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Open Source Personal Finance Manager

by chevreuil on 12/12/13, 2:14 PM with 40 comments

  • by zx2c4 on 12/12/13, 4:21 PM

  • by Jun8 on 12/12/13, 4:32 PM

    But I would give my bank credentials to Zuckerberg (say we meet at a restaurant in Palo Alto and he asks for it). The asymmetry of the situation means that he will lose much more than the meager amount in my account if he steals the money. So that questions is rather silly.

    I understand that the question really means "give you credentials to Facebook", where Facebook is proxy to any big company. This is a harder question, but one that I face often in practice, giving out bank account info, SSID number, credit card numbers, etc. The answer, evidently (since I and millions of other people do give this information out) is yes. The above answer still applies, these companies still stand to lose more than me if this information leaks or they mismanage it.

    In summary, the richer and visible an entity (real or corporate) is the better I feel about providing sensitive information, if it should be provided. This means that teh sort of main message used here ("would you give your account info to") is irrelevant. Being open source is a huge step up, but for the general public either it doesn't mean much or else is a detriment, since the thinking is that, if it's open, "hackers" can also see the code and find ways to exploit it.

    So how can a small startup ever compete with large established companies, since this creates a chicken and egg problem?

  • by jeremysmyth on 12/12/13, 3:16 PM

    First? What about http://www.gnucash.org/ or any of the others?

  • by RexRollman on 12/12/13, 3:55 PM

    Nice but I really dislike the website for this. I don't know if there is a term for that design but I hope it doesn't become popular.

  • by josephagoss on 12/12/13, 4:13 PM

    I know this sounds pedantic and distracts from your software, but that's because the website really distracts. With any service or product, make the focus on that thing instead of the website taking the limelight, because even if it works you still steal focus.

  • by skimmas on 12/12/13, 4:24 PM

    That question that is now left unanswered is: "Do you trust yourself and your server enough to keep your bank account info?

    oh wait... before that... do you trust your own bank? Sometimes I have my doubts.

  • by Procrastes on 12/12/13, 4:33 PM

    I was just mulling over this same problem last week. This approach is a big improvement over giving Mint or Wave (or their scraping partners) my credentials.

    Last I looked GnuCash didn't support any online banking except HCBI (Germany). So beyond the simple online finance manager functions, maybe it would be worth thinking of re-purposing this as a banking transaction aggregator that could feed GnuCash or Ledger or whatever. That would give it a better focus on the value for me, at least.

    What I would really like to see is a startup or open source project that can sell banks on a standard API with granular OAUTH and drive that difficult adoption cycle. Something in the spirit of the German HCBI, but built on REST with the ability to limit an app's access to read-only, get balance and get transaction options.

  • by misnome on 12/12/13, 3:15 PM

    Does GnuCash not count?

  • by nilkn on 12/12/13, 4:15 PM

    > So, would I give my bank credentials to a company of which business model is to sell its user's data?

    I think this sentence is poorly written. I'd replace "of which" with "whose" and "user's" with "users'".

  • by rlvesco7 on 12/12/13, 3:16 PM

    This sounds awesome. I've been looking to build an alternative to Mint, but getting banking data (in an automated way) has always been a pain. I look forward to trying it out.

  • by michaelrhansen on 12/12/13, 3:38 PM

    demo link appears to not work - blank screen

  • by jiggy2011 on 12/12/13, 4:48 PM

    I opened the page and saw "Would you give your bank credentials to Mark Zuckerberg?" and waiting for something to happen. About 10 seconds later I figured I should try scrolling.

  • by forkrulassail on 12/12/13, 3:58 PM

    That title is such a lie.

  • by Uchikoma on 12/12/13, 3:50 PM

    Gnucash comes to mind.