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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#241

Post by xupybd »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #227
andrepd wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every bank I've used lets you download your transactions as a csv or qfx, which is then trivial to import onto gnucash (I still need to spend ~20m each month carefully sorting things in categories).

Do they let you download it programmatically? Because if not, it's next to worthless for any kind of frequent use.

Once a week I do this. It's far from worthless. It's how I do my budget. Ever dollar earned goes into a spending category. I spend out of the categories. It works amazingly well. Before I had a mortgage I just had 11 bank accounts one for each category. That paired with a stack of automatic payments to allocate each pay check and had pretty well automated my budget.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#242

Post by mulmen »

zelly wrote: post #195
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh! I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically. I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken. I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word. And, finally, none of this matt…

if only there were a currency that existed completely transparently on a public ledger that can be integrated into any finance tracking application without asking a company for API keys or scraping wouldn't it be crazy if someone made something like that money without permissions

Plus it’s really easy to track your finances when you don’t have any transactions.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#243

Post by xupybd »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #240

I was a bit flummoxed right at the first example. You bought something at a bakery, so the balance in your credit card increased ? It's right there in the increased column. Surely it decreased to a larger negative number? (Credit card accounts are almost always negative, although mine occasionally goes slightly positive when I pay it off and round up to the next pound.) And why are the columns different to the exampl…

No a credit card is a line of credit so a more positive number is more debt you owe. Spending from it increases the balance.

A savings account goes the other way.

I don't know why but it's an accounting convention.

Sometimes I think those conventions just exist to confuse people into needing an accountant.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#244

Post by xupybd »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #229
imnotreallynew wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally speaking, bank APIs are for use by businesses that want to be able to pull bank customer data. Generally speaking, yes, presumably because API access to checking and savings accounts is only applicable to businesses 99% of the time. Most consumers, even programmers, don’t have a real need for API access to their accounts that isn’t already covered by simple CSVs or Plaid.

It's not about the format, it's about the access. I'd be fine with a CSV of my bank transactions, even the completely broken pseudo-CSV that my bank outputs. What I need is the ability to pull that CSV with an API call automatically, instead of having to log in to the bank (which takes almost a minute and involves retyping numbers from a mobile device), and navigate to the right place to find the CSV download (which…

The other thing you need is a transaction I'd. Transaction amounts can change over time. I got caught by this when I tried to build my own tracking tools. Credit card transactions in foreign currencies commonly change over time. My balances never added up and I couldn't figure out why. Turns out most banks support ofx. That has IDs so you can track the changes.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#245

Post by xupybd »

candiddevmike wrote: post #65

Shameless plug, our product, Domestica, is better for personal finance tracking as it uses the envelope model of categorization. It also includes to do lists, meal planning and more--in the cloud or self hosted. https://about.domestica.app

Just paid for a year of ynab. Do you have anything I can sign up for to be reminded you exist in a year's time?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#246

Post by aceofspades19 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #240

I was a bit flummoxed right at the first example. You bought something at a bakery, so the balance in your credit card increased ? It's right there in the increased column. Surely it decreased to a larger negative number? (Credit card accounts are almost always negative, although mine occasionally goes slightly positive when I pay it off and round up to the next pound.) And why are the columns different to the exampl…

Every credit card I have had shows the balance increasing every time you make a purchase with it, when you pay the bill, the balance decreases. None of my credit card accounts have ever shown a negative balance unless I over paid the bill.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#247

Post by growse »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #240

I was a bit flummoxed right at the first example. You bought something at a bakery, so the balance in your credit card increased ? It's right there in the increased column. Surely it decreased to a larger negative number? (Credit card accounts are almost always negative, although mine occasionally goes slightly positive when I pay it off and round up to the next pound.) And why are the columns different to the exampl…

The "credit card" account is a liability account, unlike a bank account which is an asset account. If you spend something on a credit card, your liability increases.

> Credit card accounts are almost always negative

This is only true if you think of them like a bank account. Every credit card statement I've ever receive has shown the amount I owe as a positive amount.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#248

Post by TeMPOraL »

xupybd wrote: post #241
TeMPOraL wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they let you download it programmatically? Because if not, it's next to worthless for any kind of frequent use.

Once a week I do this. It's far from worthless. It's how I do my budget. Ever dollar earned goes into a spending category. I spend out of the categories. It works amazingly well. Before I had a mortgage I just had 11 bank accounts one for each category. That paired with a stack of automatic payments to allocate each pay check and had pretty well automated my budget.

Well, worthless is a strong word, it's better than nothing as it saves you typing. But having programmatic access to that data - even being able to skip the auth - would enable series of different usecases, like keeping the budget always in sync with your spending, or being able to preview your last activity conveniently, or trigger further actions on the basis of that, or just make a banking frontend that doesn't suck.

(Case in point: every month I have to send a bunch of PDFs with transaction details to my accountant; every month I waste almost an hour, a really frustrating hour, on fighting my bank's broken React SPA, and then manually renaming the PDFs I've managed to tear from the mouth of that beast. An hour on doing things that would take 30 seconds with a shell script if I could only trigger a list of transactions and a PDF summary request via an API. An hour on manually doing the only thing that's preventing me from completely automating away my regular interactions with the accountant.)

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#249

Post by vitoc »

I used GnuCash for a few years too, then switched to something else because:

1) I couldn't make transaction importing work for the statements that I want 2) I couldn't get to the report that igpay got (this was many years back) for some reason, I also wanted more custom reports and it seemed really complicated to create one 3) I wanted a tool that was more malleable. Although GnuCash is completely open source, the codebase does not look too approachable for me

After trying a few other approaches (including spreadsheets), I settled with Ledger CLI. I also built importing tools over 3 years of coding on weekends and finally got a complete set of features and financial institutions that I want :) Started with the reporting / analytics part recently... You can check it out here:

https://prudent.me

Any feedback will be very appreciated :)

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#250

Post by nunodonato »

anitil wrote: post #140
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh! I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically. I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken. I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word. And, finally, none of this matt…

I know you're not asking directly for advice, but if you'd be interested, I find the following is the easiest way of keeping a budget. 0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode. 1. Have a spreadsheet with vague monthly costs lik…

some years back I started working on an app to track finances in that kind of way. No micro-management, just macro-management of budgets and categories. It would also forecast considering past data and future predictions and see where you would attain goals or go broke! :)

I should get back to it sometime

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