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/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.
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?
"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"
- 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
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
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.
"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.
I also wasn't super sure about sticking "simple" in the title, but while writing this article and going through the GnuCash setup steps, I actually started to feel like it was appropriate.
As another commenter mentioned, I think that the "complicated" part of using GnuCash is understanding double-entry bookkeeping, which is why I devoted so much time in the article trying to explain it in concrete terms. My intention here isn't necessarily to steer people to GnuCash itself (I'm learning about a lot of alternatives from these comments), but to simplify the core underlying concepts. Not sure if I achieved that, but I tried!
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.
I've been a longtime GnuCash user, and really it's as simple as you want it to be. You can, for example simulate the Spreadsheet approach with 3 accounts: Checking, and two hidden accounts: Income and Expenses. Make Checking the default tab, hide a few columns you're basically done. And if you decide you need a more complicated model, all those extra features are there and available on your schedule.
Probably the biggest hurdle IMO is the single user nature. Even the SQL backend requires a global lock.
I agree with it being simple. I used it when I needed to learn about accounting for my day job. I used it for 2 or 3 months for my personal expenses. I could not continue because I got lazy. But I learned a lot about accounting from using it - certainly helped me with my day job.
The first time I tried to use GnuCash was many years ago. I began by opening up the documentation and reading the overview, which, it turned out, began with a fairly lengthy history of the practice of double-book accounting. I later found that this choice, which isn't necessarily a negative, did a fair job of representing GnuCash as a whole.
It is not that hard, I followed a Youtube tutorial and about a week later things clicked in place for me. I am glad I put the effort because I feel that I've gained a skill that will change my approach to money for the rest of my life.
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 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 ;)
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...
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!
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.
> 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.
>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.
I built my own budgeting app and I strongly modeled it after Google Inbox. After importing transactions, you then need to get to “uncategorized zero”, which is identical to inbox zero. I like that it’s much less tedious than manual entry but you still see and work with each transaction. After a transaction has been fully reconciled, it disappears. It’s very analogous to managing email.
It’s running on a raspberry pi in our house and my wife and I both use it. One feature I am adding is a “hey what’s this?” flag that tells the other person to reconcile/categorize the transaction that the other person has more context on.
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.
YNAB can sometimes feel expensive. And while I could use an OSS solution like Gnucash or ledger, I don't have the time to deal with the tech support needed to be able to share my setup with my spouse. Likewise, we extremely value the mobile experience. To me, YNAB is cheap and well worth the money.
You might want to try "Every Dollar" which is free and has a mobile experience. It's not open source, of course, but it might fit what you're looking for.
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.
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?
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.
> I see so many people categorizing everything with spreadsheets and budget apps and I just ask myself... why?
I was saving 30% of my income per month, and wanted to save at least 50%. So I decided to measure my expending, and try to cut it off without actually impacting my quality of life.
I discovered that substantial parts of my expending were going to: warm and cold water (2x the national avg per person), electricity bill, take-away food, transportation, health insurance.
I changed all the water taps with ones with a lower volume rate "by default" (you have to go out of your way to open them to the max), replaced all bulbs with LEDs, decided to only go for take away once per week but get the nicest and most expensive one instead, bought a bike for commuting, and changed health insurance and electricity providers to similar ones, but much cheaper.
Those were minimal changes in lifestyle that bumped my saving ratio from 30% to 60%.
Without measuring, I would probably would have taken a bunch of random actions that would have impacted my lifestyle more, and not delivered such a big jump.
I don't routinely use these apps, but if you want to continuously optimize your expending, measuring it is step 0.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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:
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.
> 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.
[+] [-] rcMgD2BwE72F|5 years ago|reply
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/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.
[+] [-] haberman|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] seltzered_|5 years ago|reply
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-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
- 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
[+] [-] boromi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aostiles|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riffraff|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
I've never used the import features, the manual inputting of transactions into a text file doesn't take too long.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousDan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cascom|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] hammock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkhdigital|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elric|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] igpay|5 years ago|reply
As another commenter mentioned, I think that the "complicated" part of using GnuCash is understanding double-entry bookkeeping, which is why I devoted so much time in the article trying to explain it in concrete terms. My intention here isn't necessarily to steer people to GnuCash itself (I'm learning about a lot of alternatives from these comments), but to simplify the core underlying concepts. Not sure if I achieved that, but I tried!
[+] [-] pmoriarty|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jldugger|5 years ago|reply
Probably the biggest hurdle IMO is the single user nature. Even the SQL backend requires a global lock.
[+] [-] unlimit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john61|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CobrastanJorji|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicolaslem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cproctor|5 years ago|reply
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 [2] https://plaid.com/
[+] [-] jibcage|5 years ago|reply
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 ;)
[+] [-] karlicoss|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] every|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html
[2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html
[+] [-] komali2|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] chad_strategic|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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-mon...
[+] [-] city41|5 years ago|reply
It’s running on a raspberry pi in our house and my wife and I both use it. One feature I am adding is a “hey what’s this?” flag that tells the other person to reconcile/categorize the transaction that the other person has more context on.
[+] [-] raz32dust|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taftster|5 years ago|reply
You might want to try "Every Dollar" which is free and has a mobile experience. It's not open source, of course, but it might fit what you're looking for.
[+] [-] hybridtupel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexmingoia|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] sanderjd|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fluffything|5 years ago|reply
I was saving 30% of my income per month, and wanted to save at least 50%. So I decided to measure my expending, and try to cut it off without actually impacting my quality of life.
I discovered that substantial parts of my expending were going to: warm and cold water (2x the national avg per person), electricity bill, take-away food, transportation, health insurance.
I changed all the water taps with ones with a lower volume rate "by default" (you have to go out of your way to open them to the max), replaced all bulbs with LEDs, decided to only go for take away once per week but get the nicest and most expensive one instead, bought a bike for commuting, and changed health insurance and electricity providers to similar ones, but much cheaper.
Those were minimal changes in lifestyle that bumped my saving ratio from 30% to 60%.
Without measuring, I would probably would have taken a bunch of random actions that would have impacted my lifestyle more, and not delivered such a big jump.
I don't routinely use these apps, but if you want to continuously optimize your expending, measuring it is step 0.
[+] [-] echelon|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cosmie|5 years ago|reply
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
[2] Live demo: https://demo.firefly-iii.org/
[3] https://gitlab.com/GeorgeHahn/firefly-plaid-connector
[+] [-] woodruffw|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] gonehome|5 years ago|reply
I'd put YNAB along with 1Password (and probably Fastmail) in the class of best single purpose pieces of software that I pay for.
[+] [-] brnt|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fensterblick|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lancer|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://bitbucket.org/hleofxquotesteam/dist-sunriise/wiki/Ho...
[+] [-] gyrocode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spodek|5 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] neogodless|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vitoc|5 years ago|reply
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
Any feedback will be very appreciated :)
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ISL|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johanlarsson|5 years ago|reply
> 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.