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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#221

Post by dugite-code »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

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 matt…

I feel this, I ended up writing a python script with a selenium browser to scrape the data off of my banks website so I could automatically insert it into my firefly-iii instance. Originally I had it going into a complicated google sheets spreadsheet. Only breaks three times a year for the last 7 years.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#222

Post by fluffything »

alexmingoia wrote: post #175

I will never understand why people spend time on expense tracking spreadsheets and apps. I mean, you’re the one spending money you already know what you spent it on... Your bank already has a history of transactions if you want to look at it. Put 30% of your income in a savings account, the money for necessary bills in another account with auto-billing, and the rest for spending in a spending account. I see so many p…

> I see so many people categorizing everything with spreadsheets and budget apps and I just ask myself... why?

I was saving 30% of my income per month, and wanted to save at least 50%. So I decided to measure my expending, and try to cut it off without actually impacting my quality of life.

I discovered that substantial parts of my expending were going to: warm and cold water (2x the national avg per person), electricity bill, take-away food, transportation, health insurance.

I changed all the water taps with ones with a lower volume rate "by default" (you have to go out of your way to open them to the max), replaced all bulbs with LEDs, decided to only go for take away once per week but get the nicest and most expensive one instead, bought a bike for commuting, and changed health insurance and electricity providers to similar ones, but much cheaper.

Those were minimal changes in lifestyle that bumped my saving ratio from 30% to 60%.

Without measuring, I would probably would have taken a bunch of random actions that would have impacted my lifestyle more, and not delivered such a big jump.

I don't routinely use these apps, but if you want to continuously optimize your expending, measuring it is step 0.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#223

Post by rakoo »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

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 matt…

There are tons of third-party doing this for you, and I'll just cite one because it makes sense here: https://www.budgea.com/. It's much like any other, except they're a commercial entity that was born out of an open source project called weboob (https://weboob.org/). That project aims at getting information out of website without having to use websites' javascript or restrictive APIs; it's still browsing the web, but not with a browser.

weboob has many capabilities, such as "listing messages" or "listening to music" and an important one is "getting financial information out of an account". Each capability is in the middle of 2 things:

- Applications, which want to implement a given capability; a basic one is boobank (https://weboob.org/applications/boobank) but you can write anything

- Modules, listed in the same page; a module is a website

The weboob project is completely open source and written in Python. If you use the boobank application you can use it to download and store all your financial transactions, and automate it as needed. As the example on the homepage shows, you can pipe it into munin (or any other graphing tool) and see the evolution in your accounts automatically.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#224

Post by unhammer »

We've been using GnuCash for my gf's photo business for years now, it's powerful enough to give everything to do her taxes, but (unlike plain text accounting) very usable for a non-programmer.

Invoicing though, she's still been doing with a different program since the ones in GnuCash are hard to get good-looking. I was about to ask for tips here, but then I see there's a whole bunch of stuff out there we could try first: https://github.com/search?q=gnucash+invoice :)

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#225

Post by TeMPOraL »

koonsolo wrote: post #215
ramblerman wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU had the right intentions, but made a big mistake in pushing this onto the banks. Which indeed results in each bank now having a "mandatory" shitty expenses section. What they should have done instead, is standardize a secure export function of all your expenses, allowing open source, and vendors to provide statistics and utilities based on this format.

Especially when you are a customer at multiple banks.

Doubly especially when you're a developer that can handle a proper API themselves, and do a better job at it than all the startups that will pop up to sell you a budget management service, nothankyou.

All these years I wanted a widget that would display three numbers and a graph on my phone's home page. A total sum of money on all my non-savings accounts across all banks, the amount I already spent today, and a "burndown graph" for the month showing how much of this month's income I've already spent. I can write that widget myself, and I will do a better job than any of the startups - by virtue of not needing to include tracking, telemetry, not needing to make it a webview rendering React because $multiplatform, etc. But I can't do this, because the API endpoints needed don't exist unless you're a company with a large enough budget to afford it.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#226

Post by TeMPOraL »

endgame wrote: post #183
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

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 matt…

In Australia, the "consumer data right" is about giving fintechs (and probably AUSTRAC too) standardised access to banking data, but if you go and say "I'm a consumer and want to access my data", the banks are all "lol no": https://github.com/ConsumerDataStandardsAustralia/standards/...

Same in EU as far as I've investigated.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#227

Post by TeMPOraL »

andrepd wrote: post #137
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

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 matt…

Every bank I've used lets you download your transactions as a csv or qfx, which is then trivial to import onto gnucash (I still need to spend ~20m each month carefully sorting things in categories).

Do they let you download it programmatically? Because if not, it's next to worthless for any kind of frequent use.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#228

Post by TeMPOraL »

Moodles wrote: post #173
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

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 matt…

If you just want to know what businesses you tend to spend money on, many credit cards in the US do this. E.g. Chase has pie charts showing dining vs travel vs utilities, etc. If you want more fine grained data, you can download statements for the month or year to date, etc If you want to see your net worth across every bank/brokerage over time you can use an app like weslthfront or personal capital

Whereas what I would want is to not use an app, not log in onto the site to download statements, just use an API endpoint to get a list of all the transactions since last time I called it, dump it into SQLite database, and run SQL queries against it. In my own software. That fetches the statements several times a day, or - better - updates whenever a new transaction is recorded by the bank.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#229

Post by TeMPOraL »

imnotreallynew wrote: post #203
jonahbenton wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, bank APIs are for use by businesses that want to be able to pull bank customer data. There are integration hoops and so forth. They are not for end user use. Plaid has, or used to have, a mode where in preprod you could give it your credentials to a limited number of organizations and then pull in your data. Not sure that survived the Visa acquisition, but even if it did- personally implementing a…

> Generally speaking, bank APIs are for use by businesses that want to be able to pull bank customer data. Generally speaking, yes, presumably because API access to checking and savings accounts is only applicable to businesses 99% of the time. Most consumers, even programmers, don’t have a real need for API access to their accounts that isn’t already covered by simple CSVs or Plaid.

It's not about the format, it's about the access. I'd be fine with a CSV of my bank transactions, even the completely broken pseudo-CSV that my bank outputs. What I need is the ability to pull that CSV with an API call automatically, instead of having to log in to the bank (which takes almost a minute and involves retyping numbers from a mobile device), and navigate to the right place to find the CSV download (which takes another minute).

Basically, the bank UX sucks for my needs - and I'm guessing, for most people's needs[0]. Cynic in me says that the reason I can't get an API access is because somebody then would make an interface that doesn't suck, and the banks would lose the best place they can upsell people with financial products.

--

[0] - There's a reason why "preview your balance and last transaction" feature shows up in mobile banking apps these days.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#230

Post by purerandomness »

jnfr wrote: post #168
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

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 matt…

What personal finance apps have you tried with budgeting? There are a few on the market, the most popular being YNAB and Mint. My personal opinion is that Mint tries to do too much while YNAB forces you into a rigid philosophy. I made Lunch Money ( https://lunchmoney.app ) as a potential happy medium between the two. If you end up trying it out, feel free to let me know what you think!

Jen, thank you so much for LunchMoney. It feels like you really love developing it, and it shows.

I've first heard of it from the IndieHackers podcast featuring you [1] and remember myself signing up and thinking "wow, this is exactly how I would design and build something like that".

Everything is polished, thought through, and the pace with which you push out new features is crazy.

Thank you!

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/150-jen-yip-of-lunch-mo...

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