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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

#201

Post by sanat »

ananthakumaran wrote: post #73
scubakid wrote: post #58

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…

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 wa…

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/

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

#202

Post by freitzkriesler2 »

girishso wrote: post #110
freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #3

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.

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 (A…

Whoever down voted me can suck a fat bag of d1cks.

The trick with making excel work is treating your finances like a company with assets and liabilities. Build out your balance sheets, list it out, and compute it.

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

#203

Post by BeetleB »

astral303 wrote: post #176
BeetleB wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Categorization seems like low-hanging fruit given the age of AI we are in today.

> 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?

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

#204

Post by nirvdrum »

MenhirMike wrote: post #67

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 b…

I've been pretty happy with financier.io as a replacement. I pay the $12 a year for hosting, but I think you can get by running a CouchDB server somewhere. The author basically stopped working on it so its future may be in question, but he open-sourced the code. It's just an Angular application.

I may have been using YNAB wrong, but I had allowed budget categories to go negative and gradually fill them back in. Financier imported all of that data with 100% fidelity. YNAB5 couldn't do that and it's one of the key reasons I didn't upgrade. I wasn't keen on losing my historical budgeting data and starting all over (YNAB's official recommendation).

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

#206

Post by MenhirMike »

cec wrote: post #194
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is a MacOS build of YNAB 4 still available?

https://github.com/banesto/YNAB4-64bit/

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

#207

Post by thelazyoxymoron »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #205

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

Give Actual Budget a try: https://actualbudget.org/

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

#208

Post by dingdong33 »

robcohen wrote: post #12

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 hav…

Reason are not obvious to me. Could you elaborate?

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

#209

Post by MenhirMike »

Dennip wrote: post #186
MenhirMike wrote: post #67

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 b…

https://actualbudget.org/ Actual has OFX support! Really great tool

Oh wow, this does look REALLY good, at least the demo does! Going to give it a spin.

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

#210

Post by freddie_mercury »

ibdf wrote: post #80

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.

I enter everything manually. I live in SE Asia where there's no other option, really. For some of my banks there's not even a CSV/Excel download option, just a PDF "balance statement".

I (mostly) don't find it too onerous. But it is very much Inbox Zero. If you keep on top of it then it isn't much additional effort. While I'm waiting for the cashier to make change or print a receipt or while I'm walking out of the shop I can enter the transaction. But if I let a few days of them build up it becomes a more annoying 5-10 minute effort.

Also you need to do manual entry for anything you pay with cash anyway.

But the manual approach starts to fail in a family unless all involved are on-board with the data entry. (Which is almost never the case in my experience.) In practice that means all of my wife's expenses are a bit of a black hole.

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