101–110 of 323 posts
No sync with banks - a complete non-starter for most people. Even if you enthusiastically start using something like this, in a month or two it'll get super old.
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…
However, stock symbol APIs break on the regular, so there can be times when this process is broken until a fix is published and you upgrade.
Importing records in GnuCash is a pain. Credit card payments end up with two records of the payment, one from the credit card and another from your bank. There's no way to merge records in GnuCash, ideally you would be able to mark them as the same record, but keep them both to keep the import logic happy.
The big challenge IMO is that each transaction has a date, but sometimes the ends disagree on when it happened. E.g. you transfer money from checking to a brokerage, it takes multiple days but you have to choose one date for that transaction.
Does GnuCash integrate well with exports from credit-card companies or banks? It seems like the big blocker is the time spent logging transactions.
It supports imports from QIF and OFX/QFX files, CSV files, MT940 and MT942 files and DTAUS files. It also has an "online banking" integration thing, but I have no idea what kind of bank has username/password logins that would work with this. Personally, I don't mind manually entering the stuff, because you'll need to classify everything into the correct accounts anyway.
That stuff is the OFX/QFX setup. Basically it logs in and fetches those files for you. Banks are notoriously bad at this however.
Firefly[1][2] is also a really useful personal finance app. It's more akin to a self-hosted version of Mint. Combined with the Plaid connector[3], I find it the easiest to use for my workflow. And despite the instructions, you don't need a paid dev account. The free Plaid account will let you access up to 100 live financial institutions. [1] https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii [2] Live demo: https://demo.firef…
I use this too. Maybe I like the beancount more, but having my finances available on the web to share with my so is valuable. Too many told are meant for one pers,on and don't support modern ideas like tagging.
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…
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.
I’ve always thought that having the data recorded in a single text file made the software only suitable for extremely small financial accounts. So I’ve put a SQL database that you have control over as the place where the data is saved (using a similar schema to what GNUCash does). Also added GRPC endpoints so scripts can talk to it easily.
It’s still early stage but plan is to make a bunch of front ends so that every financial task within a business can talk to the same backend (bank reconciliations, payroll etc)
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 will do it again, but haven't. I'm presently using YNAB because it's easier for my wife and I to share. I use it to a similar level of detail, but don't track my stocks and retirement accounts with it. IT's been very helpful for us to know how much money we have and where it's all going. Last year was very expensive and we ended up in some debt, so this is also helping us get things back on track. It's hard to get out of debt (especially if it's become a habit to rely on credit) without knowing this kind of information.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I haven't used, because I use personal capital and they both used Yodlee, and my biggest gripe about personal capital is yodlee isn't keeping up with 2fa style logins from banks