ledger: https://www.ledger-cli.org/
and its haskell clone hledger: https://hledger.org/index.html
I use hledger - but I bellieve both would work.
Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
11–20 of 138 posts
Re: Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
#12Something like Cushion might help - https://cushionapp.com
Re: Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
#13Excel? LibreOffice Calc?
Re: Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
#14Try: https://www.gotruffle.com
Edit: although the app is marketed as finding deductions, we show spending breakdown by category and are in the process of adding automatic revenue tracking.
Re: Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
#15I can relate to you in verbatim, except never had the courage to ask publicly. I ended up going with excel and then ended up hating any tool in the browser.
Updates with startups take too long and your nit-picky features to increase your productivity probably do not directly correlate with these payment software companies business goals. I prefer full control / or the possible option for extensibility. Most importantly, looking at the data, no matter [or my several failed experiments/finance tool investments past year] ... I would eventually go back to excel. You just don't get the mental massaging that you are the shit in the UI.
Anyways, if this sounds interesting, I hope it saves you some time. I spent way too much time wasting my determination to find the perfect tool that actually never existed in the first place.
Re: Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
#16I've personally tried several different online services but ultimately landed on Wave (https://waveapps.com - no affiliation). I used it for personal consulting and lately have used it for somewhat more formal (bit still fairly straightforward) corporate accounting. I'm a big fan - just my two cents.
Re: Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
#17There's a slight learning curve but I've been very happy with GnuCash. It supports multiple accounts and containers, has decent reporting, invoicing, categorizing, etc. I also really like that it's offline.
Re: Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
#18I don't know what's the best, but, on the desktop, among other things I tried, I used GnuCash.
In addition to tracking personal/business finances in GnuCash, I used the invoicing feature to track billable hours and notes for each chunk of time. I had a custom invoice format that generated PDFs without the notes, and then I used the notes as reminders of what to put in periodic work reports.
A drawback to GnuCash, though, is that you can spend a lot of time getting your accounts and transaction splits just right, and tracking every little transaction. One of the best things I did was to move to doing less categorization and itemization in GnuCash (e.g., unless an expense was was tax-relevant, it got moved to "Misc.", and paper-money expenses weren't even tracked, but reconciled monthly).
Re: Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
#19Re: Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
#20I've personally tried several different online services but ultimately landed on Wave ( https://waveapps.com - no affiliation). I used it for personal consulting and lately have used it for somewhat more formal (bit still fairly straightforward) corporate accounting. I'm a big fan - just my two cents.
+1 for Wave. I started an LLC to do contract work and so far it's been great.
I do have one minor gripe: I have my Wave linked with my Azlo bank account, and when I'm scanning and uploading a receipt Wave creates a separate transaction, in addition to the one from my bank feed. You have to go in and manually select both txns and click "Merge". Seems like a pretty big miss, but still very usable. Especially on my small scale.