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Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

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Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#111

Post by elbasti »

asdajksah2123 wrote: post #23

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…

The gnuCash documentation has it as you describe: debits checking and credits salary.

https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/gnucash/1.6.4/arch/i3...

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#112

Post by thrway9925235 »

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.

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#113

Post by [deleted] »

makingstuffs wrote: post #98
asveikau wrote: post #94

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%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 h…

Yeah it means money in Hindi

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#114

Post by ananthakumaran »

jonathankoren wrote: post #101
wingerlang wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I download my bank/cc statements once every few months and run them through some homemade cleanup scripts, then I could technically plug it into a tool like this.

I also have some clean up scripts, but the worst part is I have to manually select the tables to extract in the PDF using Tabula. There's still some serious manual reconciliation between credit card and bank statements. I feel good doing it, but it's a slog. Technically, I might be able to get something similar by using some website to download everything, but honestly I don't trust them. I don't want all of my banki…

Paisa supports PDF import (very rough implementation), but the problem is actually simpler compared to what tabula is trying to solve. I just need a 2 dimensional array and then the template can easily filter out non financial data by checking if specific column is Date. I have tried it personally on a few PDFs, it worked well except one which had a two column layout.

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#116

Post by ananthakumaran »

jonathankoren wrote: post #92

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.

Unfortunately this is hosted on github pages and I can't get usage information without using 3rd party analytics.

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#117

Post by plibither8 »

boredtofears wrote: post #68
plibither8 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be that guy that tries to force LLMs into everything, but after automatically importing bank transactions, LLMs like GPT are very powerful in extracting information from the ill-formed, non-standard, transaction description, and subsequently classifying it. You can help train it by manually identifying and classifying the first few, and let it do the rest of the job. I've tried it out myself and works well for…

What software have you used that does this? So far every time I've relied on automatic categorization for this sort of thing it fails horribly. I don't think I've used anything that's GPT based though.

> What software have you used that does this?

I wrote my own script that uses the GPT API. For automating bank transcation downloads, it's just a cronjob that runs ever X hours and scrapes the information from the banking website.

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#118

Post by plibither8 »

MenhirMike wrote: post #79
plibither8 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be that guy that tries to force LLMs into everything, but after automatically importing bank transactions, LLMs like GPT are very powerful in extracting information from the ill-formed, non-standard, transaction description, and subsequently classifying it. You can help train it by manually identifying and classifying the first few, and let it do the rest of the job. I've tried it out myself and works well for…

How would LLMs really help though if all you get is usually an order number? I mean, it can probably figure out that an order from McDonalds is food related (though does it get categorized as "Everyday Lunch" or "Going out with Friends" or "Work Events"?) and Geico will probably be some sort of Insurance - but that would just be a large database of common payees, no real need for any AI. That said, if you're importin…

Yep, that's one of its deficiencies! For me, something like GPT helps in triaging and "cleaning up" bulk of the transactions, with little micro-categorization left to be manually done.

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#119

Post by ananthakumaran »

plibither8 wrote: post #54
lionkor wrote: post #27

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?

Not to be that guy that tries to force LLMs into everything, but after automatically importing bank transactions, LLMs like GPT are very powerful in extracting information from the ill-formed, non-standard, transaction description, and subsequently classifying it. You can help train it by manually identifying and classifying the first few, and let it do the rest of the job. I've tried it out myself and works well for…

I have tried this and it works very well. I just copy paste my investments data from website and put it as a comment and usually copilot will figure out how to format it as a ledger transaction based on the previous transactions.

I am not sure if it will work with bulk import though. It's easy to spot mistakes with single entry, hard to do when you have lot of them

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#120

Post by lelo_tp »

halotrope wrote: post #57

This looks great! We've been building a wealth tracker with 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.…

yep. That's exactly what's happening in Brazil - https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/open_finance

similar to how the central bank forced every major bank to adopt PIX (our instant payment system), they're doing the same with open banking.

Sure, it's not exactly "open" for end users. But now, as a company, I can build a personal finance app without asking for my end users bank account password. This is so much better UX-wise.

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