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Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

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Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#3
post #2

I'll give this a go So far Actual Budget is pretty good, although I wish the dashboard was a bit more extensive.

Im curious what you dont like about the dashboard? Ive been using Actual since the day it went open sourced, and the Custom Reports really make the 'dashboard' whatever I want it to be.

Theres a couple tiny things I wish would be implemented that Ive suggested on Github, but the core is solid.

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#5
post #2

I'll give this a go So far Actual Budget is pretty good, although I wish the dashboard was a bit more extensive.

Actual is cool but its lack of solid integration with the open banking standard (as is used in Australia and other countries) made it a bit annoying as its partnered integrations are pretty rough.

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#6
Checked out the readme and the screenshots and this looks quite polished.

I didn't see anyway to connect with my bank accounts and pull this information. Would you be open to adding an integration like this? Maybe through Stripe financial connections, or the Plaid APIs?

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#7
I built my own similar tool for my wife and I, with the same goal of making entering transactions as fast as possible, and one thing I found useful was predictive form filling.

Some categories have the same thing logged over and over (like for the "Gas" category I always made the title "Gas") so when you select the "Gas" category it prefills the title field with the most common transaction title for that category. Also works in reverse, if you enter the transaction title first it will guess the category.

I also optimized the date picker. We budget month to month, so when you're in this month's budget, all you have to select is the day. No need to select month and year, as so many default date pickers do.

Just some tidbits in case they interest you as well!

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#9
post #6

Checked out the readme and the screenshots and this looks quite polished. I didn't see anyway to connect with my bank accounts and pull this information. Would you be open to adding an integration like this? Maybe through Stripe financial connections, or the Plaid APIs?

Once third party integrations like those come into play, I feel that this may become less “simple” and more of a full time job for the maintainer.

(Tools with integrations like these are generally incredibly useful though, they tend to be paid and would need to run as a service)

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#10
post #7

I built my own similar tool for my wife and I, with the same goal of making entering transactions as fast as possible, and one thing I found useful was predictive form filling. Some categories have the same thing logged over and over (like for the "Gas" category I always made the title "Gas") so when you select the "Gas" category it prefills the title field with the most common transaction title for that category. Al…

thank you! those are good thoughts!
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