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How you can track your personal finances using Python

sgoel.dev

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Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#21

Post by westurner »

> We take the output of the previous step, pipe everything over to our .beancount file, and "balance" transactions.

> Recall that the flow of money in double-entry accounting is represented using transactions involving at least two accounts. When you download CSVs from your bank, each line in that CSV represents money that's either incoming or outgoing. That's only one leg of a transaction (credit or debit). It's up to us to provide the other leg.

> This act is called "balancing".

Balance (accounting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_(accounting)

Are unique record IDs necessary for this [financial] application? FWICS, https://plaintextaccounting.org/ just throws away the (probably per-institution) transaction IDs; like a non-reflexive logic that eschews Law of identity? Just grep and wc?

> What does the ledger look like?

> I wrote earlier that one of the main things that Beancount provides is a language specification for defining financial transactions in a plain-text format.

> What does this format look like? Here's a quick example:

  option "title" "Alice"
  option "operating_currency" "EUR"

  ; Accounts
  2021-01-01 open Assets:MyBank:Checking
  2021-01-01 open Expenses:Rent

  2021-01-01 * "Landlord" "Thanks for the rent"
      Assets:MyBank:Checking     -1000.00 EUR
      Expenses:Rent               1000.00 EUR
What does the `*` do?

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#22

Post by chromatin »

xupybd wrote: post #13

I used HLedger for years it was great. I thought I could do better with a paid solution. YNAB was awful and slow. So I switched to Lunch Money. It's amazing fast and intuitive. Only it's not a good fit for me. I'm trying to shoe horn my budgeting style into and it's not working. I use the envelope style. Every dollar is assigned a bucket when it comes in. All spending is done from a bucket and balances always persist…

I still use Hledger along with a small phalanx of accessory scripts, mostly written in Python, that do everything from parse CSVs to calling smart contract read functions to categorize crypto transactions for tax purposes.

Many thanks to Simon Michael for not only that wonderful program but also being so responsive.

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#23

Post by SavantIdiot »

It's funny that a register application is basically a trivial database, but it requires so much subtle UI/UX that it is really hard to make something usable. I've been using Quicken for 30+ years and I've tried other software, including my own and open source, and nothing really comes close the the ease of what they've built.

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#24

Post by candiddevmike »

If you want an open source self hosted budgeting solution, firefly is the most commonly recommended (https://www.firefly-iii.org/). If you are looking for something supported/less DIY and with features beyond budgeting, checkout Homechart (https://about.homechart.app).

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#25

Post by xupybd »

chromatin wrote: post #22
xupybd wrote: post #13

I used HLedger for years it was great. I thought I could do better with a paid solution. YNAB was awful and slow. So I switched to Lunch Money. It's amazing fast and intuitive. Only it's not a good fit for me. I'm trying to shoe horn my budgeting style into and it's not working. I use the envelope style. Every dollar is assigned a bucket when it comes in. All spending is done from a bucket and balances always persist…

I still use Hledger along with a small phalanx of accessory scripts, mostly written in Python, that do everything from parse CSVs to calling smart contract read functions to categorize crypto transactions for tax purposes. Many thanks to Simon Michael for not only that wonderful program but also being so responsive.

I might go back to HLedger soon. I guess I can always donate monthly to the project to scratch my small business support itch.

I also had a good collection of scripts to manage my finances. I ran it all on a VPS so I could access anywhere. I had an ssh client on my phone to make changes on the go. Not as ergonomic as an app but it worked.

Agreed Simon is an amazing project owner. He and his documentation are the reasons I like HLedger over the alternatives.

I'll admit that GoDBLedger is also tempting.

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#26

Post by westurner »

commoner wrote: post #20
westurner wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203393 : > No, your personal data is not sold or rented or given away or bartered to parties that are not Plaid, your bank, or the connected app. We talk about all of this in our privacy policy, including ways that data could be used — for example, with data processors/service providers (like AWS which hosts our services) for the purposes of running Plaid’s services or for…

The comments in those threads were more negative than positive, and the fact that Plaid paid a $58 million settlement for allegedly sharing personal banking data with third parties without consent is telling enough. I am not going to give my banking usernames and passwords to Plaid in plaintext, when their employee is arguing on HN over what the word "sold" means: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28201649

Are you making claims without evidence? Settling is not admission of guilt.

Banks should implement read-only OAuth APIs, so that users are not required to store their u/p/sqa answers.

From "Canada calls screen scraping ‘unsecure,’ sets Open Banking target for 2023" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28229957 :

> AFAIU, there are still zero (0) consumer banking APIs with Read-Only e.g. OAuth APIs in the US as well?

Looks like there may be less than 3 so far.

> Banks could save themselves CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and liability by implementing read-only API tokens and methods that need only return JSON - instead of HTML or worse, monthly PDF tables for a fee - possibly similar to the Plaid API: https://plaid.com/docs/api/

> There is competition in consumer/retail banking, but still the only way to do e.g. budget and fraud analysis with third party apps is to give away all authentication factors: u/p/sqa; and TBH that's unacceptable.

> Traditional and distributed ledger service providers might also consider W3C ILP: Interledger Protocol (in starting their move to quantum-resistant ledgers by 2022 in order to have a 5 year refresh cycle before QC is a real risk by 2027, optimistically, for science) when reviewing the entropy of username+password_hash+security_question_answer strings in comparison to the entropy of cryptoasset account public key hash strings: https://interledger.org/developer-tools/get-started/overview...

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#27

Post by candiddevmike »

jmschlmrs wrote: post #19

I built https://mygraph.ca as I was tired of Mint failing to sync with Canadian banks (and later dropped Mint anyway because of the security/privacy concerns). It’s not targeting technical users but it would be cool to add a SQL integration like Stripe Sigma, etc at some point.

Hey this is pretty cool, I posted an app too and see some opportunities for collaboration here (especially since I'm starting to explore data visualization capabilities). Can you email me? My contact info is in my profile.

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#28

Post by commoner »

westurner wrote: post #26
commoner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comments in those threads were more negative than positive, and the fact that Plaid paid a $58 million settlement for allegedly sharing personal banking data with third parties without consent is telling enough. I am not going to give my banking usernames and passwords to Plaid in plaintext, when their employee is arguing on HN over what the word "sold" means: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28201649

Are you making claims without evidence? Settling is not admission of guilt. Banks should implement read-only OAuth APIs, so that users are not required to store their u/p/sqa answers. From "Canada calls screen scraping ‘unsecure,’ sets Open Banking target for 2023" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28229957 : > AFAIU, there are still zero (0) consumer banking APIs with Read-Only e.g. OAuth APIs in the US as well?…

> Are you making claims without evidence?

No. Plaid did agree to pay the $58 million, and the lawsuit was for alleged data sharing with third parties without user consent. I don't care if they admit guilt or not. They agreed to pay $58 million to end the lawsuit, and that does not engender trust. Shifting the blame to banks doesn't make Plaid any more reputable.

Providing usernames and passwords of sensitive accounts to a third party is a privacy and security risk, and Plaid has not earned enough trust from me to justify the risk I would need to assume to use their services.

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#29

Post by freddie_mercury »

westurner wrote: post #21

> We take the output of the previous step, pipe everything over to our .beancount file, and "balance" transactions. > Recall that the flow of money in double-entry accounting is represented using transactions involving at least two accounts. When you download CSVs from your bank, each line in that CSV represents money that's either incoming or outgoing. That's only one leg of a transaction (credit or debit). It's up…

The star is just an 1-digit field for "flag". I don't think there are any defined semantics for the field but by convention 'star' means something 'no special flags on this transaction'.

People use other flags to indicate, for instance, whether a transaction has been reconciled, or cleared their bank, or whatnot.

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#30

Post by berkut »

Waterluvian wrote: post #16

There’s so many ways to do personal finances but I found most of them to either be too tedious or require doing stupid things like letting third parties log into your bank account. For me I simply had a spreadsheet with rows for each month and columns for each account: chequing, mortgage, RRSP, RESP, etc. I’d spend 10 mins a month logging in and typing out each balance. I’d chart the over-time trend and that’s all I…

Yeah, I wrote my own open source app to do basic personal finance accounting 12 years ago after getting annoyed at the propriatary OS X solutions (iBank, in particular), and KMyMoney / GNUCash not supporting split transactions at the time (they do now), and have been using that for the past 12 years. It's not double-entry (I recognise the benefits of that, but don't like it), and it's a manual process, but it works for me, and I can graph stuff easily to provide some indication of where money is going.

I ported it to Qt for Linux last year and still use it, but to be honest, I don't really know why I track my finances that religously - although it has helped me a few times with accounting / tax purposes given I'm a contractor now.

I suspect one of the reasons there are so many different solutions is everyone wants to do things differently, and integration with the banks for automated transaction import/download is quite complicated.

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