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Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

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

#131

Post by malermeister »

robcohen wrote: post #12

This looks awesome. I love that it's built on ledger. I have been wanting to move away from Simplifi Money for some time for obvious reasons (owned by Intuit). It seems that the real moat is pulling the data in a consistent and correct way. Yes, you COULD try to find every single export option for every bank, but I think Plaid is really the only service that pulls this data somewhat correctly, due to the U.S. not hav…

I know this is only vaguely related, but as a European that's been looking for an open source budgeting solution, how does PSD2 help?

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

#132

Post by helij »

cortesoft wrote: post #48
GingerMidas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something? Yes, exactly that. You can do automatic imports of your bank statements but that's arguably more hassle. It takes 10 minutes at the end of my day to record all my transactions and it gives me a complete understanding of where my money is going.

This would be a lot harder if you have a spouse and want to track your family finances. It would require both people working together to keep it up to date, and finding that time is tough with kids. For all the concerns and problems over tools like Mint, having all 10-20 accounts we have automatically sync their data into the system makes it so much easier to manage.

We don't find it hard. We sit down one or two times during the week in the evening and I enter all our transactions into KMyMoney. It takes 5-10 minutes to do once you get the hang of it. This is across 5-10 accounts. You might have a little more work to do with 10-20 accounts.

On Paisa (ledger). I like it! But...KMyMoney has such a nice interface for recurring/future payments and reports (that I can edit to suit our needs) that I'm struggling to see the point of ledger behind gui for our use case. It does look nice though.

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

#133

Post by BeetleB »

ibdf wrote: post #80

How are people automating the data import? I can't imagine someone entering everything by hand. Lots of places don't even provide an export file you can work with... most of them offer a PDF. It seems like most financial places rely on Plaid for the data integration, but that's a paid service I don't think Open-Source or free personal finance apps would use.

Most banks/CC have some sort of export - be it in CSV, OFX, Quicken, etc. Then you import it using your financial story.

The real pain is in the categorization (was this Groceries, Supplies, Dining, Medical Expense)?

I use KMyMoney which usually picks the same category as the last transaction from the same place. Saves some of the work, but it's still painful. I then wrote a script to export from KMyMoney to ledger format.

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

#134

Post by BeetleB »

waynesonfire wrote: post #82

i won't use any finance manager that doesn't employ the envelop method, like ynab. looking at the demo for 10 seconds it looks like a web based gnu cash.

This is based on ledger, which actually does allow envelope based budgeting via virtual accounts. No idea if Paisa handles virtual accounts well.

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

#135

Post by jonathankoren »

ananthakumaran wrote: post #116
jonathankoren wrote: post #92

I got turned off with the cookie popup. There's literally no reason why you need any of that. You want to know which pages people are visiting? Mine your htaccess logs.

Unfortunately this is hosted on github pages and I can't get usage information without using 3rd party analytics.

Well then, I guess the two solutions are obvious.

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

#136

Post by BeetleB »

GingerMidas wrote: post #30
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?

> Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something? Yes, exactly that. You can do automatic imports of your bank statements but that's arguably more hassle. It takes 10 minutes at the end of my day to record all my transactions and it gives me a complete understanding of where my money is going.

10 minutes a day is a lot! That's 300 minutes a month. I do it about once a month and I probably do 2-3 hours.

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

#137

Post by BeetleB »

piperswe wrote: post #59
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GnuCash can import directly from your bank [1]. There are also some mobile apps [2], but they are not super well integrated with the desktop application - I think you have to manually export and import every time. [1] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-manual/tools-on-li... [2] https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/GnuCash_and_Mobile_Devices

It can import directly from some banks maybe, but certainly not my bank. I haven't had any success importing to GnuCash from _any_ bank I do business with.

I used to have this problem, but then I found most banks offer free export to some file format - even those that charge for SW integration. You just have to dig around the site to find the feature.
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