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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

csun.io

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#31

Post by djhworld »

boromi wrote: post #12
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #2

I've used GnuCash for years before switching to beancount ( https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/ with smart_importer: https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer ) and fava ( https://github.com/beancount/fava/ ). Much easier to work on your journals (ledger, trades, prices...) since they are just text files. Really great if you're using the beancount package for Sublime: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Beancount…

Thanks for this. Looks compelling. Is there a simple installation guide, I find it hard to figure out how to get going.

The installation is really just a python library, but if you want to keep everything contained you can put them in a Dockerfile

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#32

Post by gonehome »

whycombagator wrote: post #28
gonehome wrote: post #7

I'd be curious if anyone has used this and also used YNAB (and can compare them). I'd put YNAB along with 1Password (and probably Fastmail) in the class of best single purpose pieces of software that I pay for.

I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their homepage line: > Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money. As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better…

I actually hadn't heard about bitwarden (thanks) - I'll check that out.

I'm not in YNAB's target market either, but the value they provide is useful even if you're not struggling month to month with finances. You get really good control over your money and a much better understanding of how you're spending it and where.

Being really aware of that makes it easier to actually leverage it more because you know exactly what you can put where so you can be closer to zero in your checking account (push more towards investments, etc.).

It also makes it easier to change behavior and know exactly what knobs you can turn with your finances.

Only downside with it is that the auto-import sucks (I suspect because the bank APIs suck). I move all transactions through one credit card and I manually create transactions in YNAB when the card is charged. I use the Apple Card which has really good software so it's easy to notice transactions and make sure things line up.

My username is also from when I was 13 and really excited about linux :-), now mostly on macOS - I haven't really lived up to it.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#34

Post by samastur »

spodek wrote: post #9

I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here: > If you’re happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less than a certain amount each month, that’s great! You don’t need GnuCash. I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or wha…

I do, each bill or bank transaction being its own entry. I'm sure I belong in minority of people who do this. It's all manual labour too without any imports from banks etc. (never tried).

I do it for two reasons. Occasionally I found a problem with double-billing that I would otherwise miss, but mostly it is to be able to check where my money went and plan realistically.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#35

Post by igpay »

brnt wrote: post #3

Hold up. Did Gnucash get better reporting or did he make his own? Last time I used Gnucash, which admittedly was 10 years ago, but for a business, I found reporting and the lack of budgeting lacking. The latter could be solved by envelopes (but I find hacky), but the former only by learning Guile, something I was and am not up to. Alternatives like Money dance have a more complete solution, certainly for personal use…

The very first plot shown in the article was generated with custom scripts, published here (https://github.com/csun/simple_gnucash_budget_plots)

I'm not sure how much it's changed since 2014. I think the "budgeting" system is still probably as bad as it was back then, though (and by bad I mean not really applicable for personal use, probably good for businesses). That's why I wrote this budget plotting script.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#36

Post by sjamaan »

ISL wrote: post #4

Does GnuCash integrate well with exports from credit-card companies or banks? It seems like the big blocker is the time spent logging transactions.

It supports imports from QIF and OFX/QFX files, CSV files, MT940 and MT942 files and DTAUS files. It also has an "online banking" integration thing, but I have no idea what kind of bank has username/password logins that would work with this.

Personally, I don't mind manually entering the stuff, because you'll need to classify everything into the correct accounts anyway.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#37

Post by igpay »

neogodless wrote: post #5

> We don’t care about how much money we’ve spent at Amazon That's like, your opinion man. While I'm sure that's one perfectly valid approach, I find a lot of value in knowing where my money has gone beyond categories. To make it more concrete, how much I spend at Amazon my Rewards Visa determines whether the 2% bump in rewards is worth the cost of Prime. (I know - most people find enough value in the videos or not th…

And that's definitely an important shortcoming in GnuCash. I don't know of a great way to deal with transactions that go beyond "categories". You could use the description field + custom reporting, but that seems a bit error-prone. Luckily, I haven't run into many cases where I felt like I needed something like this.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#38

Post by igpay »

elric wrote: post #6

"Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools. That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which ca…

I also wasn't super sure about sticking "simple" in the title, but while writing this article and going through the GnuCash setup steps, I actually started to feel like it was appropriate.

As another commenter mentioned, I think that the "complicated" part of using GnuCash is understanding double-entry bookkeeping, which is why I devoted so much time in the article trying to explain it in concrete terms. My intention here isn't necessarily to steer people to GnuCash itself (I'm learning about a lot of alternatives from these comments), but to simplify the core underlying concepts. Not sure if I achieved that, but I tried!

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#39

Post by clircle »

I was an avid GnuCash user for a year or two in grad school, keeping track of my finances using GnuCash Mobile on my android phone. Then I bought a new phone and exported my finances database. When I loaded it into my new phone, I found the xml had been corrupted.

That was a sad day because I'd like to use an offline finance tracker on my phone.

BTW GnuCashMobile is not GnuCash, it's some third party android app.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#40

Post by igpay »

pmoriarty wrote: post #26
every wrote: post #15

I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level, it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are staggering... [1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html [2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html

I looked in to switching from GnuCash to Ledger about 5 years ago, and found that it would have been too painful to use for manually inputting the thousands of transactions I had because it just didn't have the nice auto-complete and GUI nicities that GnuCash had. I'm a hardcore command-line and keyboard-only power user, so I would have absolutely loved to have made Ledger work for me rather than use the mouse-heavy…

This is exactly what made me switch away from ledger. I thought that a command-line/plaintext only workflow would be great, because that's what I usually prefer. However, a GUI + autocomplete just ended up being way more useable for me in this case.
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