Is anyone regularly or reliably getting bank/credit card data via OFX? I've considered switching from Personal Capital to these libre/open solutions, but I'd love to automate the data gathering.
Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
111–120 of 323 posts
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#112I tried GnuCash and generally liked it. However, it was a little more complicated than I wanted. In addition, I wanted to be able to access via the web, when I was away from my computer. (cause at the time, I thought it was only available locally) I also wanted my life partner (my lovely wife) to participate. This was going to be the hard part. Behavior modification. So I built a very simple "tracker".(php/codeignite…
>The trick is doing a manual entry for each transaction.
I would second this for anyone whose goal is to spend less money. I think some people keep track of purchases just to see all spending and may not care about reducing spending. In that case, importing data can save time.
This article also agrees with your suggestion. She suggests it's th that knowing you are going to have to write down your purchase helps you think before automatically spending: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/smarter-living/budget-mon...
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
You're parsing PDF? I'd imagine most places allow some sort of data export like csv or something? That's how I get the data out of Chase and BofA.
There are a few problems with exporting data... here's what comes to my mind at the moment:
- It's an additional step and unnecessary when you're already downloading PDF statements, which you probably should be doing regardless
- Data is often unavailable for export after a few months or a year or two (depending on the bank), far earlier than PDFs
- If you have PDF scans (especially from earlier days) then you need to parse the OCR anyway
- If you're using official APIs (instead of writing a scraper or or downloading by hand) then you may need to pay extra
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#114Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#115I'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 r…
Can I ask how you parse PDFs? I'm curious both in terms of reading the PDF data (Python library?) and parsing it (regex?)... and do you have to deal with OCR as well?
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
You're parsing PDF? I'd imagine most places allow some sort of data export like csv or something? That's how I get the data out of Chase and BofA.
Yes, in my experience CSV/XML/etc export is spotty. Some institutions don't have it at all, and even when they do the time range can be limited or hard to time-window reliably.
For example, I can't get CSV about my pay stub and all the places money flows (taxes, insurance, etc). So I use PDF as the best way to get all the data.
Parsing PDF is a huge PITA, since PDF is really designed only for layout and not to encode semantic document structure. But if you want the greatest amount of visibility, nothing is as authoritative as the actual statements.
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#117Firefly[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've used mmex for years and it's been not so stable recently so I gave firefly a try.
There were too many simple use cases that could not be done simply, compared to mmex.
One example is credit card partial chargeback/refunds. The dev suggested to edit the initial charge and substract the refunded amount. I dont want to do that. I like to keep a 1:1 mapping of transactions.
Also income vs expense accounts, instead of payees. If Amazon refunds me partially (let's say $10 from a $100 purchase) it now creates an Amazon income account with $10. I had an Amazon expense account of $100. Both accounts are not linked in any way and it's impossible to know your Amazon balance ($90).
I buy a lot of stuff for my girlfriend and she pays me back around the end of the month. Keeping track of her balance is not possible with Firefly.
A few other things were not working properly or at all.
Dev is very nice and active but I doubt he has any accounting background. Firefly turned out to me as a prettified excel sheet, not a double entry book keeping.
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
> beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal file Actually, beancount supports include directive. See includes section [1] of the language syntax document [1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAMVrKIA2qtRGmoVDSUBJGmY...
Thanks for the reference. But a single transaction can span multiple financial institutions. Say you pay off a credit card. One half of the transaction comes from the credit card statement, the other half comes from your bank. The two halves sum to zero.
My understanding is that the whole transaction has to live in one file with Beancount. This doesn't seem amenable to having each bank statement generate a single Beancount output file.
But I could be wrong. I don't know how Beancount's importer works.
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#119I'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.
Too many of these personal finance apps aren't putting the web first
YNAB (web version) has a pretty excellent web-first experience. And I'm not sure that I want a total web experience if half of my battle is recording transactions at the time they occur, right in the store. This is super convenient, no reason to keep receipts and enter them when I get home.
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#120I'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.
For the same reasons I am still using the classic version of YNAB (paid once). But unfortunately the Mac version is not compatible with Catalina so I am also forced to search for a new app.
I paid once as well, but was forced to upgrade to Catalina for other reasons. Felt cheated, but I understand why they do it.