Inspired by a comment on my last post.
I feel like I never have a solution that allows me to control it while also being automated to such a degree that I don’t have a huge confusing backup if I don’t do finances for days or weeks.
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I have a excel sheet on my laptop
I’m saying this as someone who used Mint for years due to how it integrated with banks so easily.
I’m currently using Money Manager EX, which is open source. I “self-host” the database file on my NAS, and simply open the file through MM EX’ Windows program.
Since it’s just a simple database (encrypted, of course), it’s easy to back up.
Now, I lost the ability to automatically sync with my bank. This was a blessing in disguise, since it forced me to go over each transaction carefully.
Granted, Mint had me doing the same, but because I spent a lot of time removing duplicates and fixing errors in their sync system. LOL
MM Ex has been very easy to use, and I don’t see a need to self-host the software itself.
Firefly III
Amazing, really hit’s the spot of fully featured but a tool and not a new system you need to learn
GnuCash running locally on my PC. Had worked for me for about 25 years.
Gnucash books split for personal, joint, and business with a mysql backend. I wrote a read-only web frontend for wife and OTG access. Sadly no automation so I just stay on top of it.
I use GnuCash. I typically update every couple weeks up to a month. Beyond that it can be hard to remember what specific transactions were.
It’s double ledger and I really like that it forces strict accounting. That sounds cumbersome but once you’re set up (it may take some trial and error), for me my workflow is essentially:
- Copy prior paycheck splits & update them to reflect new paychecks.
- export QFX files from credit cards
- import QFX, check / set transaction accounts
- any small manual updates (interest payments in accounts, etc)
It’s not automated but my data always remains local, and I can use the Linux or android application. I don’t bother daily tracking on my phone, else it might be cumbersome. I’ve never used any of the budget features, just tracking where my money comes and goes.
Weird question, but what does GnuCash do that you wouldn’t get easily from excel? I haven’t used any of these apps and wondering what I’m missing out on.
Under the hood its mostly tables and reports, so ultimately not much, if you were dedicated enough to using Excel to rebuild GnuCash’s views. It’s more streamlined than excel would be because you won’t have to worry about implementation, overhead of adding a new account, etc. Some things like auto-recommending accounts during import (and import itself) could be arduous in excel if not supported natively. Split transactions could be a headache (think your paycheck, which might be split into 401k contributions, several taxes, money into your bank, etc).
But fully recreating it in excel when it already exists would be a headache. More than likely you will have a more limited view in Excel if you’re just creating a handful of tables to represent all of your many accounts.
I use ledger. I have not automated so much outside of autocomplete macros in my text editor, but it doesnt’t take too much time and forces me to look over my spend, so I like it. I will eventually attempt to build some kind of Dash-application for visualisation of the output, but have only started on the parsers so far.
Ledger is awesome.
Actual Budget, because it supports SimpleFIN to import my transactions.
It’s still not “automated,” but I have a lot of rules now so it’s getting there.
I’m not super happy w/ how it works, but I’m too lazy to do anything about it. Maybe I’ll end up adding SimpleFIN to something else, idk.
My bank does this for me, but I do like self hosting things. Where’s the benefit in this apart from a fun project?
Indeed. My bank surely does this better than I could ever do. But if it’s “for fun”, then it’s fine.
Yez, I will be trying it out for fun. It just looks cool.
If you only have one Bank (Account) it is maybe fine.
But if you have multiple accounts (I have 4 Bank accounts for savings and another one for my shares), you would like to have one software/application to handle it. Like the one email client for your different email accounts.
Yup, I have a ridiculous amount (like 8? bank accounts and 15? credit cards), so having something that automatically pulls in transactions is nice.
That said, my main “bank” is a Fidelity brokerage, so I don’t really need those other bank accounts to sync since they mostly exist for temporary transactions, such as Zelle and cash transactions (Fidelity doesn’t support those) and transfers for bank account bonuses (I net a >$2k/year on that). And for credit cards, I mostly use 1-2 credit cards these days, the rest are mostly for signup bonuses.
So for me, the $1.50/month is totally worth it to keep track of all that nonsense. If I only had 3-4 accounts, I’d probably use something like GNUCash instead, but I have >20, and I will for the foreseeable future.
Why so many accounts and especially credit cards?
I mentioned it, but mostly signups bonuses.
For example, here are a few checking accounts I did recently:
- US Bank - $450
- Citi - $325
- Wells Fargo - $325
I’ve closed Citi, but I’m keeping the others open for a bit before closing (branches are convenient for depositing checks around the holidays).
Likewise for credit cards, here are some I’ve done recently:
- Bank of America Premium Rewards - ~$500 net after the annual fee - this is straight cash
- US Bank Altitude Reserve - ~$650 net after annual fee; a little more complicated because i need to redeem for travel
- Wells Fargo Active Cash - $200 straight cash
I actually use 2 banks (Fidelity brokerage for main, and US Bank for cash and zelle) and usually two credit cards (US Bank Altitude Reserve and some 2% card; was my Costco card and Citi double cash before I got the US Bank card). However, I have some category bonus cards I rotate in every so often, such as my Discover card, which is 5% at Amazon and Target through the end of the year.
Anyway, since I have so many accounts, I need something to keep track of them so I don’t pay maintenance fees or miss a payment or something.
It sounds complicated, but I’ve automated pretty much everything, so I just check in every couple months or so. And I think it’s worth the hassle because I make thousands every year on it.
Ah that makes sense. Right now I have one account, but it has multiple cards and pools of money under it (for lack of a better word).
So for me this is still easily managed, even with four bank accounts and about nine sub-pools under them collectively.
I guess I just got very lucky with the bank I’ve kinda stuck with just because it’s what my mom got me over a decade ago.
Actual budget with simple fin for bank links. Currently hosted on pikapods, will move to self hosting on prem at some point.
I use hledger mostly because of the plain text format. I came from YNAB as well but I just hated how you couldn’t easily undo changes or see when you made a change, etc. This is so easily to track changes and you can add comments explaining your reasoning around things and you can keep everything in source control so you have all the power of that as well. Not for everyone but if you’re a programmer or just comfortable on the command line it’s great.
Not selfhost but I use Hibiscus https://www.willuhn.de/products/hibiscus/
I have Firefly III and am really quiet happy with it. I might write a companion program to scan bill though, since doing everything by hand is rather time consuming.
I just drooled a little at the thought of integration with Paperless.
I didn’t read the whole article, just a cursory glance really, but it seems like that is the exact other way around that I would want it.
I’m thinking of scanning a paper bill with my phone, extracting the text and matching parts of the text to firefly fields, like transaction description, source account, destination account, amount and maybe categories/tags.
Id love to find a #creditunion that supported #openbanking and offered API access to my data so I could easily download it and use it with Actual or FireflyIII. I think working with a credit union to build this feature would be a great open source project.
