71–80 of 138 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
interesting! the features do sound similar to what I'm looking for, unfortunately the monthly cost is too high for me :(
I'm always looking for feedback, including on similar topics :-) What would be a "good" price for you? (asking because when I'll make a complete rewrite, I want to have various price ranges, including a lower starting price).
I use You Need A Budget to track my personal finances and budget for the future. I also use it my my company to know exactly how much profit I have. It’s the only app I’ve found that lets me prepare for the future and allow me to make proper decisions. Whenever I spend money, I record the transaction in the app and import my bank statements to reconcile once a month.
Tried it, looks interesting for being different. One thing I didnt like is the inability to plan future months, it doesnt account for future income flows, although it lets you spend money. Obviously I get the red alert because I'm spending money I do not have (but I will, at that time of the month)...
Not ideal for everyone, but works great for me. Aside from that, I like the ability to set goals for yearly expenses and making sure you are putting enough away. This is great for insurance, tax, etc. I use Xero for my official business accounts, and being able to look to the future is the single biggest thing missing.
There's a slight learning curve but I've been very happy with GnuCash. It supports multiple accounts and containers, has decent reporting, invoicing, categorizing, etc. I also really like that it's offline. https://www.gnucash.org/
Yes to GnuCash, but for none of the reasons OP wants. GnuCash is, let’s be honest, crap. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it, it’s totally free, but it’s crap. However , it forces you to learn how to do proper double-entry bookkeeping. You’ll get it wrong a bunch of times before you get it right. You’ll Google stuff and be frustrated that you can’t find an answer. You’ll just learn, somehow. But then... ...one day so…
Not that I'm using GnuCash or even consider it, heck, I'm not even freelancing. However, people like you, sharing knowledge, are what keeps the Internet alive ;).
The answer for this will be different for everyone. None of the answers will be sure to fix your problems. Dealing with your finances (or anything else you deal with more than once) is a process. Figure out what your process needs to be and then automate the most painful parts with the tools you can find. Rinse and repeat as you locate more pain points. You'll likely find that a general tool such as Excel is the best…
I was also having the same dilemma, although not a freelancer. I wanted to track my finances and tried lot of different tools but in the end decided to use plain excel. But then adding expense on Excel from mobile is real pain, so I wrote a frontend client for it. I've been using it for about 1.5 years now, works like a charm. I have expense history of almost every cent I spent in last 1.5 years :) Check it out: http…
The best thing is that you have been using it for 1.5 years. The hardest part is making something stick. Even just entering stuff into a spreadsheet.
In the UK, many FinTech startups have started launching current accounts targeted to freelancers and small businesses. Some examples:
https://getcoconut.com https://www.tide.co/
Obviously if you're in the US this won't work, but you haven't mentioned explicitly.
There's a slight learning curve but I've been very happy with GnuCash. It supports multiple accounts and containers, has decent reporting, invoicing, categorizing, etc. I also really like that it's offline. https://www.gnucash.org/
Yes to GnuCash, but for none of the reasons OP wants. GnuCash is, let’s be honest, crap. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it, it’s totally free, but it’s crap. However , it forces you to learn how to do proper double-entry bookkeeping. You’ll get it wrong a bunch of times before you get it right. You’ll Google stuff and be frustrated that you can’t find an answer. You’ll just learn, somehow. But then... ...one day so…
Last time I checked, gnucash sucked in charts :p
For analysis and filing taxes and stuff, I've written some custom analysis scripts that take the ledger file as input. Pretty easy to write, since the tool already gives you a large and reasonably well documented Python API.
[1] http://furius.ca/beancount/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm always looking for feedback, including on similar topics :-) What would be a "good" price for you? (asking because when I'll make a complete rewrite, I want to have various price ranges, including a lower starting price).
A lot or freelancers are from non-EU/US countries. 22€ can go from "food for a week" to "half of the minimum wage".
There's a slight learning curve but I've been very happy with GnuCash. It supports multiple accounts and containers, has decent reporting, invoicing, categorizing, etc. I also really like that it's offline. https://www.gnucash.org/
Learning to use GnuCash also gives you a good basic knowledge of accountancy principles which are useful skills to have both professionally and in general.
Tried GnuCash few times - first time I failed because I didn't know how to work with double-entry accounting [3]. Second time failed because GnuCash isn't flexible with currencies (maybe things got better now).
All these tools has steep learning curve, but things pays back with extreme flexibility and longevity over time. Everything is a text, which means I can access it from everywhere (scripts, editors, phone). I'm keeping everything on git (invoices, payment details, project status, todo list), so every change is recorded and, most important, I'm not dependent on external company's product that can go bankrupt tomorrow.
As I'm doing business with customers from different parts of world, I'm trying to be flexible by accepting currencies whatever is suitable for them. This is nightmare for ordinary accounting tools and AFAIK only ledger-cli and derivatives are able to handle it properly (eg. cryptocurrency payments and transactions). Hell, I'm even using ledger-cli to track my car fuel consumption and expenses which shows level of flexibility (try that with GnuCash).
Emacs/org-mode is for everything else ;) Invoices, project planning, drawing charts, coding, calculating and preparing tax reports, forecasting (you'd be surprised how powerful Emacs calc [4] is).
[1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping_syste...
[4] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/calc.htm...