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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#71

Post by memling »

mcguire wrote: post #64

" For my stocks and non-money assets, I opt not to track them super closely in order to avoid having to update the values of each stock every time. " GnuCash's Price Editor can fetch values automatically. It used to be able to use Yahoo finance, but they cut that off a while back. There is a replacement, but I cannot remember what it is at the moment (and am on the work laptop). GnuCash is actually pretty easy to use…

> GnuCash's Price Editor can fetch values automatically. It used to be able to use Yahoo finance, but they cut that off a while back. There is a replacement, but I cannot remember what it is at the moment (and am on the work laptop).

It's possible to get Yahoo! data through web scraping, but it's certainly less convenient than it used to be.

IEX also has an open API for querying historical data.[1] I don't think it has as much historical data as Yahoo! has, and it's changed a bit since the last time I thought about putting together a backtester.

[1] https://iexcloud.io/docs/api/

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#73

Post by jonjohn84 »

gonehome wrote: post #32
whycombagator wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their homepage line: > Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money. As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better…

I actually hadn't heard about bitwarden (thanks) - I'll check that out. I'm not in YNAB's target market either, but the value they provide is useful even if you're not struggling month to month with finances. You get really good control over your money and a much better understanding of how you're spending it and where. Being really aware of that makes it easier to actually leverage it more because you know exactly w…

I'll give the opposing opinion that YNAB's auto-import works well for me (I use it with a local credit union, 2 credit cards, and an online savings account). In fact, I used my own homebrew budgeting software for over a year before I found that YNAB exists and does everything I needed from my own software plus imports from banks automatically which was my biggest pain point with my own solution (it involved painful csv exports every month). I have been happy with YNAB for a year and a half at this point. Your luck may depend on which bank(s) you want it to work with. I believe their bank import api provider was recently acquired by Plaid so they are now using Plaid (as I understand it).

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#74

Post by TheApexTheater »

Like many people here, I tried GnuCash. I enjoyed it, but when I would import data from my bank, it would crash. That, and not having any real way of categorizing my expenditures was annoying. The other thing that annoyed me was not being able to select multiple items

I recently moved to KMyMoney and everything just clicked. I found the interface to be nicer, especially combining the filter functionality with the ability to select multiple things and tag them appropriately.

I appreciate the article trying to explain Double-Entry bookkeeping, and I would suggest people look into KMM as an alternative to GnuCash.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#75

Post by mattbillenstein »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #49
mattbillenstein wrote: post #47

This all seems too complex for most people. I use Google Sheets, I import a year-to-date csv from my bank and credit card every month, categorize each transaction, then use QUERY to aggregate expenses by category. This data I feed into a rough budgeting sheet which I use for expense trimming. This monthly maintenance takes maybe 30 minutes. And I have another sheet to compute net worth - retirement and brokerage acco…

Do you have a similar public sheet as example?

Yes, I've tried to get a few friends who don't budget at all into some sort of system - so I made this template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c24ZmUy19_n_QggMOjcE...

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#76

Post by mcguire »

spodek wrote: post #9

I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here: > If you’re happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less than a certain amount each month, that’s great! You don’t need GnuCash. I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or wha…

I do. I started because I would find myself surprised by the occasional credit card bill that was larger than I expected. It made life easier later when I started seriously putting money in investments, and then much easier when my mother died---she had put my name on all of my parents' accounts so I inherited two more, different bank accounts, two retirement accounts and some honest-to-gosh stock certificates. By the time I got everything cleaned up, I had a love affair with GnuCash and a checking account number that starts with seven zeros.

I track transactions in and out of accounts that I get statements for, with a "cash" expense for withdrawals (I know someone who would track his pocket change in spreadsheets.), and broadish categories for income and expenses (my Books expense account is ... large).

I wish I had created some kind of asset account when we bought a house; instead I just treat the mortgage like rent and have this great big windfall followed by an equal expense when we moved. :-)

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#77

Post by raz32dust »

I've been using YNAB. I want to switch out because YNAB is too expensive. What I miss with open source alternatives is the mobile app. I don't like to link my bank accounts, so I enter expenses manually whenever I buy anything. The mobile app is critical for that to work.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#78

Post by mattbillenstein »

igpay wrote: post #58
mattbillenstein wrote: post #47

This all seems too complex for most people. I use Google Sheets, I import a year-to-date csv from my bank and credit card every month, categorize each transaction, then use QUERY to aggregate expenses by category. This data I feed into a rough budgeting sheet which I use for expense trimming. This monthly maintenance takes maybe 30 minutes. And I have another sheet to compute net worth - retirement and brokerage acco…

I'd definitely agree that this is overkill for most people. In your case, though, I think that you could put the same amount of work into GnuCash and get the same results without writing any code. Plus you'd have a GUI with built in reports and whatnot. Not sure if that matters to you. In the article, I briefly touch on skipping manual transaction logging and just importing statements from your bank / credit card. An…

I don't really want a GUI - or the GUI I want is a spreadsheet.

I have some charts and graphs embedded with the data - like net worth over time, brokerage over time, etc. My worry with a baked system is it doesn't have the data in a way I want in a chart, whereas with this system, I can pretty much create whatever I want from the raw data in the sheet...

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#79

Post by haberman »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #2

I've used GnuCash for years before switching to beancount ( https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/ with smart_importer: https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer ) and fava ( https://github.com/beancount/fava/ ). Much easier to work on your journals (ledger, trades, prices...) since they are just text files. Really great if you're using the beancount package for Sublime: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Beancount…

Wow, your setup sounds very similar to what I've converged on. Except I wrote a fairly substantial pipeline that preprocesses the data before giving it to beancount and Fava.

Maybe I missed something, but it seemed like beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal file. I really wanted a pipeline where each bank statement PDF would output one file with a corresponding list of transactions (this stage can run completely in parallel and I use "ninja" to make it very fast).

Then another process can run over these files looking for matches (+$X, -$X), and spit out "transaction groups", where each transaction group is a set of transaction ids that sum to zero. And then a different interactive tool lets you categorize transactions and spits out transaction groups with embedded "expense" transactions. It's all non-destructive; each tool only adds data, and nothing ever modifies existing files. Then a final step can combine all these files and spit out a beancount file for Fava.

How does this compare with the way beancount's importer does it? How does its importer handle transfers and categorization? Is it destructive or non-destructive?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#80

Post by jibcage »

cproctor wrote: post #42

My partner and I have been tracking all our spending for the last five years with hledger (ledger reimplemented in haskell) and some custom import and management scripts inspired by "Full-fledged hledger" [1]. More recently we added Plaid [2] for auto-importing from financial accounts. I love having a plain-text history and being able to ask complex queries. One unexpectedly-sweet benefit is that your spending is a h…

+1 for full-fledged hledger! I just got it set up last week, and putting together the small scripts for parsing all of the CSVs was (to me) a fun programming exercise that reaped huge visibility into how I spend my money :)

It's hugely valuable to have all of your financial data in one, human-readable place. Not only to you, but to whomever might be executing your will ;)

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