21–27 of 27 posts
Personal accounting is about data capture; if you don't gather good data, you end up with garbage in garbage out analysis. Having a simple, non-propretary file format enables so many things. The data capture side (OFX/QIF/CSV files, bank websites, etc. etc.) is still clunky and painful but that's a hard problem to solve.
Does anybody have a suggestion for an Android/Sailfish OS app which supports this? Ideally I’d like to run something like hledger-web on my home server and have a little app on my phone which lets me do data entry during the day, either directly talking to the server and/or caching the results until a connection can be made again.
The idea is to run the app in a web browser using IndexedDB. It's written in React and all client-side, so I'm hoping this could run in a web browser or as a native app. It could also run purely client-side as a Chrome App so you don't have to trust a server.
I've put a ton of work into the data layer, which is pretty functional, but I'm a backend guy and not very fast at writing UI's. If anyone is interested in helping me on the UI I'd love that. (Fair warning: since I'm a Googler by day I released this as a Google Open Source project, and to contribute to it you'd have to sign the Google CLA. I understand if some people might not be into that).
It even has a (very rough) importer from Ledger format.
It supports filters (time, tags, account and payee) and you can find a demo here: http://fava.pythonanywhere.com
[1] http://furius.ca/beancount/ [2] https://github.com/aumayr/fava
This is an incredible resource, +1. I started using ledger heavily about a year ago and it's been a game changer. Personal accounting is about data capture; if you don't gather good data, you end up with garbage in garbage out analysis. Having a simple, non-propretary file format enables so many things. The data capture side (OFX/QIF/CSV files, bank websites, etc. etc.) is still clunky and painful but that's a hard p…
i find these plain text accounting projects very interesting but what i need is something more akin to what YNAB provides, which is budgeting.
At my bank, I have a "Chequing" and "Savings" account (that's their use, anyway). I use GnuCash for Android as kind of an additional data layer on top of my bank accounts.
In GnuCash I have a Savings and Chequing account I manage, but I've got a whole separate hierarchy of "bank accounts" called "Budget". Under that I build a whole tree of "Bills", "Planned Purchases", "Car", "Credit Card Payment", etc. When I get paid I transfer the appropriate amounts into the various "budget" accounts to plan for my bills and such. The displayed amount for my "Savings" account is actually "money that is not allocated to anything right now". (The true total is Savings+Budget.)
If I pick something up on my credit card (e.g., buying something online), that expense gets logged against my credit card right away and I can just transfer some money from Savings/Chequing/Budget into my "Credit Card Payment" budget item.
It doesn't really provide me any forecasting, and I can't really set up "future bills", but once I move the money into the budget accounts it's essentially "spent", so it serves the purpose just as well.
(As an added benefit, I've set up the expense accounts to more or less mirror my budget accounts, with some additional ones for the unbudgetted day-to-day. I can always get an accurate picture of "how much have I spent on since I started tracking", which is interesting.)
i find these plain text accounting projects very interesting but what i need is something more akin to what YNAB provides, which is budgeting.
It's very much a "what works for me", but any accounting system that supports an account hierarchy (which ledger seems to) can have some form of budgeting "bolted on". At my bank, I have a "Chequing" and "Savings" account (that's their use, anyway). I use GnuCash for Android as kind of an additional data layer on top of my bank accounts. In GnuCash I have a Savings and Chequing account I manage, but I've got a whole…