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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#121

Post by taftster »

raz32dust wrote: post #77

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.

YNAB can sometimes feel expensive. And while I could use an OSS solution like Gnucash or ledger, I don't have the time to deal with the tech support needed to be able to share my setup with my spouse. Likewise, we extremely value the mobile experience. To me, YNAB is cheap and well worth the money.

You might want to try "Every Dollar" which is free and has a mobile experience. It's not open source, of course, but it might fit what you're looking for.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#122

Post by downerending »

Related: Does anyone know of free-ish software to do cash-flow/retirement projections, etc.? For example, I'd input some guesses about income, 401ks, Soc Sec, rent, major necessary expenditures, rates of return and inflation, etc., and have it output balances for several decades. Extra credit for multiple runs with random variation on assumptions.

I could write this myself, and have done a trivial one in the past. Is there anything better?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#123

Post by ziga »

downerending wrote: post #122

Related: Does anyone know of free-ish software to do cash-flow/retirement projections, etc.? For example, I'd input some guesses about income, 401ks, Soc Sec, rent, major necessary expenditures, rates of return and inflation, etc., and have it output balances for several decades. Extra credit for multiple runs with random variation on assumptions. I could write this myself, and have done a trivial one in the past. Is…

https://www.firecalc.com/ is a good retirement calculator.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#124

Post by CobrastanJorji »

elric wrote: post #6

"Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools. That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which ca…

The first time I tried to use GnuCash was many years ago. I began by opening up the documentation and reading the overview, which, it turned out, began with a fairly lengthy history of the practice of double-book accounting. I later found that this choice, which isn't necessarily a negative, did a fair job of representing GnuCash as a whole.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#125

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh!

I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically.

I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken.

I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word.

And, finally, none of this matters if I have trouble with the real problem - sticking to a budget. Solving that one is what I want personal finance apps to help me with. Keeping track of my finances should be a solved problem, locked in a box and forgotten about.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#126

Post by simonebrunozzi »

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…

This sounds amazing. It would be great if one day you could publish a detailed how-to / tutorial.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#127

Post by mattbillenstein »

haberman wrote: post #116
mattbillenstein wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I guess I don't really look at paystubs often and my banks support good csv export for like 2+ years, so I'll always have it when I need when I refresh those sheets. I do year-to-date in those sheets to make them not huge.

Regarding taxes, I do a tax year calculation using my W2's and returns to compute an effective tax rate and figure out ways I can improve my situation re taxes -- but my budgeting basically only starts once the net money hits a bank account which has worked pretty well.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#128

Post by clum »

I've been using GnuCash for years. It has a great many fantastic features and it has some annoying quirks for sure. I haven't found anything to replace it, but if I could I would. One of the most annoying things: Export account names with Umlauts -> Import them again. Now they are all broken. I have to manually fix the csv file to prevent that and there's never been a fix/devs don't see this as an issue.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#129

Post by mattbillenstein »

dataflow wrote: post #113
mattbillenstein wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

To each their own, csv for me has been the easiest thing moving forward every month or three.

I did do a historical net worth calculation and the only data I had going back far enough was PDFs, so through a mix of bash scripts and pdftotext, I was able to get a number for each month back about 10 years. But I ended up just putting that monthly balance for each account in a google sheet so I could sum and plot it there. Now I just stick the month-end balance for each account in a sheet to keep this updated.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#130

Post by woodruffw »

I might be the edge case, but I don't actually find double-entry bookkeeping all that useful as a consumer trying to track my expenses.

Instead, I tend to think of my budget as having cycles (monthly, currently), with a net "debit" or "credit" for different aspects of my life. I'm required to credit myself a certain amount in savings every month, and I'm allowed to debit a certain proportions of my income every month for different categories.

I end up tracking this with a set of plain text expense ledgers and a small Rust program: https://github.com/woodruffw/pledger

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