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?
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
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.
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.