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Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#42I built my own, using daily since 2010. Finally getting serious about offering it up as a product.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#43Built an ad-hoc system using flask, Google Spreadsheets, and Twilio (where I work) that my wife and I have been using for 18 months now -- far longer than any other system has stuck. - budget tab: tracks category + allocated budget for the month - expenses tab: tracks date, amount, category, description - when we spend money, my wife and I text, eg, "13.31 restaurants lunch at chipotle" to a Twilio number. A flask ap…
Cool. Would you say the SMS plays an important part? Or would e.g. a Telegram bot work as well for those of us who do not work at Twilio?
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#44Yes. I use old school Quicken. I manually enter transactions to categorize them (most are split -- so anything automatic based on retailer doesn't work well) and then I use automatic reconciliation against the banks' online stuff. I've been doing this since 2001 or so and it's been quite useful. YNAB seems interesting, but switching to a new platform would be... complicated.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#45We use Ledger CLI[1], and once I got over the learning curve I really liked it. We keep individual files for each card or account and have a set of scripts to tie them all together and give us the output we want. Toss it all in a self-hosted git repo and update every week or so. While I do wish we could make use of ofxclient and ledger-autosync (just isn't gonna happen with some of our accounts), the discipline of going through each line item is really valuable in tracking spending and kinda the State of the Household.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#46I think you can do a lot with a simple spreadsheet. I have a sheet that I copy from month to month, where I record my wages in one sheet, then reference that total in my budget sheet, where I decide what categories to allocate, and I carry over any left over from last month that wasn't used. I have a percentage column, a recurring amount column and a actual amount column. Any one of those three will be a hard coded amount, the others will be calculated, depending on the case. For example, you only want to spend so much for heat/electricity each month, so that is hard coded in the actual amount column, whereas I'd want to carry over leftovers that I didn't spend in my donation budget, so that goes in the recurring amount. Savings then is a calculated amount. It shows a nice pie graph too, to visualize what you're editing.
Then I have a spending sheet where I record the category, amount and description.
Finally I have a spending info sheet that adds up all spending for each category and compares it to the budget throughout the month. That way I can calculate the leftovers, or if I didn't allocate enough that month so I can adjust next month.
It's worked great for the past year for my wife and I
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#47I was using long time Speendee (https://www.spendee.com/), but changed to Toshl (https://toshl.com/).
I would recommend both. Somehow like the Toshl more.
2c
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#48I'm the founder of Actual, a budget system that I want to be easy to pick up but also informative: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/actual
It's a completely local and free app. Sign up and I'll be sending the beta out in the next couple weeks.
It embraces the envelope-style of budgeting, and does it in a way that makes it easy. I think this style of budget makes it really easy to see what's going on with your money without much work.
In addition to that, reports are important and we'll provide the ability to write any custom reports to tailor the system to your lifestyle. Everybody's life is different so we all have different needs, so it's important to allow flexibility.
Let me know if you're interested, or have any questions!
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#49I'm just trying this (free and open source): https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii I dislike giving all my data to (cloud)services like Ynab, who sell all your data/profile to others...
FWIW https://www.youneedabudget.com/privacy-policy/ "We do not sell users’ data. (And we never have!)" They make money by charging $5/mo and having a large cult following.
It's worth nothing... especially if you know that payment information is worth A LOT of money.
There is no way at all to verify they are not selling your data. Also, there is no law that forbids them to do so.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#50Built an ad-hoc system using flask, Google Spreadsheets, and Twilio (where I work) that my wife and I have been using for 18 months now -- far longer than any other system has stuck. - budget tab: tracks category + allocated budget for the month - expenses tab: tracks date, amount, category, description - when we spend money, my wife and I text, eg, "13.31 restaurants lunch at chipotle" to a Twilio number. A flask ap…
Wow. I've used Twilio API before... had no idea you could do something like this. How do you log categories?
We define one word categories and their allocated budget in the "budget" tab, then the inbound text always takes the form of: "X.XX category as many words for description as you'd like."
As for doing this kind of thing with Twilio, here are the two building blocks you'd need:
Twilio + Python: https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/quickstart/python
Python + Google Spreadsheets: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/02/an-easy-way-to-read-and-...