by igpay on 5/19/20, 5:20 PM with 319 comments
by rcMgD2BwE72F on 5/19/20, 5:37 PM
More importantly, the importers (for all my banks and financial services) let me import and reconcile all transactions, but also archive all documents (including PDF, text files, etc) in one, well organized directory: each file is saved into a folder that corresponds to my account structure such as Asset:Current:Cash, Liability:Mortgage, Income:Salary, Expenses:Health:Dentist. It's great to rely on fava (example: https://fava.pythonanywhere.com/example-beancount-file/incom...) to check your accounting (with all files listed in the journal by date, with tags and links and other neat features) and still be able to browse documents in your file browser.
by cascom on 5/19/20, 8:06 PM
1. Expenses in the future - If I book a bunch of plane tickets for later in the year today, I can book those expenses in those months in which I’m traveling (pre-paid asset until then) there-by seeing when I’m incurring those expenses vs. the cash flow of those expenses.
2. Corporate expenses - I can book expenses that I will be re-imbursed for as receivables and not have them run through my “income statement” (nothing like putting some business class plane tickets on your personal card to make things look weird)
3. Loans - whether it’s an auto loan on your car or simply a loan to a friend it’s great to be able to see your entire balance sheet (and remember that some items are outstanding!)
4.variable granularity - decide how detailed you want to get for some accounts you may decide you don’t need that much detail (because you track it some other way - like your 401k) and you can just track your total balance at month end (+/- deposits)
5. Track illiquid investments in your net worth (not saying the marks are right, but at least you have a placeholder value for them on your balance sheet (your home - private company stock etc.)
6. Privacy - it’s your data - no sharing it with anyone else
by elric on 5/19/20, 5:49 PM
That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which can almost certainly handle all your bookkeeping needs. But simple, it is not.
by cproctor on 5/19/20, 7:29 PM
One unexpectedly-sweet benefit is that your spending is a high-granularity record of where you have been and what you have been doing, encoding some signals you might not have thought to write in a diary. Things like "that was when we were saving for our down payment" or "I was going to coffee shops every day trying to finish my dissertation" or "that was when we had a pandemic." I enjoy looking back through our ledger the same way I enjoy going way back in my gmail history.
[1] https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger [2] https://plaid.com/
by every on 5/19/20, 6:20 PM
by komali2 on 5/19/20, 7:40 PM
https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU
As far as I can tell, everything there was made simply because somebody out there thought it's important for a Free version of said software to exist. That's pretty cool. There's gnucash of course, but also a gnutrition calorie/macro/micro tracker, a flight simulator, some sort of comic saving software... the list goes on. Fun!
by chad_strategic on 5/19/20, 8:02 PM
I also wanted my life partner (my lovely wife) to participate. This was going to be the hard part. Behavior modification. So I built a very simple "tracker".(php/codeigniter/mysql) Date, description, category, spender, cost, that could be accessed anywhere.
I asked my wife to start tracking spending. As we had just bought a new house and 1 1/2 year old. She was extremely resistant to the idea. Six months after using the "tracker" she told me that she didn't plan on doing it more than 2 days before she gave up. However since starting it 3 years ago she and I have increased our "frugalness" and really looked where we should spend money (vacations, artisan food and not items to impress other people… such as fancy cars.)
I think part of the trick is not necessarily import or export or "api"ing data. The trick is doing a manual entry for each transaction. Kind of like a spending journal, food journal or just a journal. There still seems to be power in manually entering a transaction, although it might not be by pen and paper.
by raz32dust on 5/19/20, 8:46 PM
by alexmingoia on 5/20/20, 2:35 AM
I mean, you’re the one spending money you already know what you spent it on... Your bank already has a history of transactions if you want to look at it.
Put 30% of your income in a savings account, the money for necessary bills in another account with auto-billing, and the rest for spending in a spending account.
I see so many people categorizing everything with spreadsheets and budget apps and I just ask myself... why? If you set aside savings and necessary expenses what’s the point of categorizing your spending?
by cosmie on 5/19/20, 8:54 PM
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/
by woodruffw on 5/19/20, 11:01 PM
Instead, I tend to think of my budget as having cycles (monthly, currently), with a net "debit" or "credit" for different aspects of my life. I'm required to credit myself a certain amount in savings every month, and I'm allowed to debit a certain proportions of my income every month for different categories.
I end up tracking this with a set of plain text expense ledgers and a small Rust program: https://github.com/woodruffw/pledger
by fossuser on 5/19/20, 5:53 PM
I'd put YNAB along with 1Password (and probably Fastmail) in the class of best single purpose pieces of software that I pay for.
by brnt on 5/19/20, 5:40 PM
I guess I'm asking what happened in the past decade to Gnucash ;) 2014 is the last time I really used it, and reporting had then not really changed.
by fensterblick on 5/19/20, 5:56 PM
The UI is still excellent. It is the only reason I have Windows installed on a spare computer. Despite never being updated, the principals of personal finance haven't changed that much.
by spodek on 5/19/20, 5:54 PM
> 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 what.
Do you track your personal finances? If so, in how much detail? Maybe it would make an interesting Ask HN.
by neogodless on 5/19/20, 5:49 PM
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 thinking about shipping. But I find that I simply spend more at Amazon when I have Prime, so I avoid having it!)
To counter myself, my own software is probably too granular and I waste time on those little details of where I've spent money. I could stand to simplify a bit.
by vitoc on 5/20/20, 10:10 AM
1) I couldn't make transaction importing work for the statements that I want 2) I couldn't get to the report that igpay got (this was many years back) for some reason, I also wanted more custom reports and it seemed really complicated to create one 3) I wanted a tool that was more malleable. Although GnuCash is completely open source, the codebase does not look too approachable for me
After trying a few other approaches (including spreadsheets), I settled with Ledger CLI. I also built importing tools over 3 years of coding on weekends and finally got a complete set of features and financial institutions that I want :) Started with the reporting / analytics part recently... You can check it out here:
Any feedback will be very appreciated :)
by lifeisstillgood on 5/19/20, 10:46 PM
I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically.
I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken.
I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word.
And, finally, none of this matters if I have trouble with the real problem - sticking to a budget. Solving that one is what I want personal finance apps to help me with. Keeping track of my finances should be a solved problem, locked in a box and forgotten about.
by ISL on 5/19/20, 5:48 PM
by johanlarsson on 5/19/20, 8:57 PM
> 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.
by dang on 5/19/20, 10:10 PM
by slavoingilizov on 5/20/20, 11:34 AM
Many others promise that, but fail to deliver. Emma works for me, consistently. At the end of the day each of us manage our finances differently and the workflows have to be personalised. It's about finding the one that makes sense to you rather than "the best".
by mattbillenstein on 5/19/20, 7:38 PM
And I have another sheet to compute net worth - retirement and brokerage accounts hold funds for which I can get a price using the GOOGLEFINANCE function, so the numbers change over time and I know pretty much down to the penny what my net worth is after I sorta manually enter in a couple bank balances.
by BrandonBradley on 5/19/20, 5:57 PM
I've tried GnuCash and Skrooge, can't ever get the direct downloads to work for more than two months without breaking.
by TheApexTheater on 5/19/20, 8:34 PM
I recently moved to KMyMoney and everything just clicked. I found the interface to be nicer, especially combining the filter functionality with the ability to select multiple things and tag them appropriately.
I appreciate the article trying to explain Double-Entry bookkeeping, and I would suggest people look into KMM as an alternative to GnuCash.
by clircle on 5/19/20, 7:25 PM
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.
by andriosr on 5/20/20, 11:44 AM
The product is https://decimals.app, and the way I thought about bringing the simplicity to it was to wrap the API behind decimals and currency libraries already in use. If you want it for personal use, let me know, but it's something closer to LedgerCLI at this point, as it doesn't come with reports and other things from GnuCash.
I can sync all your data to an S3 bucket, so you would have all the data in the json format on your AWS account. As I use DynamoDB, it would be pretty straight forward to do. So, let me know what you thing and if you are interested in using a lib or REST API to create entries to a ledger, hit me up.
by briocheco on 5/19/20, 8:29 PM
by quietbritishjim on 5/20/20, 9:21 AM
And why are the columns different to the example shown later for the checking account (or current account, as we say here in the UK)? You've got "increase" and "decrease" vs "deposit" and "withdrawal". Obviously you're likely to use your credit card and checking account in substantially different ways, but surely the fundamentals of transferring money in and out is similar enough that they ought to look the same in your finance software?
by mcguire on 5/19/20, 8:20 PM
GnuCash's Price Editor can fetch values automatically. It used to be able to use Yahoo finance, but they cut that off a while back. There is a replacement, but I cannot remember what it is at the moment (and am on the work laptop).
GnuCash is actually pretty easy to use, once you get used to the double-entry system and how it handles some things. I have a moderately complex situation (and it's been stupid complex in the past), and I don't spend more than a few minutes a month on it (unless I'm trading stocks; it can take more time to set up each stock's account for proper tracking).
by pstrateman on 5/19/20, 8:14 PM
Credit card payments end up with two records of the payment, one from the credit card and another from your bank.
There's no way to merge records in GnuCash, ideally you would be able to mark them as the same record, but keep them both to keep the import logic happy.
by balnaphone on 5/19/20, 8:24 PM
[0] https://www.csun.io/images/gnucash/expenses_piechart.png
by darcys22 on 5/19/20, 9:52 PM
I’ve always thought that having the data recorded in a single text file made the software only suitable for extremely small financial accounts. So I’ve put a SQL database that you have control over as the place where the data is saved (using a similar schema to what GNUCash does). Also added GRPC endpoints so scripts can talk to it easily.
It’s still early stage but plan is to make a bunch of front ends so that every financial task within a business can talk to the same backend (bank reconciliations, payroll etc)
by kumaranvpl on 5/20/20, 10:56 AM
P.S. I am not associated with this app. I am just a happy customer.
[0] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monefy.app...
by cjlovett on 5/20/20, 2:54 AM
by unhammer on 5/20/20, 8:06 AM
Invoicing though, she's still been doing with a different program since the ones in GnuCash are hard to get good-looking. I was about to ask for tips here, but then I see there's a whole bunch of stuff out there we could try first: https://github.com/search?q=gnucash+invoice :)
by 8589934591 on 5/20/20, 5:54 PM
Are there others who have faced this issue similar to mine? Did you use GnuCash or something else? I'm more of CLI but she's more GUI. So...
by monkeydust on 5/19/20, 8:55 PM
by downerending on 5/19/20, 10:31 PM
I could write this myself, and have done a trivial one in the past. Is there anything better?
by clum on 5/19/20, 10:53 PM
by koevet on 5/20/20, 6:36 AM
Paired with Fava budgeting capabilities, my personal finance tracking is almost frictionless. It takes literally 5 minutes to go through 5 accounts.
Since I live in Germany, I still have to use cash, which is a bit a pain to track.
For that, I use an Android app that writes data directly into the Beancount ledger.
by misterspaceman on 5/20/20, 4:49 AM
In the video, the guy recommends MoneyDance, but the same system would probably work in GnuCash too.
by arunaugustine on 5/20/20, 6:11 AM
by tshanmu on 5/20/20, 3:50 PM
by voska on 5/20/20, 10:54 AM
Easy to set up and requires the least amount of ongoing work to accurately categorize transactions.
by mulmen on 5/20/20, 8:31 AM
I imagine Richard Stallman himself rappelling down a sold rock face to spread the good word of GNU.
by lbotos on 5/19/20, 9:55 PM
by suyash on 5/19/20, 7:43 PM
by tmerse on 5/19/20, 8:53 PM
by S-E-P on 5/20/20, 3:47 AM
How many libraries you got?
by m0zg on 5/19/20, 9:31 PM
by spurdoman77 on 5/19/20, 7:12 PM
by candiddevmike on 5/19/20, 8:22 PM
