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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#281

Post by rakoo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #231
rakoo wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Don't know about GP, but I don't want to touch any third party. Beyond data concerns, I haven't seen one that would provide me with necessary amount of control (which amounts to being able to run SELECTs against my finacial data and graph them how they like). Thanks for the link to weboob project, I haven't seen that one. boobank looks much more like something I want to have, though I can't find anything on how it wo…

I only mentioned the third party to show it can be done with the project that is behind. I do agree with you on the reluctance to depend on third parties for things like that.

Weboob relies entirely on web scraping: like I said, it's a form of browsing the site, just not with the usual browser. I do agree that services should provide APIs, but webood is targeted at websites won't/don't want to do it.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#282

Post by sklarsa »

mjs7231 wrote: post #139
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…

When I was using Google sheets I was really looking at this company Tiller to auto-fetch my transactions. I never actually tried them out, but the service looks pretty compelling: https://www.tillerhq.com/

I've been using Tiller for a few months and really enjoy the flexibility of using spreadsheets to manage my finances. Some of the sheets aren't incredibly flexible because there are a lot of macros updating them behind the scenes, but Tiller is constantly developing new analyses, and it's very easy to extract data for your own custom sheets. Also, data entry (mostly for transaction categorization) is a breeze, which is a huge plus for me, and the ability to easily add custom categories is huge.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#283

Post by jnfr »

purerandomness wrote: post #230
jnfr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.indieh…

That's so awesome to hear, thanks for sharing!

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#284

Post by BeetleB »

pmoriarty wrote: post #26
every wrote: post #15

I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level, it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are staggering... [1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html [2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html

I looked in to switching from GnuCash to Ledger about 5 years ago, and found that it would have been too painful to use for manually inputting the thousands of transactions I had because it just didn't have the nice auto-complete and GUI nicities that GnuCash had. I'm a hardcore command-line and keyboard-only power user, so I would have absolutely loved to have made Ledger work for me rather than use the mouse-heavy…

> I looked in to switching from GnuCash to Ledger about 5 years ago, and found that it would have been too painful to use for manually inputting the thousands of transactions I had because it just didn't have the nice auto-complete and GUI nicities that GnuCash had.

Similar problem, except I use KMyMoney. I wrote a program to convert my KMY file to Ledger format. So I still enter transactions in KMyMoney but have the power of Ledger as well.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#285

Post by carterklein13 »

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…

So the issue is that large banks (I feel like I can speak with a bit of authority as I work at one and know many colleagues who work at others) have no desire to give up user data, and I don't think this problem will be solvable without governments stepping in to force banks to comply. They're in a better position than more traditionally tech-centric companies in this regard because they fall under heavy regulation, and can do all kinds of legal hand-waving to show why their data must remain private.

There are a lot of great APIs that banks provide, but my personal opinion is that they're largely meant to distract from the fact that the vast majority of your data ISN'T accessible through an API. A lot of banks are building genuinely great tools for developers - thinking specifically of JPM's Quorum and Capital One's Cloud Custodian. But these aren't open banking tools.

Plaid and similar services are great, and the best we can currently do, but they have inherent shortcomings in that they face the same restrictions as any other developer trying to get information directly from a bank.

It's largely the same picture in healthcare. The government is trying to force healthcare companies to open up their environment, and healthcare companies are fighting tooth and nail to stop that. The CEO of EPIC Systems got the heads of many, many major hospitals to directly oppose a rule the HHS is trying to pass basically forcing health record companies to open up. For the time being EPIC has their "App Orchard" which... well, go visit apporchard.epic.com and you'll get a picture for how much they care about giving individuals the right to their health data and developers the right to build more systems on top of their own.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#286

Post by BeetleB »

EE84M3i wrote: post #185
oehtXRwMkIs wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plaintext accounting ecosystem as a whole is pretty great. Only thing however is that literally none of them comply with the XDG Base Directory Spec. So to have hledger with a web-ui and auto-importing for example means like 3-4 dotfiles littering the home directory.

Is this a critical issue for you? How often do you `ls -a` in your homedir?

It's an annoyance. For example, I like to put everything in .config under version control. It's a much bigger pain to do it in the home directory.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#287

Post by BeetleB »

seltzered_ wrote: post #212
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…

"each file is saved into a folder that corresponds to my account structure such as Asset:Current:Cash, Liability:Mortgage, Income:Salary, Expenses:Health:Dentist" Beancount user here, even if you don't bother with any finance tracking, organizing financial documents following the folder structure is useful - see "Filing Dcouments" in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e4Vz3wZB_8-ZcAwIFde8X5Cj... Shameless promos: -…

> People are starting to make Fava extensions for things like envelope budgeting

I've been hearing about making extensions for envelope budgeting for years, with little progress. I haven't checked in the last 2 years though - any progress on this?

To be frank, it was fairly annoying that the author kept declaring it as "not too hard" and yet no one came up with one.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#289

Post by jnfr »

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #237
jnfr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I’ve been meaning to get a sense of my day-to-day finances for a while now and I have to say that your site is great. Concise, answers all the obvious questions, and directly compares to the two most popular solutions on the market. Amazing work! Q: Have you ever considered alternative payment schemes, e.g., student pricing, loyalty pricing (pay $X first year and then $Y for all subsequent years, Y < X)?

Thanks!

We raise our prices every few months so you will be grandfathered into the pricing plan at sign up. Aside from that and occasional coupon codes for first year subscriptions, we don't have any other payment schemes (yet!).

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#290

Post by Izkata »

moises_silva wrote: post #256
72deluxe wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the old addage "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves" really applies. Some people don't seem to mind not really tracking their spending down to an extremely granular level (ie everything) because they make so much money that small outgoings on their bank account are worthless, or they have to dedicate their time to their family and can't be bothered to track it. That seems odd to m…

I have mixed feelings about this and overall I still want to engage in better financial tracking. However, the obvious flip side of the coin is that if I need several hours a month to keep proper track of the budget to save a few hundred more a month it might not be worth it, as I value more what I do with that time and not worry about a budget. The problem of course is that once I start tracking in detail I may find…

Takes me about 20 minutes once a month to compare my bank's monthly PDF with my own records, and update anything I missed. One reason not mentioned so far is to identify payments I don't recognize, just in case someone got access to my account or a monthly charge suddenly tripled.

So far nothing big (some things on Amazon change price by a few dollars up or down after putting in the order), but I always wince a little when I see someone not bothering at all.

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