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GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app

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Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app

#11

Post by goodmythical »

tinosar wrote: post #2

Author here. I'm a certified accountant. I ran my own finances in a double-entry Excel/VBA system for years because the off-the-shelf options forced a choice I didn't like: GnuCash (correct, but heavy enough that even I dreaded the daily entry) or the app-store budgeting apps (pleasant, single-entry, cloud-hosted, usually wanting a bank login). So I built a local-first double-entry desktop app — a plain local databas…

The bank might not appreciate it, but couldn't you extend with a headless browser to scrape your bank occasionally or even on demand when the program launches?

I've been using hledger and I usually just plug in purchases as I make them, but I do that on purpose because it's like a self-balancing checkbook so I'm always aware of what's going where.

Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app

#12

Post by coldpie »

nicpottier wrote: post #9
tinosar wrote: post #2

Author here. I'm a certified accountant. I ran my own finances in a double-entry Excel/VBA system for years because the off-the-shelf options forced a choice I didn't like: GnuCash (correct, but heavy enough that even I dreaded the daily entry) or the app-store budgeting apps (pleasant, single-entry, cloud-hosted, usually wanting a bank login). So I built a local-first double-entry desktop app — a plain local databas…

Did you write the blog post entirely on your own? It reads like AI slop to me but maybe I'm just getting more sensitive. I can't decide whether we are all starting to mimic the same turns of phrase that LLMs like to use or whether just nobody writes anymore. I suspect the latter.

It's definitely AI slop, yeah:

> It's also the work of one accountant who happens to be the daily user, built with a lot of AI assistance.

Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app

#13

Post by randlet »

nicpottier wrote: post #9
tinosar wrote: post #2

Author here. I'm a certified accountant. I ran my own finances in a double-entry Excel/VBA system for years because the off-the-shelf options forced a choice I didn't like: GnuCash (correct, but heavy enough that even I dreaded the daily entry) or the app-store budgeting apps (pleasant, single-entry, cloud-hosted, usually wanting a bank login). So I built a local-first double-entry desktop app — a plain local databas…

Did you write the blog post entirely on your own? It reads like AI slop to me but maybe I'm just getting more sensitive. I can't decide whether we are all starting to mimic the same turns of phrase that LLMs like to use or whether just nobody writes anymore. I suspect the latter.

The cadence and wording sure reads like AI to me. OP, personally I find this really off putting and does not make me want to learn more about your app.

Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app

#15

Post by noufalibrahim »

yehoshuapw wrote: post #3

See also https://hledger.org/ and plain text accounting in general

+1 to that. I used https://ledger-cli.org/ and the accompanying Emacs mode for a long long time. I used small slips of paper to record cash spends during the day and by bank statements for online ones. Then kept track. I kept a "reconciliation" account to catch misses and it was quite low after several years.

I somehow fell out of the habit but I really need to get back to it.

Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app

#17

Post by dgrin91 »

Honestly my biggest pain point with all personal accounting systems was that there was no easy, free way to automatically pull my transaction data from all my accounts into a single, local file that I can play with as I want. I really don't want to go to all my accounts every month and click download.

There still isn't, but I did recently find simplefin(https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/). Its not great (e.g. quota of only ~25 requests per day), but its good enough and the price was cheap enough that I just bit the bullet. It also paired well with Actual budget, and now I have a personal accounting system that I am reasonably happy with.

I also found teller.io, which is frankly a better dev experience (and good free tier!), but they don't support all the banks I'm on and somehow simplefin does.

Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app

#19

Post by tracker1 »

dgrin91 wrote: post #17

Honestly my biggest pain point with all personal accounting systems was that there was no easy, free way to automatically pull my transaction data from all my accounts into a single, local file that I can play with as I want. I really don't want to go to all my accounts every month and click download. There still isn't, but I did recently find simplefin( https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ ). Its not great (e.g. quota…

It would be nice if financial institutions simply created end-user/app centric APIs for consumption... As it is, the best you can do is something akin to puppeteer with a real browser agent and your authentication credentials and scraping... I mean there can be APIs underneath, but there's not a good open resource/repository that I'm aware of...

Would be nice/interesting to see something like that come about, but It's a bit frustrating. A delegated read-only api key against a specific account shouldn't be that hard to do.

Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app

#20

Post by yehoshuapw »

dgrin91 wrote: post #17

Honestly my biggest pain point with all personal accounting systems was that there was no easy, free way to automatically pull my transaction data from all my accounts into a single, local file that I can play with as I want. I really don't want to go to all my accounts every month and click download. There still isn't, but I did recently find simplefin( https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ ). Its not great (e.g. quota…

I've slowly built up a set of scripts to do this: too many different methods, but eventually I get csv files for each account, then hledger import - and finally I manually fix up details
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