Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 77 posts

Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?

#1
This is a recurring question that pop up every couple of years, but it's always interesting to see what people use nowadays.

How do you track your personal finances? Excel sheet? Python script? Self-hosted dashboard?

Do you use open source software, did you code your own, or do you subscribe to a service?

I'm more interested in the basic spending tracking functions (auto importing from bank, auto tagging categories, etc) than having it track my investment portfolio.

Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?

#4
I currently use a Google sheet, but I'm looking for something better.

I have many automatic payments (credit card, telephone, utilities, etc) from a transaction account. I also have a loan with redraw, and I want to have most of my funds keeping the loan balance low, but I don't want my transaction account to go negative. So I need to forecast future transactions.

Future transactions may be annual, monthly, four weekly, two weekly, etc. It's a real mess. Some are easy to predict accurately, others can only be estimated.

I have a column to keep track of which future transactions are predictions/estimates/allowances, and which ones have been confirmed.

I also have a column to keep track of which transactions have been reconciled with the bank. (This is currently a manual cross-checking process, since my bank doesn't have API access.)

My preference would be a text-based system (https://plaintextaccounting.org/), but haven't found one that neatly allows estimates of future transactions that can be modified once the details are known.

Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?

#5
I did firefly-iii a few times when I was interested in historic trends. Wrote some custom tooling to auto import from the banks. But in a long term, annotating weekly/monthly just doesn't provide enough benefit for me to continue doing that. It's easier to do a big import every few years when I actually need the data.

If I was doing it again, I'd probably go with one of the cli text ledgers so the process is easier to preserve and closer to ETL.

Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?

#6

I used to use YNAB, but they kept on jacking their price up, and I kept on procrastinating with keeping up a record. Having lately used Google Sheets along with AppScript for other purposes, I think I would go with that.

I was looking into YNAB but $14.99 a month seems a lot

Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?

#8
German banks support an open protocol: FinTS/HBCI with which you can automize stuff. There's a Python library for it [1] and I wrote my own little cli tool that allows you to configure your (potentially recurring) target vs. actual expenses, while setting expiration dates to get notifications about unexpected transactions. Still somewhat WIP though

[1] https://github.com/raphaelm/python-fints [2] https://github.com/phil294/fints-transaction-tracker

Post reply on HN