Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

paisa.fyi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 288 posts

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#101

Post by jonathankoren »

wingerlang wrote: post #41
lionkor wrote: post #27

Slightly off topic but how do people use these? Depending on where/what I pay, I pay with an assortment of credit cards, bank account, debit cards, paypal, etc. Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something?

I download my bank/cc statements once every few months and run them through some homemade cleanup scripts, then I could technically plug it into a tool like this.

I also have some clean up scripts, but the worst part is I have to manually select the tables to extract in the PDF using Tabula. There's still some serious manual reconciliation between credit card and bank statements. I feel good doing it, but it's a slog.

Technically, I might be able to get something similar by using some website to download everything, but honestly I don't trust them. I don't want all of my banking, investment, and spending information consolidated in one place for some tech bro douche bag to sell off to some richer fucks and then lose it to some hackers.

https://tabula.technology

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#102

Post by ananthakumaran »

mahoro wrote: post #49

This is awesome! I like how it's built and I looks like it's open for integrations of any kind. I'm also too impatient to manually enter all transactions but import from PDF statement form a bank looks like a doable task. The only transactions that would be required to enter manually is cash/crypto/etc but for them there are no other choice. Contrats with the the release Anantha and I hope your project will gain atte…

Feel free to open an issue if you can't get PDF import working. This is something I am interested in improving. I have tested with few PDFs and they are hit/miss based on how the data is encoded.

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#103

Post by phoenixy1 »

jpeeler wrote: post #85
ananthakumaran wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can try to improve import functionality, but Plaid etc is quite hard. I can't even figure out their pricing model from their page. So, as a free app I don't think it can support Plaid.

You just need to have each person create their own Plaid account (which is probably the way you want it anyway). The free tier supports 100 institutions. Last time I looked at this, I thought it was stated that the free/sandbox tier is not guaranteed to have the same SLA as the production environment. But I can't find this in the documentation anywhere.

[I work at Plaid] I don't know if we explicitly write down in the docs that the free Development tier isn't guaranteed to have the same SLA as the production environment, but if you're not paying Plaid there is no SLA (I mean, the usual recourse for an SLA breach is a rebate, but you can't give a rebate to someone who isn't paying you in the first place). That said, in practice the differences between the free and paid tiers for a personal finance app are not really such that someone doing a hobbyist app for personal use would notice them.

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#104

Post by boredtofears »

figmert wrote: post #40
lionkor wrote: post #27

Slightly off topic but how do people use these? Depending on where/what I pay, I pay with an assortment of credit cards, bank account, debit cards, paypal, etc. Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something?

I've kind of been thinking that there needs to be an open source version of Yodlee/Plaid. I keep picking up some project like Paisa and then realise that I have to figure out how to import things automatically. I don't really have the patience to do it manually. But for a few months now I've been thinking an OSS service that does this might be great for such OSS projects. Maybe I'll eventually start it.

I think the problem is that you need to establish a business relationship with the giant banking systems to get them to give you access and unless you have contacts or a way into that world this is very hard to do. I don't know how you'd pull it off in an OSS project.

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#105

Post by buzer »

domh wrote: post #83
jon-wood wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open Banking is in some ways misnamed - you can't as an end-user just do OAuth and get a data feed out of your account, you'll have to go via a third party who've jumped through all the hoops.

Got it! That's what I thought (feared). I wonder if there are ever plans to open it up to general use, or if it would be easy as an end user to jump said hoops. I wonder if there are any open source third parties?

I don't know about open source ones, but I did find Enable Banking (https://old.reddit.com/r/eupersonalfinance/comments/k4ny3j/f...) offering free access to your own accounts. I don't know if "offer" still stands, the FAQ is not very explicit on it (it only talks about testing, https://enablebanking.com/docs/faq/#can-i-test-the-api-befor... & https://enablebanking.com/docs/api/linked-accounts/).

I tried it, but I couldn't get things working sandbox environment so I ended up giving up and just do manual exports.

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#106

Post by garyrob »

ananthakumaran wrote: post #96
sbehere wrote: post #52

I think it helps if personal finance managers explicitly describe at least the following: 1. What automation, if any, exists for entering transactions? This is the most laborious/cumbersome part of personal finance. Some tools use financial data aggregators (plaid, yodlee etc.) that involves sharing login credentials with a third party, sometimes disabling 2FA, or other steps that are anti-security or anti-privacy. I…

> 1. What automation, if any, exists for entering transactions? This is the most laborious/cumbersome part of personal finance. Some tools use financial data aggregators (plaid, yodlee etc.) that involves sharing login credentials with a third party, sometimes disabling 2FA, or other steps that are anti-security or anti-privacy. It sucks that in the USA at least, there is practically no way for customers to fetch the…

> It has a very crude tf-idf based categorization. I do have plans to improve it.

You could use the same algorithm that was used for spam filtering in my Linux Journal article from back in 2003[1]. I have thought about making a plugin to do it with MoneyDance but haven't gotten around to it. But I think it would be quite easy for you to integrate into Paisa if you are looking to do that sort of thing. I have actually made some improvements to the algorithm since then; let me know if you're interested...

[1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6467

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#107

Post by mgkimsal »

Telemakhos wrote: post #100
mgkimsal wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is categorization of transactions accomplished? Ideally, I want autocategorization based on my own previously categorized transactions, since the bulk of my transactions are repeats at the same merchants. One of my aggregators categorizes any alcohol purchases (purchases from a state 'ABC' store) as 'home improvement'. While technically the house looks better when I'm drunk, I still thinks it's a mistake, and I…

Would you rather your aggregator sell your alcoholism data to your health insurance company, or your joy of maintenance and taking good care of your property to your home insurance company?

Why not both? I would not be surprised to find the banks already sell that data to other entities anyway (directly or indirectly). I end up buying perhaps $100 of hooch per year; unsure I personally care if anyone knows, but yes, for some it might be an issue.

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#108

Post by palidanx »

plibither8 wrote: post #54
lionkor wrote: post #27

Slightly off topic but how do people use these? Depending on where/what I pay, I pay with an assortment of credit cards, bank account, debit cards, paypal, etc. Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something?

Not to be that guy that tries to force LLMs into everything, but after automatically importing bank transactions, LLMs like GPT are very powerful in extracting information from the ill-formed, non-standard, transaction description, and subsequently classifying it. You can help train it by manually identifying and classifying the first few, and let it do the rest of the job. I've tried it out myself and works well for…

I played around with this quite a bit with chat gpt 4 with confirmation instructions, and after a bit of time it starts going haywire. I played around with just creating in a simple csv format, transactions date, name, category (asking it to categorize it), and amount. After a couple runs it started going haywire and hallucinating with transactions I never created.

I created an internal rails clone of financier.io and just created a spreadsheet web area i could copy/paste mass transactions in so i could add a batch at a time ( I suppose I could upload a csv also, but the problem is every bank has different formats)

Re: Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

#110

Post by girishso »

freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #3

I honestly just use excel but that's because I use it as a book of record for receipts as well. Since you're looking for open source alternatives, OpenOffice would fill that need.

I tried Excel few years back, it’s only easy when all you are tracking is income and expenses. But when you buy some stocks or MFs, the amount is debited from Bank but it’s not really an “expense”. And good luck tracking fund flows between your own accounts.

I’ve finally settled on hledger for now. There’s some issues, mainly the reports are generated by calendar year, there’s no support for Financial Year reports (Apr-1 till Mar-31 in India).

Post reply on HN