If you continue developing this, I recommend completely scrapping the UI and finding a person or AI who can create something usable. What you're showing there is really that bad -- if you consider it acceptable, and expect to be able to sell it, then you really need to partner up with someone who knows what they're doing.
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
#22If you continue developing this, I recommend completely scrapping the UI and finding a person or AI who can create something usable. What you're showing there is really that bad -- if you consider it acceptable, and expect to be able to sell it, then you really need to partner up with someone who knows what they're doing.
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Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app
#23Honestly 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…
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Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app
#24Is there use for this for individuals? Or is this like advanced note taking apps: you feel productive but are just busy talking about the things you need to do instead of doing the things you need to do
Hi
Fair challenge, and for a lot of personal finance tooling it's exactly right — and honestly for double-entry too, in two cases: if your finances are simple (one account, a salary), it's overkill; and if you track meticulously but never act on the picture, it's just theater with better-looking books.
Where it earns its keep is when the single-stream "money in / money out" view starts lying to you — several accounts, some debt, reimbursements, an asset or two — because a spending pie chart can't tell you where you actually stand. Double-entry forces the books to balance, which catches errors and gives you a real net-worth position instead of a vibe
Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app
#25See also https://hledger.org/ and plain text accounting in general
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Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app
#26LLM-written drivel. Painful to read, and (weak) evidence that the project is equally sloppy. The “author” evidently does not respect their readers.
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Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app
#27Author 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.
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Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app
#28Author 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…
What's the difference betweeen this and either Quicken or Microsoft Money?
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Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app
#29Author 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.
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Re: GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app
#30Just Windows or will there be GNU/Linux?