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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

#271

Post by ydant »

itissid wrote: post #19
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…

Mint already uses Plaid, but I the transaction information it gets is too low in information to categorize anything reasonably. For example my Amazon Grocery transaction happen on my amazon Chase Credit card(gives me 5% discount). But connecting to Chase.com using plaid pulls in transaction statement is still information poor. The obvious consequence of this is that budget information is not correctly reflected in Mi…

Fighting with Mint and categorizing Amazon purchases was what initially pushed me down the path into plain text accounting (PTA).

I ended up long down the rabbit hole with auto-downloading Amazon orders (originally with https://github.com/jbms/finance-dl, but then my own custom scraping) and importing and matching them up with credit card transactions using beancount-import (https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import).

This ultimately resulted in me spending a lot less on Amazon - to the point that now doing it manually wouldn't be too bad...

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

#272

Post by ydant »

phoenixy1 wrote: post #151
debaserab2 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the middle of going down this path right now. It kind of works, except for certain banking institutions require more rigor than just getting accepted into the developer platform. The steps, as far as I can tell, look something like this: 1) Sign up for Plaid developer account 2) Request developer access (without it you can only play with sandbox data) 3) Request production access 4) Submit application informat…

[I work at Plaid] I will say that while annoying (especially for Chase, which has the most paperwork-type requirements for developers) this process should be totally doable for solo developers. You can put your own name as the legal entity name if you don't have a company. The Master Services Agreement (MSA) sounds scary but is just the contract between you and Plaid -- the legalese laying out what you're paying for,…

Thank you! I wish Plaid would document this on the website. I've always been hesitant to convert from my dev account to a production account because everything gives the impression you're looking for a Serious Business.

I'd much rather just pay the money and have the standard API, and my workflows are all built around Plaid anyway.

I guess I'll give it a go now.

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

#273

Post by piperswe »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #191
piperswe wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, I mean the automatic direct import though.

I wonder if there is a nice local browser automation tool one can use to do the download of the csv files directly from the bank.

2-factor authentication and session expiry makes it a pain in the neck

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

#274

Post by 5ol »

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…

You can do this in a few ways, depending on what exactly you want to do:

1. Using period reporting feature (`-p`):

   hledger bse -p "yearly from 2019-04" --depth=2 --layout=bare -e 2022-04-01 -X₹
2. Separating journals into April 1 – March 31 financial years.

3. Using `-b` and `-e` to demarcate begin and end dates when generating reports.

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

#275

Post by pasc1878 »

bbor wrote: post #232
pasc1878 wrote: post #228

Unfortunately I can't see your web site as it does not work without sending cookies to Google. Please implement the site with only needed cookies. NB this means that your site cannot be used in Europe,

If you have time, could you clarify how you can tell that? I just opened it in Europe and the blurb seems to pass “these cookies are for internal self-improvement of the product only” (see below). Is your problem that google is managing the analytics so could be spying, or that the stated use isn’t essential? I guess my assumption was that “non-essential” meant “built for the purposes of 3P advertising” We use cookie…

Non non essential means to make the web site work for the user.

Getting information about home many hits the web site has or how it performs are not essential uses of cookies.

preferences are not essential as you can just use the default.

i usually accept cookies for Preferenceis but not for measurement and not for any sort of advertising.

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

#276

Post by 5ol »

BeetleB wrote: post #153
ananthakumaran wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paisa supports budgeting and the model is inspired by YNAB. It doesn't use virtual account, but uses periodic transaction which is simpler from data entry perspective, but achieves the same thing

Not trying to be argumentative, but every time I've heard someone claim they do envelope budgeting in ledger without virtual accounts, I've always found a flaw in their approach.[1] So let me give you the standard scenario: I have two checking accounts, and a credit card. I budget $300/mo on groceries. Sometimes I buy groceries with my credit card, and sometimes using money from either of those two checking accounts.…

I don't see why you need virtual accounts for this. You can make do with sub-accounts.

You can use accounts names `Liabilities:Credit-Card:Budget`, `Liabilities:Credit-Card:Bank-Name:Envelope`, `Assets:Checking:Budget`, and `Assets:Checking:Bank-Name:Budget`. You can set up your initial budgets by transferring from `...:Budget` to `...:Bank-Name:Envelope`, and then whenever you engage in transactions, shift money in the reverse direction to `...:Budget:Used`.

That way, whenever you query `Budget:Used$`, you'll see how much of your budget you've used, and whenever you query `Envelope$` or `Budget`, you'll see how much you have remaining in your budget (i.e., Budget - Budget:Used), and when you query `Budget$`, you'll see what your total budget is.

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

#277

Post by theviajerock »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #165
sdfghswe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell us, what does it mean? "as an areppa" suggests flat and round...?

to be honest, I don't actually know but I've heard it from multiple people when I was in Medellin in reference to girls. none of them were "flat and round." I think it just refers to them being from the same area. "american as apple pie"

Exactly. It's this.

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

#278

Post by kilolympus »

rmuratov wrote: post #229
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 use hledger and I enter everything by hand. I used to dread it too. But actually, in normal life, the volume of daily transactions is not that large. Besides, filling out a journal disciplines you. And VS Code does autocomplete for accounts and payees.

Can I ask how you get the autocomplete in VS Code? I've never managed to find an extension that does this, and by default the autocomplete only works on previously seen words (so it gets split by the colons in account names)

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

#279

Post by simonmic »

skowalak wrote: post #250
8589934591 wrote: post #230

I'm a longtime user of gnucash and this is a great product to convince me to move to ledger/hledger. Question for author - Is it mostly a reporting tool or does it work similar to h/ledger where I can input my transactions from paisa? Question for HN users - have you found ledger to be easier to use compared to gnucash? My challenges have been my lack or ease of understanding on how to input transactions in ledger an…

I made the switch to hledger about two years ago and I have struggled using the command line to input my transactions. Right now I use my text editor (nvim) and a snippet engine for my common / recurring transactions. This may be a little more work than just setting everything up to work automatically, but I like it. For reporting, there are some tools which can help with that, I used to use hreports [0], but have si…

Too opinionated ? I'd be interested in examples of that.

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

#280

Post by simonmic »

bakul wrote: post #43

Looks good! Paisa Vasool! Especially as it is free :-) You don’t have to, of course, but do you plan to open source it? That way others can contribute to it too. How tightly is it bound to ledger? How hard would it be to adapt it to other plaintext accounting programs like beancount?

It includes hledger support I believe.
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