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Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

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21–30 of 91 posts

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thank you! totally with you on building the habit of manually tracking and being aware of where my money goes! hopefully you like it more when you give it a try, open source, simplicity, and self-hosting are at the core for this. also, on a side note, for non streaming workloads, i prefer cloudflare tunnels over a vpn solution like tailscale, feel free to check that out too :) cheers!

Thanks for the suggestion! How's the simplicy of setting up and accessing cloudflare tunnels over a VPN for the near-totally computer illiterate, in comparison to Tailscale? Part of setting up a homelab and self-hosting more and more of my digital life has been working toward being able to offer family and very-close friends an off-ramp from the world of cloud-controlled data and computing. Especially among family, t…

yea, most certainly! from a setup perspective tunnels are much easier to configure, just need a domain and an agent container that routes to your services. To have family and friends access web services is easy too - there is support for email totp, certificates, passwords, etc. so you'll definitely find what suits you. Vpn is still required the monent you're looking into higher bandwidth requirements, but for services like expenseowl (one-off and quick operations), tunnels are free and easy

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#25

I have been using Spliit ( https://github.com/spliit-app/spliit ). We've added over 5k transactions on it and don't have any complaints so far.

nice that's a pretty cool project!

different intent from my project, but glad you introduced it to me! thanks

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#27
That's cool and thanks for sharing! If you are looking for future direction generating reports by category and overall and ability to add attachment of PDF/photo receipts to individual items is really helpful. I use these type of tools to keep track of business expenses for my corp (employee n=me) for my accountant come tax time and have never found the right tool for it. Tried even abusing invoiceninja, craterapp, a few others outside their use case. Eventually I settled on paperless-ngx (pulls from scanner, email address off phone) manual entry into excel now seatable for this on this but still not ideal. Firefly III seemed useful but daunting. I don't need double ended accounting or care about budgeting where I spend money... just receipt, table, report, print all and end of year.

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#28
post #27

That's cool and thanks for sharing! If you are looking for future direction generating reports by category and overall and ability to add attachment of PDF/photo receipts to individual items is really helpful. I use these type of tools to keep track of business expenses for my corp (employee n=me) for my accountant come tax time and have never found the right tool for it. Tried even abusing invoiceninja, craterapp, a…

thank you! that's a good suggestion! i kept the pie charts monthly for simplicity. I think adding an annual or all time report doesn't take away from simplicity. I'll look into prepping an insights pdf and having a button for that. cheers:)

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#29

The UI looks nice, but feature wise, I think I would rather go with Firefly III. It is a lot more complete.

for sure, i agree with you! i mention firefly and actual both in my readme as much more fleshed out options. intent behind this app was strictly to be simple.

Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

#30
post #7

I built my own similar tool for my wife and I, with the same goal of making entering transactions as fast as possible, and one thing I found useful was predictive form filling. Some categories have the same thing logged over and over (like for the "Gas" category I always made the title "Gas") so when you select the "Gas" category it prefills the title field with the most common transaction title for that category. Al…

I can't find the library right this second but there's a JavaScript library that takes human date descriptions, like "last Friday" and creates a date object. Depending on users' typing speed that might be another convenience factor thing.
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