[HN Gopher] Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
Author : igpay
Score : 227 points
Date : 2020-05-19 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.csun.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.csun.io)
| mcguire wrote:
| " _For my stocks and non-money assets, I opt not to track them
| super closely in order to avoid having to update the values of
| each stock every time._ "
|
| 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).
| pseudoramble wrote:
| You need to setup an AlphaVantage API key. See here: https://wi
| ki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_Why_doesn.27t_online_qu.... I set it
| up a few years ago and it seems to keep work. If I break my
| setup messing around, I'll just copy the values directly from
| my investment site into GnuCash.
|
| This is definitely one of the clumsier parts of GnuCash. Still
| works though.
| memling wrote:
| > 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).
|
| It's possible to get Yahoo! data through web scraping, but it's
| certainly less convenient than it used to be.
|
| IEX also has an open API for querying historical data.[1] I
| don't think it has as much historical data as Yahoo! has, and
| it's changed a bit since the last time I thought about putting
| together a backtester.
|
| [1] https://iexcloud.io/docs/api/
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| This all seems too complex for most people. I use Google Sheets,
| I import a year-to-date csv from my bank and credit card every
| month, categorize each transaction, then use QUERY to aggregate
| expenses by category. This data I feed into a rough budgeting
| sheet which I use for expense trimming. This monthly maintenance
| takes maybe 30 minutes.
|
| 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.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Do you have a similar public sheet as example?
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| Yes, I've tried to get a few friends who don't budget at all
| into some sort of system - so I made this template: https://d
| ocs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c24ZmUy19_n_QggMOjcE...
| igpay wrote:
| I'd definitely agree that this is overkill for most people. In
| your case, though, I think that you could put the same amount
| of work into GnuCash and get the same results without writing
| any code. Plus you'd have a GUI with built in reports and
| whatnot. Not sure if that matters to you.
|
| In the article, I briefly touch on skipping manual transaction
| logging and just importing statements from your bank / credit
| card. And I gloss over this, but it looks like GnuCash offers
| similar functionality for automatically updating stock prices
| https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Online_Quotes - not sure if it's
| a pain to set up or not, but it's probably not as easy as just
| calling a google sheets function.
|
| Seems like you wouldn't have any reasons to switch over given
| that you've already got a nice system going, but just wanted to
| point out that you can use GnuCash in a way that's not quite
| as... rigid as the way I use it :)
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| I don't really want a GUI - or the GUI I want is a
| spreadsheet.
|
| I have some charts and graphs embedded with the data - like
| net worth over time, brokerage over time, etc. My worry with
| a baked system is it doesn't have the data in a way I want in
| a chart, whereas with this system, I can pretty much create
| whatever I want from the raw data in the sheet...
| lbotos wrote:
| Tiller is trying to build exactly that:
| https://www.tillerhq.com/
|
| I haven't used, because I use personal capital and they
| both used Yodlee, and my biggest gripe about personal
| capital is yodlee isn't keeping up with 2fa style logins
| from banks
| jldugger wrote:
| Online quotes is fairly easy to set up. First you set up the
| ticker symbol in the prices menu, then you set an account for
| the stock, make the type "Stock" and set the currency to the
| symbol in question. From then on, you can just 'get new data'
| and stuff mostly updates automatically.
|
| However, stock symbol APIs break on the regular, so there can
| be times when this process is broken until a fix is published
| and you upgrade.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Shameless plug, our product, Domestica, is better for personal
| finance tracking as it uses the envelope model of categorization.
| It also includes to do lists, meal planning and more--in the
| cloud or self hosted.
|
| https://about.domestica.app
| darcys22 wrote:
| To all the people who are running ledger with bash scripts and
| piping thru sed & awk I've been working on another open source
| alternative.
|
| https://godbledger.com/
|
| 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)
| komali2 wrote:
| It's kinda fun to idly scroll through gnu's list of free software
|
| 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!
| raz32dust wrote:
| I've been using YNAB. I want to switch out because YNAB is too
| expensive. What I miss with open source alternatives is the
| mobile app. I don't like to link my bank accounts, so I enter
| expenses manually whenever I buy anything. The mobile app is
| critical for that to work.
| hybridtupel wrote:
| For the same reasons I am still using the classic version of
| YNAB (paid once). But unfortunately the Mac version is not
| compatible with Catalina so I am also forced to search for a
| new app.
| raz32dust wrote:
| I paid once as well, but was forced to upgrade to Catalina
| for other reasons. Felt cheated, but I understand why they do
| it.
| taftster wrote:
| YNAB can sometimes feel expensive. And while I could use an OSS
| solution like Gnucash or ledger, I don't have the time to deal
| with the tech support needed to be able to share my setup with
| my spouse. Likewise, we extremely value the mobile experience.
| To me, YNAB is cheap and well worth the money.
|
| You might want to try "Every Dollar" which is free and has a
| mobile experience. It's not open source, of course, but it
| might fit what you're looking for.
| dsd wrote:
| Too many of these personal finance apps aren't putting the web
| first
| taftster wrote:
| YNAB (web version) has a pretty excellent web-first
| experience. And I'm not sure that I want a total web
| experience if half of my battle is recording transactions at
| the time they occur, right in the store. This is super
| convenient, no reason to keep receipts and enter them when I
| get home.
| fossuser wrote:
| I'd be curious if anyone has used this and also used YNAB (and
| can compare them).
|
| I'd put YNAB along with 1Password (and probably Fastmail) in the
| class of best single purpose pieces of software that I pay for.
| boromi wrote:
| Why 1Password? I've tried it throughout the years, and IMO
| nothing has beat KeePass.
| fossuser wrote:
| It works really well across all of my devices and operating
| systems (and will continue to do so as those systems change).
|
| I'm glad keepass exists, but I'm happy to support polished
| software in this domain. I like paying for software I think
| is really good and focuses on a narrow problem.
| codazoda wrote:
| +1 for keypass. The apps aren't quite as polished, but they
| do what I need, and I can store my encrypted password file in
| my Dropbox folder so that I've still got it if any single
| company in this small chain folds.
| jorvi wrote:
| 1Password its vault format is open source, so even if the
| company goes belly up a 3rd party tool that can decrypt
| your vault can easily be written.
| memling wrote:
| > I'd be curious if anyone has used this and also used YNAB
| (and can compare them).
|
| I'm a long-time user of both. YNAB wins hands-down in budgeting
| and basic usability.
|
| When I got married, we integrated finances. I had been using
| GnuCash for years by then. Its interface was an immediate non-
| starter, even though as an application it's more powerful than
| YNAB (e.g., stocks and retirement planning, mortgage
| amortization, business expenses, easier splits--at least in my
| opinion). If it had a better budget and reporting system, I
| might have been able to swing it--but it didn't and doesn't,
| and that was that. The other killer feature YNAB offered was a
| mobile application.
|
| Financial apps have to reduce friction. Interpersonal first
| (although that's a tall order for software), but also in
| delivering fast entry and a big-picture view of what you're
| doing with your money. GnuCash really isn't designed for any of
| that. And that's honestly fine for what it is, although I wish
| the database were easier to wrap your head around--it should be
| possible to build a cleaner and/or web UI around it than it
| seems to be.
|
| As it is, I'm not really content with YNAB either, but if
| that's what it takes to get our internal financial reporting in
| order, it's a lot better than nothing.
| whycombagator wrote:
| I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance
| tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my
| time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a
| certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their
| homepage line:
|
| > Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save
| more money.
|
| As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried
| Bitwarden? What is better about 1Password?
| fossuser wrote:
| I actually hadn't heard about bitwarden (thanks) - I'll check
| that out.
|
| I'm not in YNAB's target market either, but the value they
| provide is useful even if you're not struggling month to
| month with finances. You get really good control over your
| money and a much better understanding of how you're spending
| it and where.
|
| Being really aware of that makes it easier to actually
| leverage it _more_ because you know exactly what you can put
| where so you can be closer to zero in your checking account
| (push more towards investments, etc.).
|
| It also makes it easier to change behavior and know exactly
| what knobs you can turn with your finances.
|
| Only downside with it is that the auto-import sucks (I
| suspect because the bank APIs suck). I move all transactions
| through one credit card and I manually create transactions in
| YNAB when the card is charged. I use the Apple Card which has
| really good software so it's easy to notice transactions and
| make sure things line up.
|
| My username is also from when I was 13 and really excited
| about linux :-), now mostly on macOS - I haven't really lived
| up to it.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Which file export do you use from Apple Card to YNAB? I'm
| looking at doing the same thing and I'm curious which works
| best.
| fossuser wrote:
| I don't export - when a transaction is made I open the
| YNAB app and quickly add it.
|
| I resisted doing this for a long time because I thought
| it would be awful, but it's actually easier than dealing
| with import issues and reconciling later.
| jonjohn84 wrote:
| I'll give the opposing opinion that YNAB's auto-import
| works well for me (I use it with a local credit union, 2
| credit cards, and an online savings account). In fact, I
| used my own homebrew budgeting software for over a year
| before I found that YNAB exists and does everything I
| needed from my own software plus imports from banks
| automatically which was my biggest pain point with my own
| solution (it involved painful csv exports every month). I
| have been happy with YNAB for a year and a half at this
| point. Your luck may depend on which bank(s) you want it to
| work with. I believe their bank import api provider was
| recently acquired by Plaid so they are now using Plaid (as
| I understand it).
| godtoldmetodoit wrote:
| I've been using YNAB for about 6 months now. I was not living
| paycheck to paycheck when I started - but I have made
| significant improvements to my financial well being since I
| started using it.
|
| Previously I had been using Mint to keep track of my
| spending, but I never felt in control, it was only useful as
| a reporting tool of what had already happened.
|
| YNAB is all about giving every dollar a job and setting
| priorities for your life. It's the envelope system in digital
| form if you are familiar with that. With Mint and similar
| systems, I'd just be looking at my pile of cash in my account
| and thinking "yeah I can easily afford a new gaming PC!".
|
| But I wouldn't be taking into account my 6 month auto
| insurance bill coming up in 2 months that would require a
| bunch of cash. YNAB let's me see that easily - it was painful
| in the beginning as I was "catching up" in all these
| categories, but now I feel so much more comfortable with my
| money and how it can be put to good use.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - I had a similar experience. A lot of people suggest
| Mint is a similar thing to YNAB, but except for being money
| related it really isn't.
|
| I used it first too and I think it may actually be worse
| than nothing.
|
| It's both infested with a ton of ads and makes you think
| you understand where your money is going without really
| understanding it.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| I tried GnuCash and generally liked it. However, it was a little
| more complicated than I wanted. In addition, I wanted to be able
| to access via the web, when I was away from my computer. (cause
| at the time, I thought it was only available locally)
|
| 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.
| pseudoramble wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This was a big realization for me. I tend to prefer getting the
| "robots" to do things for us (in other words, automate things).
| Developing an intuition of what's happening with your money is
| hard when you use an automated tool though.
|
| The process of managing the ledger bi-weekly really adds
| something more for me. Working on each entry to determine a
| category, writing down amounts, noticing how many entries I've
| entered into a category each session, and looking at it in
| aggregate afterward gives me some greater sense of how my
| financial life works. I can almost picture writing the
| transactions in GnuCash before I even do it.
|
| I get what you mean about it being complicated though. I
| learned the bits I needed to get by and mostly stick to that.
| So that works for me. In the long run, the double-ledger manual
| style is what I think is most important.
| projproj wrote:
| >The trick is doing a manual entry for each transaction.
|
| I would second this for anyone whose goal is to spend less
| money. I think some people keep track of purchases just to see
| all spending and may not care about reducing spending. In that
| case, importing data can save time.
|
| This article also agrees with your suggestion. She suggests
| it's th that knowing you are going to have to write down your
| purchase helps you think before automatically spending:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/smarter-living/budget-mon...
| balnaphone wrote:
| In the first pie chart [0], am I the only one having a hard time
| with colours in the legend? For example, the second colour in the
| legend is #ff851b [1], but that doesn't appear in the pie chart.
| Going by the amount (33.69%), it must be the segment with colour
| #ffa85f [2].
|
| [0] https://www.csun.io/images/gnucash/expenses_piechart.png
|
| [1] https://www.color-hex.com/color/ff851b
|
| [2] https://www.color-hex.com/color/ffa85f
| lbotos wrote:
| Is anyone regularly or reliably getting bank/credit card data via
| OFX? I've considered switching from Personal Capital to these
| libre/open solutions, but I'd love to automate the data
| gathering.
| clum wrote:
| I've been using GnuCash for years. It has a great many fantastic
| features and it has some annoying quirks for sure. I haven't
| found anything to replace it, but if I could I would. One of the
| most annoying things: Export account names with Umlauts -> Import
| them again. Now they are all broken. I have to manually fix the
| csv file to prevent that and there's never been a fix/devs don't
| see this as an issue.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| I've used GnuCash for years before switching to beancount
| (https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/ with smart_importer:
| https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer) and fava
| (https://github.com/beancount/fava/). Much easier to work on your
| journals (ledger, trades, prices...) since they are just text
| files. Really great if you're using the beancount package for
| Sublime: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Beancount.
|
| 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.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| This sounds amazing. It would be great if one day you could
| publish a detailed how-to / tutorial.
| riffraff wrote:
| I'm also a happy beancount user. It's also pretty simple to
| extend, if not too documented.
|
| I was able to write a plugin to get data from the Milan stock
| exchange in a few hours, which was very nice. The vim plugin is
| also pretty ok.
| haberman wrote:
| Wow, your setup sounds very similar to what I've converged on.
| Except I wrote a fairly substantial pipeline that preprocesses
| the data before giving it to beancount and Fava.
|
| Maybe I missed something, but it seemed like beancount wants
| everything to live in One Giant Journal file. I really wanted a
| pipeline where each bank statement PDF would output one file
| with a corresponding list of transactions (this stage can run
| completely in parallel and I use "ninja" to make it very fast).
|
| Then another process can run over these files looking for
| matches (+$X, -$X), and spit out "transaction groups", where
| each transaction group is a set of transaction ids that sum to
| zero. And then a different interactive tool lets you categorize
| transactions and spits out transaction groups with embedded
| "expense" transactions. It's all non-destructive; each tool
| only adds data, and nothing ever modifies existing files. Then
| a final step can combine all these files and spit out a
| beancount file for Fava.
|
| How does this compare with the way beancount's importer does
| it? How does its importer handle transfers and categorization?
| Is it destructive or non-destructive?
| cobby wrote:
| > beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal
| file
|
| Actually, beancount supports include directive. See includes
| section [1] of the language syntax document
|
| [1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAMVrKIA2qtRGmoVDSUB
| JGmY...
| haberman wrote:
| Thanks for the reference. But a single transaction can span
| multiple financial institutions. Say you pay off a credit
| card. One half of the transaction comes from the credit
| card statement, the other half comes from your bank. The
| two halves sum to zero.
|
| My understanding is that the whole transaction has to live
| in one file with Beancount. This doesn't seem amenable to
| having each bank statement generate a single Beancount
| output file.
|
| But I could be wrong. I don't know how Beancount's importer
| works.
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| You're parsing PDF? I'd imagine most places allow some sort
| of data export like csv or something? That's how I get the
| data out of Chase and BofA.
| mehrdadn wrote:
| There are a few problems with exporting data... here's what
| comes to my mind at the moment:
|
| - It's an additional step and unnecessary when you're
| already downloading PDF statements, which you probably
| should be doing regardless
|
| - Data is often unavailable for export after a few months
| or a year or two (depending on the bank), far earlier than
| PDFs
|
| - If you have PDF scans (especially from earlier days) then
| you need to parse the OCR anyway
|
| - If you're using official APIs (instead of writing a
| scraper or or downloading by hand) then you may need to pay
| extra
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| To each their own, csv for me has been the easiest thing
| moving forward every month or three.
|
| I did do a historical net worth calculation and the only
| data I had going back far enough was PDFs, so through a
| mix of bash scripts and pdftotext, I was able to get a
| number for each month back about 10 years. But I ended up
| just putting that monthly balance for each account in a
| google sheet so I could sum and plot it there. Now I just
| stick the month-end balance for each account in a sheet
| to keep this updated.
| haberman wrote:
| Yes, in my experience CSV/XML/etc export is spotty. Some
| institutions don't have it at all, and even when they do
| the time range can be limited or hard to time-window
| reliably.
|
| For example, I can't get CSV about my pay stub and all the
| places money flows (taxes, insurance, etc). So I use PDF as
| the best way to get all the data.
|
| Parsing PDF is a huge PITA, since PDF is really designed
| only for layout and not to encode semantic document
| structure. But if you want the greatest amount of
| visibility, nothing is as authoritative as the actual
| statements.
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| Yeah, I guess I don't really look at paystubs often and
| my banks support good csv export for like 2+ years, so
| I'll always have it when I need when I refresh those
| sheets. I do year-to-date in those sheets to make them
| not huge.
|
| Regarding taxes, I do a tax year calculation using my
| W2's and returns to compute an effective tax rate and
| figure out ways I can improve my situation re taxes --
| but my budgeting basically only starts once the net money
| hits a bank account which has worked pretty well.
| mehrdadn wrote:
| Can I ask how you parse PDFs? I'm curious both in terms of
| reading the PDF data (Python library?) and parsing it
| (regex?)... and do you have to deal with OCR as well?
| boromi wrote:
| Thanks for this. Looks compelling. Is there a simple
| installation guide, I find it hard to figure out how to get
| going.
| djhworld wrote:
| The installation is really just a python library, but if you
| want to keep everything contained you can put them in a
| Dockerfile
| jonahbenton wrote:
| As a longtime beancount user- it should be easy to install-
| there are packages for most OSes, they mostly work, the
| maintainer, Martin Blais is amazing and indefatigable, and
| the community is active and friendly and technical.
|
| But the "how to get going" part is where I find the real
| difficulty lies.
|
| There is a conceptual friction in double-entry accounting,
| which beancount enforces. If you do not have prior exposure
| to it, even if you are financially and mathematically
| inclined- grokking double entry can be a life-changing
| practice. It is the Iyengar Yoga to the 7 minute workout that
| is just tracking transactions as per GnuCash or Quicken or
| whatever.
|
| One has to have the appetite to consume a worldview. As
| someone living in that world, FWIW, I highly recommend it. I
| would not undersell the conceptual work required. It is not
| for everyone.
|
| But if the approach speaks to you, reach out on the mailing
| list and people will help with the mechanics.
|
| Cheers.
| djhworld wrote:
| Been an avid beancount'er for about two years now too!
|
| I've never used the import features, the manual inputting of
| transactions into a text file doesn't take too long.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| How do you parse the pdfs?
| spodek wrote:
| I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself
| in the category he describes here:
|
| > _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.
| swimfar wrote:
| I tracked every single expenditure in GnuCash for a year,
| mostly out of curiosity. But in general I don't worry too much
| about budgeting because I'm naturally a bit frugal. However, I
| do a yearly summary of assets in order to track long-
| term/retirement trajectory. I can also use that to get a single
| number showing me how much I spend each year.
| mcguire wrote:
| I do. I started because I would find myself surprised by the
| occasional credit card bill that was larger than I expected. It
| made life easier later when I started seriously putting money
| in investments, and then much easier when my mother died---she
| had put my name on all of my parents' accounts so I inherited
| two more, different bank accounts, two retirement accounts and
| some honest-to-gosh stock certificates. By the time I got
| everything cleaned up, I had a love affair with GnuCash and a
| checking account number that starts with seven zeros.
|
| I track transactions in and out of accounts that I get
| statements for, with a "cash" expense for withdrawals (I know
| someone who would track his pocket change in spreadsheets.),
| and broadish categories for income and expenses (my Books
| expense account is ... large).
|
| I wish I had created some kind of asset account when we bought
| a house; instead I just treat the mortgage like rent and have
| this great big windfall followed by an equal expense when we
| moved. :-)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I was a ledger user for years, then some things happened, it
| got out of date, and I haven't gone back. But I tracked it in
| great detail. Every transaction, updated prices on stocks every
| month. It was really nice, and I had a tmux configuration that
| automatically loaded an emacs buffer with an org file holding
| all my ledger entries, and other panes containing various
| reports (uncleared balance, balance in cash/credit card
| accounts, total balance, monthly reports, etc.).
|
| I will do it again, but haven't. I'm presently using YNAB
| because it's easier for my wife and I to share. I use it to a
| similar level of detail, but don't track my stocks and
| retirement accounts with it. IT's been very helpful for us to
| know how much money we have and where it's all going. Last year
| was very expensive and we ended up in some debt, so this is
| also helping us get things back on track. It's hard to get out
| of debt (especially if it's become a habit to rely on credit)
| without knowing this kind of information.
| berkut wrote:
| I've sporadically tracked my finances for the past 14 years
| (started using commercial software on OS X before getting fed
| up of some of the software and writing my own open source
| finance app to learn Objective C / Cocoa back in 2009 to do it
| which I still use), and over the past 6 years have been
| tracking it rather meticulously, which I find helpful for two
| reasons:
|
| 1. I'm a contractor now, so need to do tax filings, and having
| detailed finances helps with that.
|
| 2. I find it quite interesting (but not always that useful!,
| although it sometimes is) what my expenditures are each month,
| i.e. how much I spend on electronics/gear vs holiday vs other,
| compared to potential savings.
| veddox wrote:
| I did for a couple of years - actually wrote my own small CLI
| app to take care of my very basic student needs :D
|
| At some point I dropped the habit, more out of laziness than
| anything else. I still have a budget spreadsheet with a rough
| plan for my monthly finances, I just don't track the actual
| expenses anymore. Reading this makes me think I ought to start
| again...
| codazoda wrote:
| I'll bite here... I used to track my finances and balance my
| checkbook. But, it took hours of my time. The best thing I ever
| did was create a separate account for my disposable income. My
| bills account gets the exact amount it needs and everything is
| payed automatically. The rest of my income goes into my fun
| account and I rest easy knowing I can spend until it's gone and
| my bills still get payed.
|
| After that worked well for me, I now put small amounts into
| various savings accounts, like "tires", "vacation", or
| "emergency". I use an Ally account with "buckets".
|
| I don't balance anymore, and haven't for 20 years. Just a quick
| glance at recent transactions to make sure I recognize
| everything.
|
| It's also amazing how quickly some of those savings accounts
| add up when I'm not thinking about them much.
| gen220 wrote:
| I use ledger to document my personal finances, and I've been
| using it for about a year.
|
| I do it less for budgeting, and more for a method of
| _centralizing_ information. I have 4 credit cards that I use
| regularly, from 3 banks, I 'm a w-2 employee with a 401k and
| benefits, and I file my own taxes. It's hard to keep track of
| everything, when the relevant data is behind login walls, in
| occasionally proprietary formats.
|
| I wrote a bunch of scrapers and parsers for obtaining this
| data, and translating it into a ledger transaction format. Once
| it's there, I can do all the reporting and whatnot to my
| heart's content. Writing all of the infrastructure has been a
| labor of love, with a non-trivial emphasis on _labor_. I
| balance out about once a month, but since automating the
| various transformers, I pretty much never have to debug
| balances any more, which is a godsend.
|
| It tracks down to a pretty excruciating level of detail, enough
| that I compute (for example) how much it costs my employer to
| employ me, my average monthly spread in my checking accounts
| (between when cc bills, rent are due and when income comes in),
| average costs of travel-vacation-days, and how that's changed
| over seasons.
|
| At this point, it mostly "just works", and it's easy to append
| to my records. The next fun part will be getting useful and
| actionable insights out of it, and applying them to my life and
| decisions.
|
| It's very nice to feel "in control" about these things; I don't
| really worry about money any more.
| iffycan wrote:
| I've tracked my finances for as long as I can remember. It's
| become even more important since getting married.
|
| We track every penny. About once a month we sit down and
| categorize every purchase we made the last month. We only keep
| receipts if the purchase was for a non-obvious category (e.g.
| buying both diapers and groceries at Target) so that we can
| split each transaction between categories.
|
| For some banks, we manually download transaction data in
| whatever nice format they provide. For others, we use a syncing
| service that works with the app.
|
| It's been so great throughout our marriage to know that we're
| both in charge of the money and make decisions together.
|
| That said, I've talked with many people who don't like that
| level of detail. At first, it was baffling to me that people
| didn't know the details of their finances, but as I've grown,
| I've realized that there's plenty more than one good way to
| manage your money.
|
| Full disclosure: I actively work on and sell budgeting
| software.
| samastur wrote:
| I do, each bill or bank transaction being its own entry. I'm
| sure I belong in minority of people who do this. It's all
| manual labour too without any imports from banks etc. (never
| tried).
|
| I do it for two reasons. Occasionally I found a problem with
| double-billing that I would otherwise miss, but mostly it is to
| be able to check where my money went and plan realistically.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| Before I started using GnuCash I had no clue how much I spent
| monthly. I was fine with the fact that the my savings account
| seemed to grow over time.
|
| Then one day I got mad at a random fee from my bank after
| realizing how much they charged me over the years. I closed my
| account at this bank, decided that I will be more careful with
| my spendings and started tracking everything with GnuCash.
| every wrote:
| I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level,
| it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a
| text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will
| begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are
| staggering...
|
| [1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html
|
| [2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html
| gen220 wrote:
| I strongly recommend people give ledger a try, especially if
| you're a UNIX-nerd who gets a lot of use out of sed/grep/awk.
|
| It's totally changed the way I think about finance, for my
| person and for businesses. It also means I can have very
| informed conversations with accountants! :)
|
| Double-entry accounting as a domain is super interesting, and
| Ledger's intersection of that domain with UNIX hackery is a joy
| to experience.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I looked in to switching from GnuCash to Ledger about 5 years
| ago, and found that it would have been too painful to use for
| manually inputting the thousands of transactions I had because
| it just didn't have the nice auto-complete and GUI nicities
| that GnuCash had.
|
| I'm a hardcore command-line and keyboard-only power user, so I
| would have absolutely loved to have made Ledger work for me
| rather than use the mouse-heavy GnuCash interface, but
| couldn't, and went back to GnuCash with my tail between my
| legs.
|
| I'd still rather use it, so maybe I'll give it another try some
| day.
| hesk wrote:
| +1 for ledger.
|
| I switched from GnuCash to ledger about 8 years ago and never
| looked back.
|
| I have a script that pulls my bank account using aqbanking
| [1] and icsv2ledger.py [2]. The latter can match transactions
| to templates and set transaction accounts and payees
| automatically. It also supports autocompletion of account
| names when a transaction is not matched by a template.
|
| For cash entries, I use ledger-mode in Emacs. (I also use Org
| mode, so I spent a lot of time in Emacs anyway.) ledger-mode
| also supports autocompletion.
|
| I only use the command line for reporting and have aliases
| for the most common reports. These mostly revolve about
| showing my current budget.
|
| [1] https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/AqBanking [2]
| https://github.com/quentinsf/icsv2ledger
|
| Fun fact: The second program I wrote was a database in Turbo
| Pascal to keep track of my loose change.
|
| Not so fun fact: I lost my GnuCash files after I made the
| switch. Ten years of accounting gone. :(
| igpay wrote:
| This is exactly what made me switch _away_ from ledger. I
| thought that a command-line /plaintext only workflow would be
| great, because that's what I usually prefer. However, a GUI +
| autocomplete just ended up being way more useable for me in
| this case.
| every wrote:
| Assuming GnuCash can do some sort of plain text record dump,
| I would probably try to cobble something together to convert
| that to an acceptable ledger format. Maybe with AWK or
| something similar...
| gen220 wrote:
| I've been using ledger for a year next month.
|
| As you imagine, the fact that it's text-only has been both a
| burden and a blessing.
|
| Burdens:
|
| - inserting transactions takes a long time, when you're
| starting out. will always take a long time if you never
| "automate"
|
| - it's easy to make little mistakes and not catch it until
| the next time you compile or make a report.
|
| blessings:
|
| - git, sed, grep, awk all "work as advertised"
|
| - you can automate the boring things, as they get more
| boring, and you can learn a lot along the way
|
| at this stage, I have a combination of awk and python scripts
| (maybe 500 lines total, but a lot of it is regex) that
| convert my financial institutions' transaction export csvs
| into ledger transactions. I pretty much copy paste that into
| specific ledger files. The next step that I'm currently
| automating takes a concatenated `git diff` and interactively
| categorizes expenses/splits/assigns to the correct ledger
| file.
|
| I also blew a ton of time (maybe 40 hours) on scraping those
| csvs from bank websites, workday, and fidelity (basically, a
| puppeteer script for logging in, downloading all the files
| available). Getting past google auth for workday was hard.
| But learning these things has been fun.
|
| With all this automation, I spend maybe 20 minutes every
| weekend importing things over from the banks. I'd do it every
| month, but I'm still a control freak with it.
|
| Doing this has been super fun! And it also has yielded a lot
| of insight into my finances. Above all, it gives me a feeling
| of "control" over my finances like no other. Itemizing
| deductions takes an hour, just as a throwaway example.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Beancount as well, very similar in philosophy and staggering in
| capability, slightly different flavor and rendition compared to
| ledger.
|
| http://furius.ca/beancount/
| suyash wrote:
| Most banking services - at least mine already provides reports
| and graphs along with simple budgeting features for free with
| online banking. I prefer to use that, as that is where most of
| the data lives anyways.
| m0zg wrote:
| No sync with banks - a complete non-starter for most people. Even
| if you enthusiastically start using something like this, in a
| month or two it'll get super old.
| detaro wrote:
| It supports multiple methods of sync with banks, although I
| don't know how common these methods are in various parts of the
| world.
| fensterblick wrote:
| I want to like GnuCash but I just can't. I have found the UI to
| be confusing. I still use a freeware, abandoned version of
| Microsoft Money: https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/download/details.aspx?id=207...
|
| 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.
| gyrocode wrote:
| I am still using Microsoft Money too, it's great! There is also
| Money Plus Sunset Home and Business edition available at
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=756...
| which includes features for small businesses, see comparison at
| http://moneymvps.org/faq/article/499.aspx
| cascom wrote:
| I've been using Gnucash for my personal finances for a several
| years now, and really love it - it's not dead simple, and
| requires an understanding of double entry bookkeeping, but where
| it really shines is flexibility. A couple of examples are as
| follows:
|
| 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
| clircle wrote:
| I was an avid GnuCash user for a year or two in grad school,
| keeping track of my finances using GnuCash Mobile on my android
| phone. Then I bought a new phone and exported my finances
| database. When I loaded it into my new phone, I found the xml had
| been corrupted.
|
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| Hold up. Did Gnucash get better reporting or did he make his own?
| Last time I used Gnucash, which admittedly was 10 years ago, but
| for a business, I found reporting and the lack of budgeting
| lacking. The latter could be solved by envelopes (but I find
| hacky), but the former only by learning Guile, something I was
| and am not up to. Alternatives like Money dance have a more
| complete solution, certainly for personal use, in my view.
|
| 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.
| jldugger wrote:
| It did not get better. I am contemplating making a GNUCash
| adaptor for Grafana.
| igpay wrote:
| The very first plot shown in the article was generated with
| custom scripts, published here
| (https://github.com/csun/simple_gnucash_budget_plots)
|
| I'm not sure how much it's changed since 2014. I think the
| "budgeting" system is still probably as bad as it was back
| then, though (and by bad I mean not really applicable for
| personal use, probably good for businesses). That's why I wrote
| this budget plotting script.
| BrandonBradley wrote:
| Until the open source options have direct download options that
| 'just work', Quicken is the best.
|
| I've tried GnuCash and Skrooge, can't ever get the direct
| downloads to work for more than two months without breaking.
| Voyiatzis wrote:
| Quicken died for me ten ir so years ago, as did many other
| personal finance software applications. It is the syncing
| between devices that's imperative these days, and this is where
| Quicken is failing, especially when your database gets larger:
| it syncs, but as your database grows its latency becomes ever
| more apparent.
|
| Quickbooks Online, which I have been using for a little over a
| year, does syncing exceptionally well; but at the cost of a
| polished UI.
|
| Ideally I would love to be able to access my Quickbooks desktop
| database using iOS or web, alas that's not doable.
| zie wrote:
| Quicken is out from under the Intuit Monster now, so it may
| be worth looking at again.
| briocheco wrote:
| I needed a way to track my kids' allowance, so I built this
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fivesaver -
| very simple and very free. Hopefully, not too massive-aggressive
| self promotion:)
| downerending wrote:
| Related: Does anyone know of free-ish software to do cash-
| flow/retirement projections, etc.? For example, I'd input some
| guesses about income, 401ks, Soc Sec, rent, major necessary
| expenditures, rates of return and inflation, etc., and have it
| output balances for several decades. Extra credit for multiple
| runs with random variation on assumptions.
|
| I could write this myself, and have done a trivial one in the
| past. Is there anything better?
| ziga wrote:
| https://www.firecalc.com/ is a good retirement calculator.
| tmerse wrote:
| The last time I used GnuCash, it was not able to import it's own
| export. Does anyone know if this has been fixed?
| cosmie wrote:
| Firefly[1][2] is also a really useful personal finance app.
|
| 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/
|
| [3] https://gitlab.com/GeorgeHahn/firefly-plaid-connector
| dsd wrote:
| I use this too. Maybe I like the beancount more, but having my
| finances available on the web to share with my so is valuable.
| Too many told are meant for one pers,on and don't support
| modern ideas like tagging.
| cosmie wrote:
| The multi-user aspect is super handy.
|
| It's also nifty that it exposes pretty much all of the
| functionality via a REST API, complete with the ability to
| manage OAuth clients/tokens. Not something I expected to
| really leverage, but have been surprised how frequently it's
| come in handy.
| AdamGibbins wrote:
| Have you tried fava recently? A web interface for beancount.
| Its become very powerful in the past year or so, allows
| editing etc too.
| _Anima_ wrote:
| I've used mmex for years and it's been not so stable recently
| so I gave firefly a try.
|
| There were too many simple use cases that could not be done
| simply, compared to mmex.
|
| One example is credit card partial chargeback/refunds. The dev
| suggested to edit the initial charge and substract the refunded
| amount. I dont want to do that. I like to keep a 1:1 mapping of
| transactions.
|
| Also income vs expense accounts, instead of payees. If Amazon
| refunds me partially (let's say $10 from a $100 purchase) it
| now creates an Amazon income account with $10. I had an Amazon
| expense account of $100. Both accounts are not linked in any
| way and it's impossible to know your Amazon balance ($90).
|
| I buy a lot of stuff for my girlfriend and she pays me back
| around the end of the month. Keeping track of her balance is
| not possible with Firefly.
|
| A few other things were not working properly or at all.
|
| Dev is very nice and active but I doubt he has any accounting
| background. Firefly turned out to me as a prettified excel
| sheet, not a double entry book keeping.
| monkeydust wrote:
| I kinda want to try it but just not convinced I will see a good
| return on my time esp with manual entry. I wish some of these
| features were baked into my main bank account though.
| cproctor wrote:
| My partner and I have been tracking all our spending for the last
| five years with hledger (ledger reimplemented in haskell) and
| some custom import and management scripts inspired by "Full-
| fledged hledger" [1]. More recently we added Plaid [2] for auto-
| importing from financial accounts. I love having a plain-text
| history and being able to ask complex queries.
|
| 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/
| karlicoss wrote:
| also highly recommend its tui https://hledger.org/hledger-
| ui.html
| jibcage wrote:
| +1 for full-fledged hledger! I just got it set up last week,
| and putting together the small scripts for parsing all of the
| CSVs was (to me) a fun programming exercise that reaped huge
| visibility into how I spend my money :)
|
| It's hugely valuable to have all of your financial data in one,
| human-readable place. Not only to you, but to whomever might be
| executing your will ;)
| cproctor wrote:
| Imagining my will as a poorly-documented API makes me feel
| present stress on behalf of my unborn descendants :)
| johanlarsson wrote:
| A macOS and iOS alternative:
| https://hochgatterer.me/finances/macos/
|
| > 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.
| TheApexTheater wrote:
| Like many people here, I tried GnuCash. I enjoyed it, but when I
| would import data from my bank, it would crash. That, and not
| having any real way of categorizing my expenditures was annoying.
| The other thing that annoyed me was not being able to select
| multiple items
|
| 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.
| mtrower wrote:
| No way to categorize your expenses? Could you elaborate and
| compare to KMM? I've used both programs, so I'm curious which
| of us is missing something.
| pstrateman wrote:
| Importing records in GnuCash is a pain.
|
| 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.
| jldugger wrote:
| How are you doing this? The OFX import tool has a bayesian
| matcher that will update and reconcile existing records, and
| classify them based on past behavior.
|
| The big challenge IMO is that each transaction has a date, but
| sometimes the ends disagree on when it happened. E.g. you
| transfer money from checking to a brokerage, it takes multiple
| days but you have to choose one date for that transaction.
| dang wrote:
| See also:
|
| 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109545
|
| 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16857884
| spurdoman77 wrote:
| I never understood the point of these personal finance apps. When
| I run out of money I just withdraw a some more out of our familys
| multimillion trust fund.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| are you looking for any relatives. :)
| ISL wrote:
| Does GnuCash integrate well with exports from credit-card
| companies or banks? It seems like the big blocker is the time
| spent logging transactions.
| sjamaan wrote:
| It supports imports from QIF and OFX/QFX files, CSV files,
| MT940 and MT942 files and DTAUS files. It also has an "online
| banking" integration thing, but I have no idea what kind of
| bank has username/password logins that would work with this.
|
| Personally, I don't mind manually entering the stuff, because
| you'll need to classify everything into the correct accounts
| anyway.
| jldugger wrote:
| > It also has an "online banking" integration thing, but I
| have no idea what kind of bank has username/password logins
| that would work with this.
|
| That stuff is the OFX/QFX setup. Basically it logs in and
| fetches those files for you. Banks are notoriously bad at
| this however.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Worked fine with my bank. I had to sanitize the csv file a bit,
| which can be done with a simple script.
| jdofaz wrote:
| I always use QFX import and haven't had any issues
| neogodless wrote:
| > We don't care about how much money we've spent at Amazon
|
| 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.
| igpay wrote:
| And that's definitely an important shortcoming in GnuCash. I
| don't know of a great way to deal with transactions that go
| beyond "categories". You could use the description field +
| custom reporting, but that seems a bit error-prone. Luckily, I
| haven't run into many cases where I felt like I needed
| something like this.
| gen220 wrote:
| You can track these kinds of things in GNU Ledger (cousin of
| GNUCash)
|
| The expense category is still something like
| `Expenses:Books:SciFi`, or whatever. The payee for the
| transaction is then `Amazon`. If you prefer to make the payee
| the specific retailer that's selling to you, using Amazon as a
| platform, you can do that, and instead "tag" the transaction
| with `:Amazon:`.
|
| You can also track points as a byproduct of the transaction,
| but that's another rabbit hole.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Last time I looked they seem to have a pretty decent python API
| so splitting down transactions by retailer shouldn't take too
| much python-fu methinks.
| jldugger wrote:
| na, the problem is the data doesn't commonly exist in the
| model. If I buy a book from a local independent bookstore,
| that's a debit on checking and a credit in the 'Books'
| account. If--perhaps due to coronavirus--I buy the sequel on
| Amazon, that again results in a transaction from checking to
| books. The payee data isn't there.
|
| I think you can do it via vendors but the small business
| feature set is somewhat cumbersome.
| elric wrote:
| "Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it
| is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a
| penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't
| recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their
| budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more
| user friendly tools.
|
| 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.
| holri wrote:
| Double entry booking is complicated but it pays off to learn if
| also for personal finance because errors are much less likely
| than with a spreadheet.
| ahnick wrote:
| This is commonly stated, but I found it relatively
| straightforward once I saw the _extended accounting equation_
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_equation) and knew
| every entry needed a corresponding entry to make the equation
| balance.
|
| Assets = Liabilities + Equity + (Income - Expenses)
|
| For some reason the (Income - Expenses) part gets left off in
| many introductory explanations of the accounting equation. I
| think that leads to a lot of confusion about how to treat
| Income and Expense accounts in programs like GnuCash for
| newcomers to double entry accounting.
| igpay wrote:
| I also wasn't super sure about sticking "simple" in the title,
| but while writing this article and going through the GnuCash
| setup steps, I actually started to feel like it was
| appropriate.
|
| As another commenter mentioned, I think that the "complicated"
| part of using GnuCash is understanding double-entry
| bookkeeping, which is why I devoted so much time in the article
| trying to explain it in concrete terms. My intention here isn't
| necessarily to steer people to GnuCash itself (I'm learning
| about a lot of alternatives from these comments), but to
| simplify the core underlying concepts. Not sure if I achieved
| that, but I tried!
| nicolaslem wrote:
| It is not that hard, I followed a Youtube tutorial and about a
| week later things clicked in place for me. I am glad I put the
| effort because I feel that I've gained a skill that will change
| my approach to money for the rest of my life.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Given the typical audience of HN.. if you already know how to
| program you already know how to use something that's way more
| complicated than GnuCash.
|
| GnuCash is very simple if you already know double-entry
| accounting... and learning double-entry accounting would
| probably be the work of a weekend or less for anyone who knows
| how to program. Not hard.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| The first time I tried to use GnuCash was many years ago. I
| began by opening up the documentation and reading the overview,
| which, it turned out, began with a fairly lengthy history of
| the practice of double-book accounting. I later found that this
| choice, which isn't necessarily a negative, did a fair job of
| representing GnuCash as a whole.
| jldugger wrote:
| I've been a longtime GnuCash user, and really it's as simple as
| you want it to be. You can, for example simulate the
| Spreadsheet approach with 3 accounts: Checking, and two hidden
| accounts: Income and Expenses. Make Checking the default tab,
| hide a few columns you're basically done. And if you decide you
| need a more complicated model, all those extra features are
| there and available on your schedule.
|
| Probably the biggest hurdle IMO is the single user nature. Even
| the SQL backend requires a global lock.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh!
|
| 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.
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