The last time I used GnuCash, it was not able to import it's own export. Does anyone know if this has been fixed?
Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
81–90 of 323 posts
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#82Firefly[1][2] is also a really useful personal finance app.
It's more akin to a self-hosted version of Mint. Combined with the Plaid connector[3], I find it the easiest to use for my workflow. And despite the instructions, you don't need a paid dev account. The free Plaid account will let you access up to 100 live financial institutions.
[1] https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii
[2] Live demo: https://demo.firefly-iii.org/
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#83Like many people here, I tried GnuCash. I enjoyed it, but when I would import data from my bank, it would crash. That, and not having any real way of categorizing my expenditures was annoying. The other thing that annoyed me was not being able to select multiple items I recently moved to KMyMoney and everything just clicked. I found the interface to be nicer, especially combining the filter functionality with the abi…
No way to categorize your expenses? Could you elaborate and compare to KMM? I've used both programs, so I'm curious which of us is missing something.
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#84My partner and I have been tracking all our spending for the last five years with hledger (ledger reimplemented in haskell) and some custom import and management scripts inspired by "Full-fledged hledger" [1]. More recently we added Plaid [2] for auto-importing from financial accounts. I love having a plain-text history and being able to ask complex queries. One unexpectedly-sweet benefit is that your spending is a h…
+1 for full-fledged hledger! I just got it set up last week, and putting together the small scripts for parsing all of the CSVs was (to me) a fun programming exercise that reaped huge visibility into how I spend my money :) It's hugely valuable to have all of your financial data in one, human-readable place. Not only to you, but to whomever might be executing your will ;)
Imagining my will as a poorly-documented API makes me feel present stress on behalf of my unborn descendants :)
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#85I kinda want to try it but just not convinced I will see a good return on my time esp with manual entry. I wish some of these features were baked into my main bank account though.
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#86I'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'd be curious if anyone has used this and also used YNAB (and can compare them).
I'm a long-time user of both. YNAB wins hands-down in budgeting and basic usability.
When I got married, we integrated finances. I had been using GnuCash for years by then. Its interface was an immediate non-starter, even though as an application it's more powerful than YNAB (e.g., stocks and retirement planning, mortgage amortization, business expenses, easier splits--at least in my opinion). If it had a better budget and reporting system, I might have been able to swing it--but it didn't and doesn't, and that was that. The other killer feature YNAB offered was a mobile application.
Financial apps have to reduce friction. Interpersonal first (although that's a tall order for software), but also in delivering fast entry and a big-picture view of what you're doing with your money. GnuCash really isn't designed for any of that. And that's honestly fine for what it is, although I wish the database were easier to wrap your head around—it should be possible to build a cleaner and/or web UI around it than it seems to be.
As it is, I'm not really content with YNAB either, but if that's what it takes to get our internal financial reporting in order, it's a lot better than nothing.
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#87A macOS and iOS alternative: https://hochgatterer.me/finances/macos/
> No data is stored on servers, except when you enable Cloud Sync to keep your data up-to-date on all your devices. In this case the data is stored encrypted on iCloud.
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#88I'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…
Wow, your setup sounds very similar to what I've converged on. Except I wrote a fairly substantial pipeline that preprocesses the data before giving it to beancount and Fava. Maybe I missed something, but it seemed like beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal file. I really wanted a pipeline where each bank statement PDF would output one file with a corresponding list of transactions (this stage can r…
You're parsing PDF? I'd imagine most places allow some sort of data export like csv or something? That's how I get the data out of Chase and BofA.
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#89I 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've tracked my finances for as long as I can remember. It's become even more important since getting married.
We track every penny. About once a month we sit down and categorize every purchase we made the last month. We only keep receipts if the purchase was for a non-obvious category (e.g. buying both diapers and groceries at Target) so that we can split each transaction between categories.
For some banks, we manually download transaction data in whatever nice format they provide. For others, we use a syncing service that works with the app.
It's been so great throughout our marriage to know that we're both in charge of the money and make decisions together.
That said, I've talked with many people who don't like that level of detail. At first, it was baffling to me that people didn't know the details of their finances, but as I've grown, I've realized that there's plenty more than one good way to manage your money.
Full disclosure: I actively work on and sell budgeting software.
Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
#90Firefly[1][2] is also a really useful personal finance app. It's more akin to a self-hosted version of Mint. Combined with the Plaid connector[3], I find it the easiest to use for my workflow. And despite the instructions, you don't need a paid dev account. The free Plaid account will let you access up to 100 live financial institutions. [1] https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii [2] Live demo: https://demo.firef…
I use this too. Maybe I like the beancount more, but having my finances available on the web to share with my so is valuable. Too many told are meant for one pers,on and don't support modern ideas like tagging.