cross-posted from: https://eviltoast.org/post/14412290
I’ve been really lazy with keeping track of my money over the last few years. I still use personal capital (now empower)'s dashboard, but it’s not self-hosted and they can be pretty aggressive with their marketing.
Previously, I was using Beancount + Fava to track all of my money, including investments. Every time I think about updating my ledger and importing the last several years of transactions, it just feels overwhelming and I put it off again.
I’m still a fan of plain-text-accounting, but importing a large number of transactions always feels cumbersome.
I tried Firefly-III briefly, but it didn’t support investment tracking. I also saw Ghostfolio for the investment side, but haven’t tried it yet and it seems to only do investments.
My wishlist of features is below, are there any self-hosted/oss finance apps that would meet most of these?
- self-hosted
- import via csv at minimum, ideally support for yodly/plaid/some other bank syncing api
- support for regular accounts (checking/savings), credit cards, and investment accounts (stocks, 401k, etc)
- misc. asset tracking like for a car or house
- mobile app or mobile-friendly web view
- local llm support for categorizing transactions and fixing merchant semi-automatically
- multi-user support - not required, but it’d be nice if my partner and I can use the same app but still have our own private accounts too
- tags or some other way to group expenses together (like all expenses related to a trip)
- good reporting
- bonus: support for custom reports/calculations like “If i retired next year, how much money would I have per month?”
Alternatively, what do you all use for this type of thing?
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I’ve been using Actual Budget in a docker container. It’s worked well for me but not sure if it checks all the boxes for you.
I love Actual. It’s fantastic and easy to use. I use off-budget accounts and weekly / monthly reconciliation just to keep the general value of these accounts at stable intervals.
I have a slight bone to pick with the PWA version of the site though. After a couple months of using the PWA front end to keep my budget and transactions accurate manually, I opened the site on my desktop browser and it completely lost all that work due to a sync issue. Apparently the PWA for weeks had not remained in sync and so all manual entries were not making back to the server. But the app works so well I never noticed because it kept just working. Supposedly there’s an alert saying it’s not synced with the server but it’s not prominent enough. So if you use that feature (the PWA) then be sure it’s syncing often.
I stopped looking after I found ledger-cli.
Is this the Vim of financial accounting?
I switched from ledger to beancount at some point. I don’t really remember what features beancount had over ledger anymore though.
My plan is to try a few of the other suggestions here like Maybe, Actual, Ghostfolio, etc, and if I don’t end up liking them - just bite the bullet and make the effort to pick up beancount again. I’ll have to check out ledger vs beancount again though and see what the actual differences were again.
Also check out https://hledger.org/ more actively maintained ledger Haskell clone(not that the original ledger is unmaintained)
I played around a bit with hledger, but ultimately did not see a reason to switch from ledger. I don’t remember if I ran into any issues, but at least they are not totally compatible.
I do Ghostfolio for my stocks. Though I paid for it to support development, its quite cheap.
I use GNUCash with the file on a NAS. I’ve been using GC for over 20 years, I just don’t see myself changing soon.
Have you tried any of the other options by any chance? Anything that GNUCash does well that keeps you using it? I think not having mobile access would be the thing I’d miss the most
Beware, Gnucash is meant to be pro level accounting software. Is not a simple ledger or a tech/crypto gateway. I also use it for my personal life, but there’s like 30% of features I don’t use because they’re business accounting stuff I don’t need. It predates the cloud, it cares not for the latest trends, it crunches numbers and spits out reports. That’s part of what I like about it. It is not simple but it also isn’t bloated.
I think gnucash looking more like actual accounting software is one of the things that originally put me off of it. I didn’t know what double-entry accounting was at the time either.
When I started, it was only GNUCash as a free option. Never tried anything else. It fits my needs as a family very well.
There’s no mobile or web access, and that’s fine for me. Updating it is something done once a week or less for me anyway.
I manage mortgage, virtual account for kids allowances, budget for future expenditures, and have a set of reports that I refresh to keep tabs on my money and goals.
Totally fair. When you have a lot of history in an app and don’t have any real issues with it, it takes a lot to want to switch to something else.
Do you import transactions at all, or just manually input them?
My previous bank used make it easy to import them, but ever since I’ve moved countries I’ve just been doing it by hand. The banking system here sucks.
Check out DollarDollar Bill Y’all https://github.com/harung1993/dollardollar
I’m currently using firefly-iii + Ghostfolio simultaneously. I’m not really a fan of this approach because Firefly-iii shows the wrong net worth without my investments and Ghostfolio doesn’t handle tax lots correctly. The Firefly-iii importer was terrible and created a mess of my transaction history too because I tried to import data from Mint going back a decade. I ended up writing my own Python-based analyzer to clean-up the data to get it imported. Now I just use those tools for visualization until I find alternatives.
Plaid didn’t work because I couldn’t use OAuth to banks without going through compliance reviews (not sure if that has changed.) I instead focused on building scraping tools to pull directly from banks or my bank aggregator, Monarch (I use this when I couldn’t directly scrape from a bank due to auth issues.) I had to build Playwright scripts to scrape website and it’s all very janky code, but it technically works. Some of that has been open-sourced, the actual scrapers need to be cleaned up.
Thanks for sharing your scripts. Could you create an account in firefly-iii that is just the overall value and have a script that takes the balance from ghostfolio and updates it in firefly-iii?
For Plaid, I went through the process to apply for “production” access and get oauth access to most banks. It really wasn’t bad at all. I basically just said I was going to use it for personal use, not selling anything, and not letting others use it. I haven’t used it much, but did get it approved relatively quickly.
Could you create an account in firefly-iii that is just the overall value and have a script that takes the balance from ghostfolio and updates it in firefly-iii?
I considered that, but that would require me to create deposit or withdrawal transactions every day to represent the change in account value.
For Plaid, I went through the process to apply for “production” access and get oauth access to most banks. It really wasn’t bad at all. I basically just said I was going to use it for personal use, not selling anything, and not letting others use it. I haven’t used it much, but did get it approved relatively quickly.
That changes things. I might go ahead and apply for Plaid and use it for cases where I don’t have my own scrapers. I know it doesn’t give detailed information for investments to the degree that I am looking for.
Maybe one of these is interesting? I have no actual experience with them though:
https://github.com/DumbWareio/DumbBudget
They should all be self-hostable.
Edit: I don’t know of these all match your criteria. Maybe finance looks pretty Sleek imho. I just dread the thought of exporting my transactions and importing them because my bank is forking horrible w.r.t. integrations.
And logging in every time to do a CSV export is just annoying.
Edit 2: formatting
Oh wow, Maybe does look pretty slick and covers most of what I want. It looks like it supports importing transactions automatically (without csv files?) but I don’t see much about how that’s configured for hte self-hosted version yet. I’ll definitely try it out.
Paisa looks pretty nice too. I might try it if I can import/convert my old beancount ledger files into it.
I tried out a whole bunch of these recently, and think I will be landing on Actual Budget due to the ease of use.
Maybe is the slickest looking, but it is on of the most cumbersome in terms of tagging/categorizing transactions.
I tried:
- Actual Budget
- Firefly III
- Maybe
- WYGIWYH
Actual Budget has been awesome for my partner and me.
What was cumbersome around tagging/categorizing in Maybe? I’m probably going to have to install all of the ones I’m interested in at the same time to test them side by side
From what I recall, it is buried behind multiple clicks - click in to the transaction, click in to another section, perform the operations you want, go back to the transaction list, etc
