> As an engineer, it is in my DNA to build things. However, it’s too easy to get stuck in the mindset that you have to build everything. This mentality often leads one stuck with a plethora of incomplete products that grew too complex to finish before losing interest.
This. I can relate so much. I feel my instinct is always to roll-my-own because I can and, perhaps more importantly, because I'm not familiar with relevant no-code services.
What other such tools/services are out there that can help "to go from idea to proof-of-concept in only a few hours."?
It's relatively new, but I've been using Coda.io to build a lot of interesting ideas out. I've built some fantasy leagues, a very powerful task tracker/organizer, and do all of my trip planning using it.
The tools in the article, google sheets and zapier are quite good. A few more that might fit are airtable, webflow and stripe. Maybe even look into something like google app maker as well.
For anyone who wants to do things like double-entry accounting with transaction splits (e.g., properly encode an Amazon order for 5 different items from different expense categories, that're paid for by a mix of rewards points, Gift Card balance, and CC), there's GnuCash.
You can also do things like record transactions yourself, update with downloaded data, and reconcile against monthly statements (as another way of catching discrepancies).
You can make custom reports with charts. I used these, for example, for comparing how much I spent buying coffee every day, vs. how much I spent on every cost that goes into making coffee at home, when I tried that for a while.
There's also features for tracking investments, including automatic updates of market prices.
And, if you're a small business, you can build and generate invoices (including building the invoice over multiple days), and track accounts receivable.
Warning: GnuCash can be a significant investment of time. I eventually decided it was no longer worth it for me, though I might someday resume it.
Other Warning: If you have retirement accounts or other investments in GnuCash, consider hiding them from view, which GnuCash lets you do with any account. Bogleheads-style, US people probably want to keep contributing to a predetermined balance of total-market stocks and bonds, automatically, and not think about it, especially when there's market fluctuations.
> You can make custom reports with charts. I used these, for example, for comparing how much I spent buying coffee every day, vs. how much I spent on every cost that goes into making coffee at home, when I tried that for a while.
Nice! But why do you need a separate report for that? Just put all the coffee-related expenses into their own subaccount of the expense account for Food, and run the standard expense reports on that account.
> Warning: GnuCash can be a significant investment of time. I eventually decided it was no longer worth it for me, though I might someday resume it.
Oh, I know what you mean. Especially when you first set it up.
For me, it's about 15 minutes per week, all things considered. I track all expenses, including cash expenses. The only thing I don't break down into individual items are grocery bills. Those get folded into one daily "Groceries" transaction.
I admire how you've managed to do this easily (and avoid writing code for everything). But the fact that you have to do it shows how broken and lethargic banks have become.
In the UK, they are starting to wake up. The new "challenger" banks which exist here all do this as a hygiene feature - see Monzo, Starling, Revolut. With Open Banking mandating open APIs for all banks, this will become the norm soon. The fact that American banks and regulation hasn't jumped on this is a symptom of something very wrong with the system.
I sincerely hope the launch of Apple Card or similar services disrupt consumer finance in the US as well and set a new bar. And when the above mentioned banks come to the US (which they are currently working on), you should absolutely switch and delete the 100 lines of python as well.
Banking in the US is utterly ridiculous. In Europe, if you need to move up to 100,000E in a day, you can do it with a few clicks or taps, and maybe a card reader that they already gave you.
In the US, you have to use a wire transfer is you're moving more than about $4,000. And wires cost a lot of money. And they aren't even instant even though they are billed that way.
I had to move some money from one account I own to another, and I needed it there the same day. The only way to make it happen was to drive 15 minutes to the origin bank, spend 15 minutes filling out a paper form in the branch, which was then faxed to the central processing center. Then I had to call the center center every hour to see if they'd gotten to it yet. When they finally did do it, I had to call the receiving bank with the tracking number and tell them, and then they had to find it on their side, which took a couple minutes, before it was finally processed.
From the time I finished filling out the "instant" wire form (and paying $45!) to the time it hit my other account was over three hours! And that was after the initial 30 minute delay of driving to the bank and filling out a paper form.
Hi, sorry for a bit of off-topic but perhaps someone could tell me if I'm wrong here. I clicked on this article on medium.com and it shows me a dialog from Google asking if I want to continue browsing medium.com authenticated with my Google account. It shows there my name and e-mail address.
I find it a bit concerning. Can medium.com technically walk through the DOM of that page to harvest my personal data such as e-mail address and send it to medium.com with some API call?
I guess it must be filled by some .js code linked from google domains. Scary to see my e-mail address appear on random web page I entered.
Medium doesn't have access to that part, even though you see it on your screen. It use an iframe, which in the past, was accessible, but now with crossdomain policy and all that, the iframe content is no longer accessible.
The brilliance of this is the use of email receipts as the data source. There's so many services that use Yodlee (and/or the the Quicken-style "direct connect" method) to fetch your transactions but they all eventually fall over:
- your credentials change
- your credentials require MFA authentication
- your credentials require a password reset or security question/answer intervention
- the bank, Yodlee, or the service lose track of the transaction offset and you get duplicate transactions or missing transactions
- the service doesn't transmit all available metadata
I've done something similar recently; but instead of grabbing data from my bank, I chose to enter data manually from receipts.
This makes it work for both cash and debit payments, and doesn't need any maintenance for API breakage. I find doing this data entry calming, to be honest.
I used to do this when I lived on a much tighter budget and found the data entry was calming and provided something to do that didn’t cost money. However, now that I have a little disposable income and a family the thought of sitting down and entering financial transactions every couple of days sounds horrifying. I can barely keep up with my monthly spreadsheet tracking net worth.
> Or… I could use a shell script to run calculations with SQLite.
I did exactly that and I import the data from the bank’s csv-export once per month. I have a set of sql statements to run and categorize everything and then I manually enter the stuff that isn’t caught by the script. I manually enter cash transactions.
And the end of the year I run a sql statement to generate a report with all of the significant amounts for taxes.
Very cool. Using email notifications to get transaction data is a nice hack. If you do find yourself wanting a more formal API, check out Plaid (https://plaid.com/). I've never used it myself, but I believe the free plan is enough to get your personal transactions.
I do essentially this with `imapfilter` and some cronjobs.
The biggest hassle is the fact that each of my banks/financial institutions uses at least half a dozen unique addresses to send me relevant information.
But this way you send all your financial transactions through at least 2 additional providers (zapier and google) and your email provider. Not sure if this is worth it.
I love being able to continue using Google Sheets shortcuts + automation features. It allows me to generate well-formed reports that I can analyze with pivot tables or any of my normal processes that I use for analyzing datasets.
I'd like the capabilities of Mint without the creds hand off. BofA has starting doing this in their portal but it's not well done.
I like the "hack" here - seems BofA supports this kind of alert too. I'd love to follow a simple guide that lets me (1) setup the zapier instance and (2) deploy the server side to a DO or Heroku.
Very creative. Love the idea of using gsheets as the back-end so you can leverage the power of spreadsheets (which were basically designed for use cases like aggregating transactions!)
I have been wanting to do this, as I set up the Chase email notifications, but never got motivated to tackle what you used zapier for.
One thing that it seems you could do is use Google sheets for your constants vs coded in the repo. That way if you spend from somewhere new, you can do add that category on the fly by updating your sheet.
Your idea is very nice! I’m going to try it but without the use of zapier, instead I’m going to use python’s smtpd lib to directly receive the emails and parse them. Thanks for sharing
> I looked into existing budgeting software such as Mint or YNAB; they were feature packed but cumbersome to setup and complex to use. All I wanted was a simple, unified view of my transaction history across all payment mechanisms with a few spending categories from which I could do my own analysis.
[+] [-] air7|6 years ago|reply
This. I can relate so much. I feel my instinct is always to roll-my-own because I can and, perhaps more importantly, because I'm not familiar with relevant no-code services.
What other such tools/services are out there that can help "to go from idea to proof-of-concept in only a few hours."?
[+] [-] stolksdorf|6 years ago|reply
Definitely check out their templates, https://coda.io/templates
[+] [-] davidjnelson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brooklyntom|6 years ago|reply
I'll be adding more in the coming days...
To directly answer your question, I would recommend Bubble.is as a great place to start in the no code space.
[+] [-] neilv|6 years ago|reply
You can also do things like record transactions yourself, update with downloaded data, and reconcile against monthly statements (as another way of catching discrepancies).
You can make custom reports with charts. I used these, for example, for comparing how much I spent buying coffee every day, vs. how much I spent on every cost that goes into making coffee at home, when I tried that for a while.
There's also features for tracking investments, including automatic updates of market prices.
And, if you're a small business, you can build and generate invoices (including building the invoice over multiple days), and track accounts receivable.
Warning: GnuCash can be a significant investment of time. I eventually decided it was no longer worth it for me, though I might someday resume it.
Other Warning: If you have retirement accounts or other investments in GnuCash, consider hiding them from view, which GnuCash lets you do with any account. Bogleheads-style, US people probably want to keep contributing to a predetermined balance of total-market stocks and bonds, automatically, and not think about it, especially when there's market fluctuations.
[+] [-] xerxesaa|6 years ago|reply
1 - http://furius.ca/beancount/ 2 - https://plaintextaccounting.org/
[+] [-] majewsky|6 years ago|reply
Nice! But why do you need a separate report for that? Just put all the coffee-related expenses into their own subaccount of the expense account for Food, and run the standard expense reports on that account.
> Warning: GnuCash can be a significant investment of time. I eventually decided it was no longer worth it for me, though I might someday resume it.
Oh, I know what you mean. Especially when you first set it up.
For me, it's about 15 minutes per week, all things considered. I track all expenses, including cash expenses. The only thing I don't break down into individual items are grocery bills. Those get folded into one daily "Groceries" transaction.
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slavoingilizov|6 years ago|reply
In the UK, they are starting to wake up. The new "challenger" banks which exist here all do this as a hygiene feature - see Monzo, Starling, Revolut. With Open Banking mandating open APIs for all banks, this will become the norm soon. The fact that American banks and regulation hasn't jumped on this is a symptom of something very wrong with the system.
I sincerely hope the launch of Apple Card or similar services disrupt consumer finance in the US as well and set a new bar. And when the above mentioned banks come to the US (which they are currently working on), you should absolutely switch and delete the 100 lines of python as well.
[+] [-] jedberg|6 years ago|reply
In the US, you have to use a wire transfer is you're moving more than about $4,000. And wires cost a lot of money. And they aren't even instant even though they are billed that way.
I had to move some money from one account I own to another, and I needed it there the same day. The only way to make it happen was to drive 15 minutes to the origin bank, spend 15 minutes filling out a paper form in the branch, which was then faxed to the central processing center. Then I had to call the center center every hour to see if they'd gotten to it yet. When they finally did do it, I had to call the receiving bank with the tracking number and tell them, and then they had to find it on their side, which took a couple minutes, before it was finally processed.
From the time I finished filling out the "instant" wire form (and paying $45!) to the time it hit my other account was over three hours! And that was after the initial 30 minute delay of driving to the bank and filling out a paper form.
[+] [-] throwaway9d0291|6 years ago|reply
Note that this only applies for business accounts. Regular users as far as I can tell are unable to access the API.
[+] [-] 6ue7nNMEEbHcM|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwild|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldandboring|6 years ago|reply
- your credentials change
- your credentials require MFA authentication
- your credentials require a password reset or security question/answer intervention
- the bank, Yodlee, or the service lose track of the transaction offset and you get duplicate transactions or missing transactions
- the service doesn't transmit all available metadata
[+] [-] gkbrk|6 years ago|reply
This makes it work for both cash and debit payments, and doesn't need any maintenance for API breakage. I find doing this data entry calming, to be honest.
I wrote about it here https://gkbrk.com/2019/04/plaintext-budgeting/
[+] [-] bronco21016|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decasteve|6 years ago|reply
I did exactly that and I import the data from the bank’s csv-export once per month. I have a set of sql statements to run and categorize everything and then I manually enter the stuff that isn’t caught by the script. I manually enter cash transactions.
And the end of the year I run a sql statement to generate a report with all of the significant amounts for taxes.
[+] [-] klohto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dguo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavenlyblue|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Amezarak|6 years ago|reply
We would all do well to follow this example though - NIH and reinventing the wheel are huge problems in our profession. Great work!
[+] [-] echion|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodruffw|6 years ago|reply
The biggest hassle is the fact that each of my banks/financial institutions uses at least half a dozen unique addresses to send me relevant information.
[+] [-] sash_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlarkworthy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alecgorge|6 years ago|reply
I love being able to continue using Google Sheets shortcuts + automation features. It allows me to generate well-formed reports that I can analyze with pivot tables or any of my normal processes that I use for analyzing datasets.
[+] [-] bluetidepro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopeboy|6 years ago|reply
I like the "hack" here - seems BofA supports this kind of alert too. I'd love to follow a simple guide that lets me (1) setup the zapier instance and (2) deploy the server side to a DO or Heroku.
[+] [-] timwis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScoutOrgo|6 years ago|reply
One thing that it seems you could do is use Google sheets for your constants vs coded in the repo. That way if you spend from somewhere new, you can do add that category on the fly by updating your sheet.
[+] [-] _x5tx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
Quick glance at my UK amex says nope
[+] [-] spking|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] diminoten|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justusthane|6 years ago|reply
> I looked into existing budgeting software such as Mint or YNAB; they were feature packed but cumbersome to setup and complex to use. All I wanted was a simple, unified view of my transaction history across all payment mechanisms with a few spending categories from which I could do my own analysis.
[+] [-] garp|6 years ago|reply