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Open Source Personal Finance Manager

seeker89.github.io

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Re: Open Source Personal Finance Manager

#22

Post by pbreit »

RexRollman wrote: post #12

Nice but I really dislike the website for this. I don't know if there is a term for that design but I hope it doesn't become popular.

I might give Zuck my bank credentials but I would have no trust whatsoever in some random .cc site (whose demo doesn't work).

Re: Open Source Personal Finance Manager

#26

Post by FedRegister »

berkut wrote: post #5
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, s…

The last place I want my personal finance details is in "the cloud".

Re: Open Source Personal Finance Manager

#27

Post by Procrastes »

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,…

I've checked back with Mint many times over the years, but they have never added support for any of my banks and never responded with more than a form email to requests. After quite a bit of back and forth with Wave and their backend provider (yodlee?), I was able to get connected.

It does squick me out to share my credentials and grant full access to my bank account, but I was hoping for some smart transaction categorization. Wave does a pretty good job there.

I'm still likely to just disconnect and reset all of my passwords though. It's just too worrisome leaving that out there.

Re: Open Source Personal Finance Manager

#28

Post by Jun8 »

But I would give my bank credentials to Zuckerberg (say we meet at a restaurant in Palo Alto and he asks for it). The asymmetry of the situation means that he will lose much more than the meager amount in my account if he steals the money. So that questions is rather silly.

I understand that the question really means "give you credentials to Facebook", where Facebook is proxy to any big company. This is a harder question, but one that I face often in practice, giving out bank account info, SSID number, credit card numbers, etc. The answer, evidently (since I and millions of other people do give this information out) is yes. The above answer still applies, these companies still stand to lose more than me if this information leaks or they mismanage it.

In summary, the richer and visible an entity (real or corporate) is the better I feel about providing sensitive information, if it should be provided. This means that teh sort of main message used here ("would you give your account info to") is irrelevant. Being open source is a huge step up, but for the general public either it doesn't mean much or else is a detriment, since the thinking is that, if it's open, "hackers" can also see the code and find ways to exploit it.

So how can a small startup ever compete with large established companies, since this creates a chicken and egg problem?

Re: Open Source Personal Finance Manager

#29

Post by Procrastes »

I was just mulling over this same problem last week. This approach is a big improvement over giving Mint or Wave (or their scraping partners) my credentials.

Last I looked GnuCash didn't support any online banking except HCBI (Germany). So beyond the simple online finance manager functions, maybe it would be worth thinking of re-purposing this as a banking transaction aggregator that could feed GnuCash or Ledger or whatever. That would give it a better focus on the value for me, at least.

What I would really like to see is a startup or open source project that can sell banks on a standard API with granular OAUTH and drive that difficult adoption cycle. Something in the spirit of the German HCBI, but built on REST with the ability to limit an app's access to read-only, get balance and get transaction options.

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