. How is an AI supposed to guess how much I spent on each?
• waynesonfire 3y ago
  i won't use any finance manager that doesn't employ the envelop method, like ynab. looking at the demo for 10 seconds it looks like a web based gnu cash.
  • AlanYx 3y ago
    You can easily do the envelope method in ledger (aka. ledger-cli if you're searching for it), which is the back end for Paisa.
  • BeetleB 3y ago
    This is based on ledger, which actually does allow envelope based budgeting via virtual accounts. No idea if Paisa handles virtual accounts well.
    • ananthakumaran 3y ago
      Paisa supports budgeting and the model is inspired by YNAB. It doesn't use virtual account, but uses periodic transaction which is simpler from data entry perspective, but achieves the same thing
      • BeetleB 3y ago
        Not trying to be argumentative, but every time I've heard someone claim they do envelope budgeting in ledger without virtual accounts, I've always found a flaw in their approach.[1] So let me give you the standard scenario: I have two checking accounts, and a credit card. I budget $300/mo on groceries. Sometimes I buy groceries with my credit card, and sometimes using money from either of those two checking accounts. Last month I spent $200. This month I'll spend $350. I should see that I have $50 left in the envelope. At the same time, I should see an accurate amount of money in my actual checking accounts/credit card (i.e. despite doing automatic transactions). How do you do this with periodic transactions, and without a virtual account? [1] Same goes for Beancount. The author was adamant one could do it without virtual accounts, but never showed a way to do it.
        • 3y ago
• jonathankoren 3y ago
  I got turned off with the cookie popup. There's literally no reason why you need any of that. You want to know which pages people are visiting? Mine your htaccess logs.
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    Unfortunately this is hosted on github pages and I can't get usage information without using 3rd party analytics.
    • jonathankoren 3y ago
      Well then, I guess the two solutions are obvious.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • bbkane 3y ago
        I think he's happy with the solution he found...
    • dvdkon 3y ago
      Just so you know, opt-out cookie banners are illegal in the EU. If you want to only measure visits, there are alternatives to Google Analytics that don't even require a notice, since they don't record personal information (Plausible is one, but there are many others).
• asveikau 3y ago
  I wondered about the name. I guess I'm unfamiliar with a bunch of South Asian references, apparently it is Hindi and related to currency: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%88%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%BE https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%88%E0%A4%B8%E... I was perplexed a bit because paisa (like paisano, countryman) is also a word I hear a lot among Latin American immigrants in the US, seems like one of those things that can be taken offensively but I mostly seem to hear it as a term of endearment.
  • makingstuffs 3y ago
    Yeah it means money in Hindi
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • deleted 3y ago
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• arun-mani-j 3y ago
  It's nice and has a lot of quite advanced features. If you want a simple app to track lent and borrows among friends and circle then try Debitum. But it's for Android only.. https://github.com/marmo/debitum https://github.com/marmo/debitum
• thrway9925235 3y ago
  I must admit as a Western-denomination consumer I was thrown off by the display of the monetary convention such as this --> 1,25,80,568 then realized it must be in Lakh and the author coming from this convention. The difference in perception is interesting.
• esosac 3y ago
  having using hledger for a little more than a year, this is all my reporting dreams came true. thank you so much
• flandish 3y ago
  I use “pocketsmith” because I like the look ahead calendar view. Does this offer that? I could not see it in the demo.
• trippyrooster 3y ago
  I have a tool to easily convert bank csv's to ledger format https://github.com/muralisc/bank2ledger-cli https://github.com/muralisc/bank2ledger-cli
• lijok 3y ago
  This looks great. Semi-related to this: does anyone know of any double entry ledgers backed by actual databases like dynamo?
• codethief 3y ago
  That cookie banner is straight from hell. Took me a solid minute to realize how to disable tracking. Ugghh.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• rambambram 3y ago
  After building and using my own bookkeeping solution for my small business, one of the main takeaways for me before and after I built it was that bookkeeping software is only useful once you know the bookkeeping rules. Whatever software solution you use - whether that's some webapp, an Excel sheet, or some homegrown solution - you always need to know these rules. Even the simple rules for a small business take some time and understanding to get a grip on. I haven't seen bookkeeping software that is plug-and-play, so without knowing these rules as a user, if that's even possible!? Knowing this for my own situation made me decide to opt for a homegrown software solution, because I had to learn these rules anyway. I felt more capable in my programming language of choice than in Excel, and I didn't want to pay for a SaaS solution, let alone learn another interface.
  • hedgehog0 3y ago
    Any any suggestions or recommendations for learning these rules? Either for future business or current personal finance management?
    • rambambram 3y ago
      Start reading up on 'double entry' bookkeeping. Soon enough you will read about certain constructs and try these as a tutorial on your own financial situation. That's how I did it. Because of the 'double entry' you can find out soon enough when you're making mistakes, and then 'bugfixing' these mistakes makes you learn quick enough. Well, this is how I did it.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• iFire 3y ago
  LICENSE AGPL3 https://github.com/ananthakumaran/paisa/blob/master/COPYING https://github.com/ananthakumaran/paisa/blob/master/COPYING I won't use this because I can't ensure all my systems can be agpl3. Like bank systems I don't control.
  • mattigames 3y ago
    This is false, interacting with public APIs that are not under your control is allowed under AGPL3, the only thing you may have to do is release any code you may add to connect with those APIs. Source https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8201/if-i-use-a-public-api-endpoint-that-has-its-source-code-licensed-under-agpl-in-m https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8201/if-i-use...
    • iFire 3y ago
      I refuse, would rather release on my own terms like Apache 2 or MIT or any other license.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• danielvaughn 3y ago
  Tools where you control the underlying data in plain text are severely underrated. I love this.
• SanjayMehta 3y ago
  It has a CLI? And it’s on macOS? I’m sold.
• anjel 3y ago
  Any plans for a Linux version?
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    Cli is already available for linux (which provides the same functionality, just that you have to use the web browser instead of desktop window) For desktop app I plan to add support soon. The delay is because there are too many variations (appimage/flatpak/deb/snap) and I need to figure out which one to support etc. I use linux myself (NixOS).
    • grudg3 3y ago
      any plans to get this into nixpkgs?
      • ananthakumaran 3y ago
        The project comes with a flake.nix file, you can try that (you would still need to build it manually, I use the flake only to bring the dev environment, not to build the final package). I don't plan to submit to nixpkg myself or any other package managers. I will only focus on binary builds that's downloadable from release page. I don't have any experience with maintaining distro level packages, and I don't think I can figure out the details and keep it maintained. I will leave it to the community to figure that out.
        • aidenn0 3y ago
          I had to modify the flake.nix to get "npm run build" to work
• Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
  I love the idea, but to me one of the key things is being able to record expenses manually from the phone, in the same account my wife uses. I'm stuck with ynab for this requirement
  • thelazyoxymoron 3y ago
    Give Actual Budget a try: https://actualbudget.org/ https://actualbudget.org/
• kelnos 3y ago
  Wow, this is fantastic! I've been using GNUCash for some simpler tasks, like tracking income and expenses for a rental property, not for all of my personal finance. But GNUCash is... kinda clunky, and I'm not sure of the best way to share the data, as my partner would appreciate having access to it too. I love that this has a web interface, but still seems to have a fairly simple data model based on `ledger` and plain text files. I see some other posts about data import from banks, and that's always been the thing keeping me from doing this for all of my personal finance. I just don't think I'd be able to keep up if I had to manually log into bank, brokerage, and credit card accounts, download my data for each one (assuming they even allow a CSV-style download), and import into GNUCash (or whatever). I'm curious about the Plaid option (and really cool a Plaid employee is posting here), but I've always been wary of them. It looks like they have some sort of OAuth-like process for one of my financial institutions, but the others are all "give Plaid your credentials and we promise to keep them safe". Not really comfortable with that. Everyone gets hacked eventually. Regardless, I'm not too keen on giving Plaid literally all of my financial data; just doesn't seem like a great idea. But it seems like there's really no alternative, at least in the US. I wish the government would mandate that all of these institutions implement a standardized API, and that they give regular people (not just big companies) access to their own data through it. Sigh...
• hawk01 3y ago
  Amazing I stumbled across Paisa a while back on plaintextaccounting subreddit and has come a long way since
• cryptozeus 3y ago
  Great work but not useful unless there is integration with 3rd party via plaid
• dvdkon 3y ago
  I was looking for some software that I could use to make sense of my bank transactions from imported statements, and sadly found that none of the FLOSS options I tried could import the counterparty's bank account number. I have to ask, do people mostly enter transactions manually into their personal finance software? Or do they just go by names for imported transactions? This means that I can't meaningfully import transactions between my multiple accounts. Do others just fix them up manually?
• BOOSTERHIDROGEN 3y ago
  I’m using beancount with fava as UI, any experience why you choose based on Ledger vs Beancount ? Thanks
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    Nothing specific, I was even looking at adding support for beancount then realized it's much more strict and doesn't support some features like periodic transactions (which I use for budgeting)
  • seltzered_ 3y ago
    You may want to take a look at my prototype of melding an editor experience with fava: https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage
• pasc1878 3y ago
  Unfortunately I can't see your web site as it does not work without sending cookies to Google. Please implement the site with only needed cookies. NB this means that your site cannot be used in Europe,
  • bbor 3y ago
    If you have time, could you clarify how you can tell that? I just opened it in Europe and the blurb seems to pass “these cookies are for internal self-improvement of the product only” (see below). Is your problem that google is managing the analytics so could be spying, or that the stated use isn’t essential? I guess my assumption was that “non-essential” meant “built for the purposes of 3P advertising” We use cookies to recognize your repeated visits and preferences, as well as to measure the effectiveness of our documentation and whether users find what they're searching for. With your consent, you're helping us to make our documentation better.
    • pasc1878 3y ago
      Non non essential means to make the web site work for the user. Getting information about home many hits the web site has or how it performs are not essential uses of cookies. preferences are not essential as you can just use the default. i usually accept cookies for Preferenceis but not for measurement and not for any sort of advertising.
    • hydroid7 3y ago
      Cannot used legally.
      • maccard 3y ago
        Third party cookies aren't illegal in Europe.
        • brnt 3y ago
          Undeniable Google Analytics is.
• 8589934591 3y ago
  I'm a longtime user of gnucash and this is a great product to convince me to move to ledger/hledger. Question for author - Is it mostly a reporting tool or does it work similar to h/ledger where I can input my transactions from paisa? Question for HN users - have you found ledger to be easier to use compared to gnucash? My challenges have been my lack or ease of understanding on how to input transactions in ledger and also getting good reports comparable to gnucash. It's highly likely I'm unaware of how to use the tool properly but I am not sure where to learn this.
  • skowalak 3y ago
    I made the switch to hledger about two years ago and I have struggled using the command line to input my transactions. Right now I use my text editor (nvim) and a snippet engine for my common / recurring transactions. This may be a little more work than just setting everything up to work automatically, but I like it. For reporting, there are some tools which can help with that, I used to use hreports [0], but have since switched to my own script, which exports the data from hledger and queries it itself. A good (although opinionated) resource for learning how to use hledger is the manual, which goes in depth about different accounting and modeling concepts [1]. [0]: https://hreports.readthedocs.io/en/latest/readme.html https://hreports.readthedocs.io/en/latest/readme.html [1]: https://hledger.org/dev/hledger.html https://hledger.org/dev/hledger.html
    • simonmic 3y ago
      Too opinionated ? I'd be interested in examples of that.
      • skowalak 3y ago
        I did say "opinionated", not "too opinionated" and I believe that is a fair characterization, would you not agree? Anyway, thanks for all your work on hledger and pta in general, Simon!
        • simonmic 3y ago
• seltzered_ 3y ago
  Very cool! I was trying a different approach of packaging a vscode experience with beancount / fava built-in, but haven't had time to get quite as far as you: https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage Have you considered incorporating a split view of the ledger with the reports?
• movedx 3y ago
  I’ve been using YNAB as of late. Cheap enough it’s a no brainer and it’s really good.
• harshilsharma63 3y ago
  Thanks for creating this tool! I was really in need of something open source, and something I can contribute to.
• coldtrait 3y ago
  This looks great. Is there any way this can be integrated with bank accounts, credit cards and mutual fund transactions? In India specifically?
• OJFord 3y ago
  This is really weird for me, a few years ago I was trying to build exactly this - as in same ledger-based, local-first/only etc. decisions - only difference really was that I never got as far as visualisations, and faffed about with PDF->ledger instead until I lost motivation for the project. Very nice to see! I look forward to trying this out properly soon. I recommend not bothering with PDFs, OCR errors however occasional ruin it - it's worse if they're rare in a way, since you come to trust it. If you really do want it, extract the actual text layer instead. There won't always be one, tables will be a mess, and sometimes there'll be a lot of nonsense - but at least the correct content that is there will be £74.97 or whatever, not misread as £24.87.
  • ananthakumaran 3y ago
    It does have PDF import support, I am using pdf.js to extract data and it works decently from what I have tested.