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Open Source Personal Finance Manager

seeker89.github.io

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Re: Open Source Personal Finance Manager

#5

Post by berkut »

jeremysmyth wrote: post #3

First? What about http://www.gnucash.org/ or any of the others?

Missing the "Cloud - based" part I think...

I agree with the idea of a free/open finance manager - definitely when it connects to the bank through online services.

I wrote a GPL'd finance app for OS X a few years ago, and tried to add online banking support, but other than OFX HTTP download, there didn't seem to be any standard specification for it at the time other than screen-scraping, which I don't think counts, so I didn't bother, given it would be different for each bank.

Another issue is that my bank would give abbreviated/limited names and descriptions of the data, which meant that there needed to be a "post import" step to tidy the data up to make it meaningful which was annoying.

I don't know what the state of things is now...

Re: Open Source Personal Finance Manager

#6

Post by mason55 »

rlvesco7 wrote: post #4

This sounds awesome. I've been looking to build an alternative to Mint, but getting banking data (in an automated way) has always been a pain. I look forward to trying it out.

Yeah Mint has so many flaws and warts but without the backend integrations it would be very tough to create a competitor.

There was a good article a couple of years back about why Wesabe lost to Mint[1], written by one of the Wesabe co-founders. The biggest issue according to him was that they chose to write their own integrations instead of partnering with Yodlee.

Since that time, Mint has left the Yodlee platform, but it gave them a first-mover advantage that no one has been able to overcome.

[1] http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint/

Re: Open Source Personal Finance Manager

#9

Post by smackfu »

mason55 wrote: post #6
rlvesco7 wrote: post #4

This sounds awesome. I've been looking to build an alternative to Mint, but getting banking data (in an automated way) has always been a pain. I look forward to trying it out.

Yeah Mint has so many flaws and warts but without the backend integrations it would be very tough to create a competitor. There was a good article a couple of years back about why Wesabe lost to Mint[1], written by one of the Wesabe co-founders. The biggest issue according to him was that they chose to write their own integrations instead of partnering with Yodlee. Since that time, Mint has left the Yodlee platform,…

And Mint was purchased by Intuit, which already had the backend integrations for years due to Quicken.
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