Haha, I guess people making their own expense tracker a thing.
Because I built mine but it's a bit more rudimentary
Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
41–50 of 91 posts
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#42Generally looks like a promising idea even in a deeply-competitive space, however the "selling point" of having pie charts to summarize your monthly spending does absolutely nothing for me - I know, banks etc use them in their marketing of "modern" online tools too, so they look kind of cool, but in practice for decision making about personal finance I find them absolutely useless. What I need to know on a regular ba…
thank you, i'll take this as food for thought and see if i can improve the datavis!
I agree, if you need insights related to budgeting, then I recommend Actual or Firefly, as noted in readme. This app is strictly intended to be simpler. no budgeting, just tracking.
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#43Generally looks like a promising idea even in a deeply-competitive space, however the "selling point" of having pie charts to summarize your monthly spending does absolutely nothing for me - I know, banks etc use them in their marketing of "modern" online tools too, so they look kind of cool, but in practice for decision making about personal finance I find them absolutely useless. What I need to know on a regular ba…
almost none such tools touch the problem of future planning or projection. it's kind of strange but perhaps it reflects culture. nothing beats making your own spreadsheets.
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another approach might be to build an app that parses the SMS trails that card transactions generate to reduce the need for manually entering transactions.
.. What are these sms trails? Ive never heard of this.
Some banks allow setting up alerts for transactions of more than a threshold. It's possible to set this threshold to a very low value thus getting all transactions logged as texts.
I am not sure how this system handles US tips though; the notification may come in before the tips are added and the CC transaction is finalized.
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#45Very nice!
I wrote an app like this a while ago in Node.js, the problem was that I found it annoying having to remember evrrything until I get back home and boot up my laptop to add new entries, so I decided to rewrite the backend in Golang so that it can run as an executable file, embedded the frontend React.js files into the Golang executable file, changed the DB from MongoDB to SQLite, and ran it on my Android phone using Termux.
I could have run it without rewriting the backend and changing the database, but I don't want to run Node.js and MongoDB on my phone...
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
These sound great in theory but as an app user I have found their implementation can range from deeply irritating to downright broken. Anti-use cases off the top of my head might be (this was from a calendar/reminder app): - I write myself an appointment on Monday to remind myself to plan a meal for next Friday, so the app silently moves the Monday app to Friday without telling me just because the words "next Friday"…
I think org mode has a great implementation of it. It works when setting a date parameter to, say, "Friday" and the scheduler will pick the closest Friday and turn it into a proper date, so there is no ambiguity later.
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#47This is super cool! I was looking for something like this just a few days ago. Ended up going with Flow[1], an open source Android app, because I wanted something that I could enter data on from my phone and run completely locally there. I don't yet have Tailscale running, or some other solution to access my homelab on the go. But it's great to see more and more software designed to run on people's local networks. An…
I have just written a comment about a related point, but I wrote my own expenses tracking web app and using it on the go wasn't possible because I didn't host it somewhere, so I ended up running it on my Android phone using Termux (I rewrote it from Node.js to Golang first though).
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t importing a credit card statement eliminate the need for manual entries? I don’t use an expense tracking tool - apologies if my question may is missing context.
Easier said then done. Most softwares Ive used that attempted this did so poorly. However it is getting better.
Whatever happened to the Quick Interchange Format(.qif)? It used to be common for all banks to support that. A modern variant today could just be a XML or JSON export, and I hardly see that either.
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#49I 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…
Wouldn’t importing a credit card statement eliminate the need for manual entries? I don’t use an expense tracking tool - apologies if my question may is missing context.
Most banks don't have an API, and statements are (often) lagged, sometimes even by a week or a month depending on how archaic the systems are.
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#50Checked out the readme and the screenshots and this looks quite polished. I didn't see anyway to connect with my bank accounts and pull this information. Would you be open to adding an integration like this? Maybe through Stripe financial connections, or the Plaid APIs?
thank you! glad you like it! currently the intent is to be a simple and fast expense tracker, so there are no plans to integrate banks and auto-combing transactions.
How about a CSV import? My banks all have an option to export transactions to a CSV file. You would need an import tool to create the mapping though.