[HN Gopher] Show HN: Paisa - Open-Source Personal Finance Manager ___________________________________________________________________ Show HN: Paisa - Open-Source Personal Finance Manager I have been using plaintext accounting for some time and had a duct-taped together reporting system. Paisa is my latest attempt at making it usable for others. I am interested in knowing what people normally want to understand about their finances PS: Please avoid editing the demo data. Download and run locally if you want to edit. Author : ananthakumaran Score : 325 points Date : 2023-09-22 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (paisa.fyi) (TXT) w3m dump (paisa.fyi) | bakul wrote: | Looks good! Paisa Vasool! Especially as it is free :-) | | You don't have to, of course, but do you plan to open source it? | That way others can contribute to it too. | | How tightly is it bound to ledger? How hard would it be to adapt | it to other plaintext accounting programs like beancount? | dkjaudyeqooe wrote: | https://github.com/ananthakumaran/paisa | bakul wrote: | Very good! Thanks! | mcshicks wrote: | This looks really cool I've used beancount/fava for tax planning, | but of course I had to code up my own tax models. In the US tax | table change every year (by a predictable formula) and some forms | of income are weird, like I bonds are exempt from federal tax, | but are taxed by state income tax. It seems unlikely that you | could support all the cases, but is there a straightforward way | to plug in your own model? I did see in tax.go you had long term, | short term, but couldn't quite find the income tax tables, like | long term capital gains has different rates depending upon filing | status and amount. | ananthakumaran wrote: | I have replied at another thread, but there is no plugin | support as of now. My country changes the rules every year and | add grandfathering, xyz rules etc. I think, I have to figure | out a DSL or some other way to make it general. This is | something I am interested, but haven't figured out how to solve | it yet. | Gualdrapo wrote: | Today I learned "paisa" is a subunit of the Indian rupee - here | we call "paisa" to all things related to a specific region of | Colombia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisa_(region)) | codegeek wrote: | The word "Paisa" is also used generally for "money" depending | on the context. But specifically, 100 Paisas = 1 INR (Rupee). | cultofmetatron wrote: | its also a term used to refer to women with a certain "look" | from medellin. my ex was an example. "paisa as an areppa" is a | pretty common term there. | theviajerock wrote: | What? Yeah, that's a say, but "Paisas" are all the people | from Antioquia (Medellin is the capital), Quindio and | Risaralda. All of us are Paisas. That say could be referenced | to any person from there, because of the look or way to talk | or just because we were born there. | sdfghswe wrote: | Tell us, what does it mean? "as an areppa" suggests flat and | round...? | criloz2 wrote: | It's the same as saying "American as a burger", arepa is | just a traditional food in Colombia, a bread made of corn | sdfghswe wrote: | Ok but I was wondering if you'd describe the "look". | cultofmetatron wrote: | this should help https://www.tiktok.com/discover/Paisa- | girls | cultofmetatron wrote: | to be honest, I don't actually know but I've heard it from | multiple people when I was in Medellin in reference to | girls. none of them were "flat and round." I think it just | refers to them being from the same area. "american as apple | pie" | tmikaeld wrote: | This is great! | | If you could add multi-language support, then I'm sure my family | will use it :) | | > I am interested in knowing what people normally want to | understand about their finances | | For my family use cases - seeing upcoming expenses and how much | is left in the account on the specific dates in a calendar time- | flow view, this way we can see how and when things are spent and | if new entries are added we can plan for how much is left at a | specific target date (like a trip). I've seen nothing like this, | so would be extremely useful. | ananthakumaran wrote: | I don't know what you mean by multi-language support. But | calendar view on Budget page is something I can think about. I | will soon add a calendar view to Recurring page. | jaipilot747 wrote: | Haven't used it but it sounds like this feature would work? | | https://paisa.fyi/reference/budget/ | MenhirMike wrote: | Has anyone compared this to YNAB4? (Not the cloud-only | subscription-only YNAB, but the good one that was killed off in | 2019) | | It's by far the best household bookkeeping tool I've ever used, | but it won't ever get updates again (running it in a VM just so I | can make sure I will always be able to run it), and it would be | nice to have something that can track stocks and maybe even | foreign currency - but for now, I would be happy with something | that can just replace YNAB4. | | The lack of Quicken OFX Import is a bummer :( But if the CSV | import is good, it would still work. (As much of a pain as OFX is | to implement for developers, especially since there's at least | two major versions, it is pretty widely supported by US banks to | download my transaction history) | | Will probably give it a spin on the weekend, since the demo | actually looks promising! | ananthakumaran wrote: | OFX is unheard of in my country. I would look into it if | someone could open a issue and attach a few sample OFX files. | MenhirMike wrote: | Yeah, it's an American thing mostly, I think (it originates | from Quicken). I know that Germany used to have another | standard, HBCI (which is now FinTS?) and I'm not sure what | other countries do. | | OFX is a huge PITA to implement, I've tried it and realized I | would want to get paid to put up with it :) I'll try the CSV | import, if it works then there's no need to overcomplicate | stuff. | | The Demo looks really good by the way, and props for actually | having one! | bakul wrote: | Perhaps you can just use https://github.com/aclindsa/ofxgo - | it seems to be a pretty good Go package (just eyeballing it, | haven't use it). | JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: | I use YNAB 4 every day on macOS thanks to patches available | online for the Adobe Air framework (from 32 to 64 bits). What | OS are you using? | MenhirMike wrote: | I use Windows, though I did download the 64-Bit macOS patch | just in case I ever need it. Mostly just playing it safe in | case there are future incompatibilities because they'll have | to pry YNAB4 from my cold, dead hands - unless I find an | actual alternative :D | jonathankoren wrote: | I got turned off with the cookie popup. There's literally no | reason why you need any of that. You want to know which pages | people are visiting? Mine your htaccess logs. | ananthakumaran wrote: | Unfortunately this is hosted on github pages and I can't get | usage information without using 3rd party analytics. | jonathankoren wrote: | Well then, I guess the two solutions are obvious. | bbkane wrote: | I think he's happy with the solution he found... | [deleted] | mahoro wrote: | This is awesome! I like how it's built and I looks like it's open | for integrations of any kind. | | I'm also too impatient to manually enter all transactions but | import from PDF statement form a bank looks like a doable task. | The only transactions that would be required to enter manually is | cash/crypto/etc but for them there are no other choice. | | Contrats with the the release Anantha and I hope your project | will gain attention it deserves! | ananthakumaran wrote: | Feel free to open an issue if you can't get PDF import working. | This is something I am interested in improving. I have tested | with few PDFs and they are hit/miss based on how the data is | encoded. | VinLucero wrote: | Love the clean interface example into ledger-cli! | sdfghswe wrote: | What is the difference between this and GnuCash? | | GnuCash also allows you to generate reports from double-entry | accounting. | eviks wrote: | Is there any good non-web non-plaintext (which is unsuitable for | rich data despite its initial allure) alternative? | flandish wrote: | I use "pocketsmith" because I like the look ahead calendar view. | Does this offer that? I could not see it in the demo. | charles_f wrote: | This looks very similar to Beancount, which has been around for a | while and has quite the community and extensions. | | How does this differentiate? | ananthakumaran wrote: | It is quite similar to Beancount Fava. I want to focus and | improve some of the things like app distribution | (desktop/single cli binary) and the UI (reporting) and make it | accessible for more users. | sbehere wrote: | I think it helps if personal finance managers explicitly describe | at least the following: | | 1. What automation, if any, exists for entering transactions? | This is the most laborious/cumbersome part of personal finance. | Some tools use financial data aggregators (plaid, yodlee etc.) | that involves sharing login credentials with a third party, | sometimes disabling 2FA, or other steps that are anti-security or | anti-privacy. It sucks that in the USA at least, there is | practically no way for customers to fetch their bank data via an | open API. Until recently, many financial institutions supported | OFX, but that is being phased out. | | 2. How is categorization of transactions accomplished? Ideally, I | want autocategorization based on my own previously categorized | transactions, since the bulk of my transactions are repeats at | the same merchants. | | 3. What sort of reporting, dashboarding, and potentially sharing | capabilities exist? Ideally, I want to share some reports with my | partner | | A while ago, I created my own homegrown system to automate my | personal finances[1]. It is capable of doing all of the above, | without sharing data with a 3rd party. Unfortunately, the | automated transaction retrieval mostly does not work because | financial institutions are dropping support for OFX. | | [1]: https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/ | ananthakumaran wrote: | > 1. What automation, if any, exists for entering transactions? | This is the most laborious/cumbersome part of personal finance. | Some tools use financial data aggregators (plaid, yodlee etc.) | that involves sharing login credentials with a third party, | sometimes disabling 2FA, or other steps that are anti-security | or anti-privacy. It sucks that in the USA at least, there is | practically no way for customers to fetch their bank data via | an open API. Until recently, many financial institutions | supported OFX, but that is being phased out. | | It has import support (can be templated using handlebars), no | automated fetch though | | > 2. How is categorization of transactions accomplished? | Ideally, I want autocategorization based on my own previously | categorized transactions, since the bulk of my transactions are | repeats at the same merchants. | | It has a very crude tf-idf based categorization. I do have | plans to improve it. | | > 3. What sort of reporting, dashboarding, and potentially | sharing capabilities exist? Ideally, I want to share some | reports with my partner | | You can checkout the https://demo.paisa.fyi It's just a web app | that works over http, so you can run it on a machine and share | them access. You have to figure out the authorization part, I | do plan to add some password based auth soon. | garyrob wrote: | > It has a very crude tf-idf based categorization. I do have | plans to improve it. | | You could use the same algorithm that was used for spam | filtering in my Linux Journal article from back in 2003[1]. I | have thought about making a plugin to do it with MoneyDance | but haven't gotten around to it. But I think it would be | quite easy for you to integrate into Paisa if you are looking | to do that sort of thing. I have actually made some | improvements to the algorithm since then; let me know if | you're interested... | | [1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6467 | [deleted] | [deleted] | mgkimsal wrote: | > How is categorization of transactions accomplished? Ideally, | I want autocategorization based on my own previously | categorized transactions, since the bulk of my transactions are | repeats at the same merchants. | | One of my aggregators categorizes any alcohol purchases | (purchases from a state 'ABC' store) as 'home improvement'. | While technically the house looks better when I'm drunk, I | still thinks it's a mistake, and I submitted feedback to them. | 2 years ago. No change. | Telemakhos wrote: | Would you rather your aggregator sell your alcoholism data to | your health insurance company, or your joy of maintenance and | taking good care of your property to your home insurance | company? | mgkimsal wrote: | Why not both? I would not be surprised to find the banks | already sell that data to other entities anyway (directly | or indirectly). I end up buying perhaps $100 of hooch per | year; unsure I personally care if anyone knows, but yes, | for some it might be an issue. | lijok wrote: | This looks great. | | Semi-related to this: does anyone know of any double entry | ledgers backed by actual databases like dynamo? | wreck wrote: | @ananthakumaran, can this be installed via Docker and ran in the | browser like your demo[1]? | | [1]: https://demo.paisa.fyi/ | ananthakumaran wrote: | Yes, check the installation page https://paisa.fyi/getting- | started/installation/ | velcrovan wrote: | I am probably the target audience for this kind of thing, but I'm | having trouble seeing myself slog through hundreds of household | transactions every month (or putting in the time to automate | transaction imports from my credit union and credit cards). I'm | happy to huck money at YNAB to do all this for me, on top of | which they give me an app that my wife and I can both use to | check the budget and enter transactions on our phones. | Reconciling the accounts and budgeting for the next month becomes | maybe a half-hour exercise. Whereas with Paisa I see nothing but | entire weekends lost in service of the machine. | ananthakumaran wrote: | There is import option available on Paisa, but I agree, it | won't match YNAB level experience. | abdullahkhalids wrote: | GnuCash can import directly from your bank [1]. There are also | some mobile apps [2], but they are not super well integrated | with the desktop application - I think you have to manually | export and import every time. | | [1] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-manual/tools-on- | li... | | [2] https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/GnuCash_and_Mobile_Devices | piperswe wrote: | It can import directly from some banks maybe, but certainly | not my bank. I haven't had any success importing to GnuCash | from _any_ bank I do business with. | abdullahkhalids wrote: | There is also the plaid api to gnucash [1], which should | work with a lot more banks. Personally, I have not used any | of these. My banks allow csv downloads, which works well | enough for me. I wouldn't give my data to a 3rd party in | any case. | | [1] https://github.com/ebridges/plaid2qif | BeetleB wrote: | I used to have this problem, but then I found most banks | offer _free_ export to some file format - even those that | charge for SW integration. You just have to dig around the | site to find the feature. | mcjiggerlog wrote: | Every bank I've ever used has had functionality to do csv | exports (or xlsx, for which I have a one-liner to convert | to csv), which can trivially be imported into gnucash. | | At least in the UK/EU, it seems to be a common feature. | yonrg wrote: | To be precise, the wonderful aqbanking is doing the job for | gnucash. I do not see why paisa could not use aqbanking as | well | [deleted] | chrbr wrote: | Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I've used YNAB for almost a decade | now, but wish it were more powerful for things like investment | tracking. I tried last month to get into the ledger systems | (beancount, specifically), but it's a huge additional time | sink. And implementing YNAB-style envelope-based budgeting on | top of them is always a bit of a hack. Went back to YNAB | quickly. | waynesonfire wrote: | > wish it were more powerful for things like investment | tracking. | | Community needs an open-source version of YNAB, not another | gnu cash clone. | | Plaid solves the transaction import problem, the hardest | part, unfortunately at the expense of privacy. | edoceo wrote: | I want to know where my money goes. I like to look at stacked- | area (or column) charts of the categories of spending. To make | this work I have some software I made ~20 years ago that does | double-entry book-keeping. At the end of the month, I import | statements from financial service providers (eg: Wells Fargo, | Chase, PayPal, Stripe, etc). Lots of stuff is repeat purchases | (eg: Shell Gas) and my software automatically categorises. Some | transactions I have to categorise manually. Each category / | vendor becomes an expense-account and my banks and CCs exist as | assets and liabilities. | | Once the import and reconciliation is done I pull up a my column | chart that shows where the money went -- and can compare over | time -- see a full year of movement. I've been through various | charting libraries with it and most recently moved to ECharts[0] | -- so I'm planning to expand with Treemap and Sankey style | visuals. | | The import process, which I do monthly takes maybe an hour. I'm | importing from like 5 bank accounts, 3 payment processors, 4 CC | providers. The part that takes the longest is signing into their | slow sites, navigating past pop-up/interstitial, getting to their | download page and waiting for it to download. Loads of these | sites (WF, Chase) have been "modernised" and have some real | bullshit UI/UX going on -- lags, no keyboard, elements jump | around, forms can't remember state, ctrl+click won't open in a | new page cause that damned link isn't actually a link but some | nested monster of DIVs with 19 event listeners on each one -- and | somehow still all wrong. | | I think the most-best feature would be to have some tool | automatically get all my transactions from all these providers | into one common format. Gimmee some JSON with like 10 commonly- | named fields for the normal stuff and then 52 other BS fields | that each provider likes to add (see a PayPal CSV for example). | Does that exist and I just don't know? | | [0] https://echarts.apache.org/ | bbkane wrote: | I don't know about a service that does this, but you might be | able to script the website logins with https://playwright.dev/ | halotrope wrote: | This looks great! We've been building a wealth tracker with | https://markets.sh and were a bit flabbergasted when people | started "abusing" our automatically syncing Yodlee connection to | hook up all of their checking and credit card accounts | (technically we market only for brokerages and investment | accounts). We have a free and simple API and plain CSV download | which in itself seems to be a real pain point for people. | | Apparently, just being able to pull your financial data into | open-source tools and excel could be a product since Yodlee and | other aggregators are often too expensive and technical to set up | for individuals. | | I think we need to force all financial companies to have a modern | API and OAuth available for everyone via legislation. | [deleted] | lelo_tp wrote: | yep. That's exactly what's happening in Brazil - | https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/open_finance | | similar to how the central bank forced every major bank to | adopt PIX (our instant payment system), they're doing the same | with open banking. | | Sure, it's not exactly "open" for end users. But now, as a | company, I can build a personal finance app without asking for | my end users bank account password. This is so much better UX- | wise. | lukebennett wrote: | > I think we need to force all financial companies to have a | modern API and OAuth available for everyone via legislation. | | That already exists[0] in the UK | | [0] https://www.openbanking.org.uk/ | domh wrote: | It's been a little while since I've looked into the Open | Banking API stuff - how easy is it to use this API as a | consumer? Or do I have to create a business and apply for a | license in order to use it? | jon-wood wrote: | Open Banking is in some ways misnamed - you can't as an | end-user just do OAuth and get a data feed out of your | account, you'll have to go via a third party who've jumped | through all the hoops. | domh wrote: | Got it! That's what I thought (feared). I wonder if there | are ever plans to open it up to general use, or if it | would be easy as an end user to jump said hoops. | | I wonder if there are any open source third parties? | buzer wrote: | I don't know about open source ones, but I did find | Enable Banking (https://old.reddit.com/r/eupersonalfinanc | e/comments/k4ny3j/f...) offering free access to your own | accounts. I don't know if "offer" still stands, the FAQ | is not very explicit on it (it only talks about testing, | https://enablebanking.com/docs/faq/#can-i-test-the-api- | befor... & https://enablebanking.com/docs/api/linked- | accounts/). | | I tried it, but I couldn't get things working sandbox | environment so I ended up giving up and just do manual | exports. | halotrope wrote: | Europe has a shot too but what i've found is that the API's | are often so clunky and bad that they might as well not exist | scubakid wrote: | It's interesting how many tools can analyze where your money has | been going, but few go deep on the planning + forecasting side. | | Have you thought about building out the "retirement" module more? | If you need any inspiration, I've been working on a personal | finance simulator [1] for the past two and a half years as a side | project. | | Really great job with the docs on this, and I love that you | include a demo environment! | | I imagine that eventually we'll see an app that pulls budgeting, | tracking, and planning all together in a fully seamless way. | Whoever manages that will probably be a force to be reckoned | with. | | [1]: https://projectionlab.com | ananthakumaran wrote: | I have seen projectionlab before and agree with you. There are | few tools on the forecast side. Most of them stop at budgeting. | I do have plans to make retirement page generic (aka | Goals/Target), but I am yet to figure out the details. | | In an ideal world, double entry accounting would be your | database and there would be lot of tools that use that and | focuses on a specific niche. But we are far from that and | everyone wants to create their own data island. | ffpip wrote: | Love the app, will try it for a few days. Thanks for making it. | Hopefully I can contribute after trying it for a few days! | trippyrooster wrote: | I have a tool to easily convert bank csv's to ledger format | https://github.com/muralisc/bank2ledger-cli | asveikau wrote: | I wondered about the name. I guess I'm unfamiliar with a bunch of | South Asian references, apparently it is Hindi and related to | currency: | https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%88%E0%A4%B8%E... | | I was perplexed a bit because _paisa_ (like _paisano_ , | countryman) is also a word I hear a lot among Latin American | immigrants in the US, seems like one of those things that can be | taken offensively but I mostly seem to hear it as a term of | endearment. | makingstuffs wrote: | Yeah it means money in Hindi | [deleted] | [deleted] | mr-karan wrote: | Love this project! I've been trying out Paisa off late and it's | been great at just de-cluttering my investments in various assets | (which are spread all over). | codethief wrote: | That cookie banner is straight from hell. Took me a solid minute | to realize how to disable tracking. Ugghh. | [deleted] | thrway9925235 wrote: | I must admit as a Western-denomination consumer I was thrown off | by the display of the monetary convention such as this --> | 1,25,80,568 then realized it must be in Lakh and the author | coming from this convention. The difference in perception is | interesting. | jaipilot747 wrote: | This is incredible! | | Great job building this and also writing the documentation that | explains concepts as well as how they are implemented. | | I can't believe how many comments here are dismissive. If you are | happy using a paid solution to manage your finances and don't | want to get into the weeds yourself, you are probably not the | target audience for this. | | One suggestion would be to make the country-specific pieces like | tax calculations module so others can contribute their own. | ananthakumaran wrote: | > One suggestion would be to make the country-specific pieces | like tax calculations module so others can contribute their | own. | | This is something I have been thinking about, I need to figure | out the base abstraction. Even the current implementation | (which is basically written for my personal use cases) has too | many conditions/grandfathering etc, I suspect it might not be | accurate. | rambambram wrote: | After building and using my own bookkeeping solution for my small | business, one of the main takeaways for me before and after I | built it was that bookkeeping software is only useful once you | know the bookkeeping rules. Whatever software solution you use - | whether that's some webapp, an Excel sheet, or some homegrown | solution - you always need to know these rules. Even the simple | rules for a small business take some time and understanding to | get a grip on. I haven't seen bookkeeping software that is plug- | and-play, so without knowing these rules as a user, if that's | even possible!? | | Knowing this for my own situation made me decide to opt for a | homegrown software solution, because I had to learn these rules | anyway. I felt more capable in my programming language of choice | than in Excel, and I didn't want to pay for a SaaS solution, let | alone learn another interface. | [deleted] | hedgehog0 wrote: | Any any suggestions or recommendations for learning these | rules? Either for future business or current personal finance | management? | danscan wrote: | Thrilled to see something like this building on Ledger (a great | tool by itself). Will definitely check it out! | miroljub wrote: | I like the fact that the author supports both ledger and | hledger. | ibdf wrote: | How are people automating the data import? I can't imagine | someone entering everything by hand. Lots of places don't even | provide an export file you can work with... most of them offer a | PDF. | | It seems like most financial places rely on Plaid for the data | integration, but that's a paid service I don't think Open-Source | or free personal finance apps would use. | BeetleB wrote: | Most banks/CC have some sort of export - be it in CSV, OFX, | Quicken, etc. Then you import it using your financial story. | | The _real_ pain is in the categorization (was this Groceries, | Supplies, Dining, Medical Expense)? | | I use KMyMoney which usually picks the same category as the | last transaction from the same place. Saves some of the work, | but it's still painful. I then wrote a script to export from | KMyMoney to ledger format. | eredengrin wrote: | As far as standard checking/savings/credit card accounts go, I | haven't had one that didn't have a csv export option yet. Some | of them are very buried and much harder to find and use than I | wish, but they are there at least with the banks I use. | bogwog wrote: | Some years ago I built a custom tool similar to this which | downloaded financial data from my Chase bank account and | converted it to beancount (another text-based accounting tool). | | Chase charged like $10/mo or something like that for using OFX | to download your bank statements (which is pretty ridiculous | considering what it is). Eventually I abandoned it because none | of the other bank accounts I needed to track offered OFX or | anything similar that I could find, and just gave up. | waynesonfire wrote: | i won't use any finance manager that doesn't employ the envelop | method, like ynab. | | looking at the demo for 10 seconds it looks like a web based gnu | cash. | AlanYx wrote: | You can easily do the envelope method in ledger (aka. ledger- | cli if you're searching for it), which is the back end for | Paisa. | BeetleB wrote: | This is based on ledger, which actually does allow envelope | based budgeting via virtual accounts. No idea if Paisa handles | virtual accounts well. | ananthakumaran wrote: | Paisa supports budgeting and the model is inspired by YNAB. | It doesn't use virtual account, but uses periodic transaction | which is simpler from data entry perspective, but achieves | the same thing | BeetleB wrote: | Not trying to be argumentative, but every time I've heard | someone claim they do envelope budgeting in ledger without | virtual accounts, I've always found a flaw in their | approach.[1] So let me give you the standard scenario: | | I have two checking accounts, and a credit card. I budget | $300/mo on groceries. Sometimes I buy groceries with my | credit card, and sometimes using money from either of those | two checking accounts. | | Last month I spent $200. This month I'll spend $350. I | should see that I have $50 left in the envelope. _At the | same time_ , I should see an accurate amount of money in my | actual checking accounts/credit card (i.e. despite doing | automatic transactions). | | How do you do this with periodic transactions, and | _without_ a virtual account? | | [1] Same goes for Beancount. The author was adamant one | could do it without virtual accounts, but never showed a | way to do it. | mekster wrote: | What's with the thousand separator being placed on every 2 digits | except for the last 3 digits? | | How do you even do that, unless you manually regex it? | | If that's the case, already looks weird on technical decisions. | | There's never a decent open source self finance management app | somehow. | | It's either bloated or just doesn't look easy on the eyes for | simple day to day use. | ananthakumaran wrote: | The author is from India (myself) and this is how numbers are | formatted there. Locale can be configured via configuration | page, so it's just a matter of changing it to `en-US` if you | want thousand separator. | sdfghswe wrote: | Boom headshot | lelo_tp wrote: | lol, this is such an aggressive reaction. People won't always | live where you live. Be kind to others, don't assume there's | something wrong until you gather the full context. | jaipilot747 wrote: | That's how they are delimited in India and the author is | probably from there. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system | asdajksah2123 wrote: | Here's something that always trips me up when I look into non | professional software for double entry accounting (or more | accurately, instructions around them). | | It's been a long time, so I may be getting it wrong, but I do | have some introductory information of accounting. And according | to that, in a transaction such as salary received, the accounting | would look something like: | | Income: Salary - Credit | | Assets: Checking - Debit. | | The Golden rule/s that apply here (Debit the receiver, credit the | giver) | | However, looking at the tutorial, the example given is: | | 2022/01/01 Salary | | Income:Salary:Acme (Debit Account) | | Assets:Checking (Credit Account) | | This is the opposite of what I expect, however, I see this all | the time when looking at tutorials/information written by SW | devs. | | What am I missing or is everyone else just getting it wrong? | thuruv wrote: | Thats correct with DE accounting. However I always assumed, the | logic followed here is that the money has been "debited from" | the INCOME account and "CREDITED to" Assets/Checkings. | john2x wrote: | Debit from employer's account, credited to your bank. | asadjb wrote: | My somewhat limited understanding of this is that from your | perspective, an increase in your asset/cash account would be | a debit. | | A big confusion for me initially was that my banks always | talked about crediting my account whenever money was | deposited/added to my account. | | I finally understood it when I realized that from the banks | perspective, an increase in my account is an increase in | their liability towards me; they now owe me more money. Which | is why they call it crediting my account. | | So now I think of it like this: an increase in an asset is | always a debit, an increase in liability is always a credit. | elbasti wrote: | The gnuCash documentation has it as you describe: debits | checking and credits salary. | | https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/gnucash/1.6.4/arch/i3... | PopAlongKid wrote: | "Debits and credits are nothing more than "increases" and | "decreases" to accounts." Don't try to apply logic; it is just | a convention: debits to the left, credits to the right. | | In particular, the _first_ example above is correct. An asset | account is increased by debits; a credit increases a revenue | account. | | Salary received: | | Income: Salary - Credit | | Assets: Checking - Debit. | GingerMidas wrote: | Awesome! I've been using Beancount/Fava for over 2 years now and | this looks really slick. | | One thing off the bat I noticed, it doesn't look like custom Tags | are supported? I use tags all the time in beancount, say to | filter for a trip #trip-europe-2022 which would break down my | cash flow and balances (and the rest of the fava UI) for a subset | of transactions. | ananthakumaran wrote: | > One thing off the bat I noticed, it doesn't look like custom | Tags are supported? | | Not as of now, Tags are used only for recurring transactions as | of now. I first need to figure out how to bring the filter into | the UI. Everything now works based on Account names only. | GingerMidas wrote: | Makes sense - great work so far! This is easily the best | looking PTA app I've seen. | robcohen wrote: | This looks awesome. I love that it's built on ledger. I have been | wanting to move away from Simplifi Money for some time for | obvious reasons (owned by Intuit). It seems that the real moat is | pulling the data in a consistent and correct way. Yes, you COULD | try to find every single export option for every bank, but I | think Plaid is really the only service that pulls this data | somewhat correctly, due to the U.S. not having a PSD2 equivalent | in our laws. | | So the question is, would it make sense to have a Plaid plugin | for this? Obviously because they are a 3rd party, it negates some | of the benefits, but I simply cannot use this system manually | because I have so many accounts. Maybe one workaround is to pull | from Tiller (which uses plaid), then export a csv/excel. | | Any chance there's a good plan in place to get automated data | imports working, even if we need a 3rd party to do it? | hackernewds wrote: | What is PSD2 and why is it important? Is it the basis for | something like UPI in India? | sailorganymede wrote: | Payment Services Directive 2 and it's basically legal stuff | we gotta comply with to do payments. Can't speak for India | but it's v much something in the UK | itissid wrote: | Mint already uses Plaid, but I the transaction information it | gets is too low in information to categorize anything | reasonably. For example my Amazon Grocery transaction happen on | my amazon Chase Credit card(gives me 5% discount). | | But connecting to Chase.com using plaid pulls in transaction | statement is still information poor. The obvious consequence of | this is that budget information is not correctly reflected in | Mint(that info is actually in my Amazon.com silo). The only way | to fix this rn is sadly manually. | | As a tangent, I do feel though that LLM agents that can one day | act on individuals behalf, reading info and making this manual | job far more easier in absence of any govt regulations. | avarun wrote: | Mint does not use Plaid. Intuit has their own service for | integrating with bank APIs and/or screen-scraping that they | use across all their products. | malermeister wrote: | I know this is only vaguely related, but as a European that's | been looking for an open source budgeting solution, how does | PSD2 help? | robcohen wrote: | My understanding of PSD2 is that it requires banking | transactions to be "machine-readable" whatever that means. So | there's an actual legal requirement for making data | accessible outside of the browser. | ghosty141 wrote: | The problem I faced when I looked at data export was that | none of the banks had any apis. You always had to go | through 3rd party commercial apis. Maybe there are ways bur | I didnt find them | jtha wrote: | If you're talking about European banks they all have | APIs. But only licensed companies can use them directly. | Those companies are called AISPs within the PSD2 | framework, sometimes referred to as aggregators. Some of | them have ways for individuals to access their own | accounts at banks via the AISP APIs. But there are | limitations, one major one being that PSD2 doesn't cover | credit card data or anything other than deposit accounts. | [I'm a product manager at a bank] | avirut wrote: | One option I'd recommend for anyone working towards this is to | use the SimpleFIN Bridge [0], which is basically an API wrapper | around MX (a Plaid competitor) designed for personal use by the | same people that make Budgeting with Buckets. Data security is | definitely an issue, but I value having my transactions | automatically imported more than I'm concerned about the risk | of SimpleFIN being breached. | | I've personally used SimpleFIN to provide automatic imports in | my own personal, kind-of selfhostable personal finance tool | [1]. | | [0] https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ | | [1] https://github.com/avirut/bursar | ananthakumaran wrote: | I can try to improve import functionality, but Plaid etc is | quite hard. I can't even figure out their pricing model from | their page. So, as a free app I don't think it can support | Plaid. | salmaanp wrote: | I would use this if there was an easy way to integrate it | with plaid. (login once and keep data synced). This would be | comparable to personal capital at that level. | phoenixy1 wrote: | [I work at Plaid] The pricing model is here: | https://plaid.com/docs/account/billing/ but @jpeeler is right | that for a free app like this aimed at an audience of | engineers you could also set it up for your users to BYO | Plaid API keys. | robcohen wrote: | This is the precise option I was thinking might be | possible. Is it even reasonable for an individual developer | to use their own API keys for something like this? I assume | because you suggested it, it is. Any limitations that are | impractical for personal use? | debaserab2 wrote: | I'm in the middle of going down this path right now. It | kind of works, except for certain banking institutions | require more rigor than just getting accepted into the | developer platform. | | The steps, as far as I can tell, look something like | this: | | 1) Sign up for Plaid developer account | | 2) Request developer access (without it you can only play | with sandbox data) | | 3) Request production access | | 4) Submit application information including a name, | website URL, and logo | | 5) Add a legal company entity name and address to my | plaid account | | 6) Sign an MSA contract (no idea what its about) | | 7) Fill out a security questionnaire. | | I'm at step 3 currently but I'm not sure how much further | I'm realistically going to get. I'm not sure I could | reasonably fill the rest without stretching the truth | quite a bit and it seems to get deep into legal territory | that I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. | | There's also apparently different API behaviors depending | on the bank: | https://plaid.com/docs/link/oauth/#institution-specific- | beha... | | I don't have a lot of hope that this is going to pan out. | I'm considering just scraping Chase with a headless | puppeteer script instead. | | It's possible that this may be simpler for other banks | though, I've only tried Chase since that's my primary | bank. | phoenixy1 wrote: | [I work at Plaid] | | I will say that while annoying (especially for Chase, | which has the most paperwork-type requirements for | developers) this process should be totally doable for | solo developers. You can put your own name as the legal | entity name if you don't have a company. The Master | Services Agreement (MSA) sounds scary but is just the | contract between you and Plaid -- the legalese laying out | what you're paying for, what Plaid is providing, and the | rights and obligations of both parties. And when it comes | to the security questionnaire, fill it out as accurately | as you can, but you don't need to stress over it -- Plaid | doesn't expect a solo hobbyist to have the same security | measures as, like, a publicly traded company. | debaserab2 wrote: | Thanks for the info -- this is really good to know. I'll | keep pressing on as far as I can! | akerl_ wrote: | Can confirm: I did this as a solo user of a personal API | integration with Chase via Plaid. I answered honestly | given the scope of what I was doing: for example, IIRC | there was a question about whether all employees are | background checked, and another about how we deal with | terminated employee access. As the only | user/employee/human, I could confidently say I background | check all my employees and that if they're terminated, | their access will be promptly revoked :D | jpeeler wrote: | You just need to have each person create their own Plaid | account (which is probably the way you want it anyway). The | free tier supports 100 institutions. | | Last time I looked at this, I thought it was stated that the | free/sandbox tier is not guaranteed to have the same SLA as | the production environment. But I can't find this in the | documentation anywhere. | phoenixy1 wrote: | [I work at Plaid] I don't know if we explicitly write down | in the docs that the free Development tier isn't guaranteed | to have the same SLA as the production environment, but if | you're not paying Plaid there is no SLA (I mean, the usual | recourse for an SLA breach is a rebate, but you can't give | a rebate to someone who isn't paying you in the first | place). That said, in practice the differences between the | free and paid tiers for a personal finance app are not | really such that someone doing a hobbyist app for personal | use would notice them. | debaserab2 wrote: | Correct me if I'm wrong but some of the banks don't work | in developer mode at all (at least, it doesn't seem to | work with Chase). | arun-mani-j wrote: | It's nice and has a lot of quite advanced features. | | If you want a simple app to track lent and borrows among friends | and circle then try Debitum. But it's for Android only.. | | https://github.com/marmo/debitum | Brajeshwar wrote: | Nostalgia. I led a small team in 2009 and built Paisa.com - a | financial/investment Startup. I still have the initial mockup | designs I did in a hotel room in Delhi/Gurgaon to pitch to NDTV. | cultofmetatron wrote: | wow, now I can say I like my personal finance manager the way I | like my women. | esosac wrote: | having using hledger for a little more than a year, this is all | my reporting dreams came true. thank you so much | lionkor wrote: | Slightly off topic but how do people use these? Depending on | where/what I pay, I pay with an assortment of credit cards, bank | account, debit cards, paypal, etc. | | Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every | transaction they do every day, or something? | GingerMidas wrote: | > Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every | transaction they do every day, or something? | | Yes, exactly that. You can do automatic imports of your bank | statements but that's arguably more hassle. | | It takes 10 minutes at the end of my day to record all my | transactions and it gives me a complete understanding of where | my money is going. | teeray wrote: | > It takes 10 minutes at the end of my day to record all my | transactions | | I'd love to be able to do this, but realistically (for me), | I'd need something that works reliably on my worst days. If | I'm out late, on vacation for a few days, dealing with some | on-call thing all night, etc., I don't want to be beholden to | a 10-minute per day commitment that accumulates linearly. | Discipline can only get me so far in the face of chaos-- | automation can take me the rest of the way there. | cortesoft wrote: | This would be a lot harder if you have a spouse and want to | track your family finances. It would require both people | working together to keep it up to date, and finding that time | is tough with kids. | | For all the concerns and problems over tools like Mint, | having all 10-20 accounts we have automatically sync their | data into the system makes it so much easier to manage. | helij wrote: | We don't find it hard. We sit down one or two times during | the week in the evening and I enter all our transactions | into KMyMoney. It takes 5-10 minutes to do once you get the | hang of it. This is across 5-10 accounts. You might have a | little more work to do with 10-20 accounts. | | On Paisa (ledger). I like it! But...KMyMoney has such a | nice interface for recurring/future payments and reports | (that I can edit to suit our needs) that I'm struggling to | see the point of ledger behind gui for our use case. It | does look nice though. | brewdad wrote: | I do the bank import once a week. I set aside an hour on my | calendar to update all of my spending accounts. It usually | takes more like 15-20 minutes unless I find something | unexpected. | | For longer term accounts like my 401k, IRAs, and brokerage | accounts, I track money going in our out but only update the | gains/losses every 6 months or annually on Dec 31st. | n6242 wrote: | I only do it every few days but pretty much the same. I find | it's too easy to lose track of how much I've been spending, | so by doing it manually I always notice before it becomes a | problem. It also helps me save because I notice right away if | I get charged for a subscription I'm not using and I can | cancel it. | BeetleB wrote: | 10 minutes a day is a lot! That's 300 minutes a month. I do | it about once a month and I probably do 2-3 hours. | poisonborz wrote: | Yes, I do this for over 15 years every day. You can easily | train yourself, it never "breaks" and takes only a few seconds. | MenhirMike wrote: | Most banks (at least in the US) allow a data export, usually in | Quicken/OFX or CSV format. I download the transactions from my | accounts once a week or so and import it into the tool. (PayPal | gets charged to my credit card, so it shows up on the credit | card import, no need to track PayPal separately) | | I currently use YNAB4, and I've assigned categories to Payees, | so when it sees a transaction to e.g., my local Pub, it knows | to categorize it as Food. For stuff like Amazon or eBay, I need | to manually categorize each transaction, but that takes a | minute or two. | progx wrote: | I do this since ~20 years with a simple Calc-Table. Easy | overview and simple to search. | jcpst wrote: | At least with ledger cli, the format for a transaction is | simple enough that a just make a script that reads the CSV that | I can export from my bank's website. | | But to your point, it's still a lot of customization and manual | work, I never keep up with it for more than a month or two | plibither8 wrote: | Not to be _that_ guy that tries to force LLMs into everything, | but after automatically importing bank transactions, LLMs like | GPT are very powerful in extracting information from the ill- | formed, non-standard, transaction description, and subsequently | classifying it. You can help train it by manually identifying | and classifying the first few, and let it do the rest of the | job. I 've tried it out myself and works well for me! | ananthakumaran wrote: | I have tried this and it works very well. I just copy paste | my investments data from website and put it as a comment and | usually copilot will figure out how to format it as a ledger | transaction based on the previous transactions. | | I am not sure if it will work with bulk import though. It's | easy to spot mistakes with single entry, hard to do when you | have lot of them | boredtofears wrote: | What software have you used that does this? | | So far every time I've relied on automatic categorization for | this sort of thing it fails horribly. I don't think I've used | anything that's GPT based though. | plibither8 wrote: | > What software have you used that does this? | | I wrote my own script that uses the GPT API. For automating | bank transcation downloads, it's just a cronjob that runs | ever X hours and scrapes the information from the banking | website. | boredtofears wrote: | Would you be willing to share the prompts you use? | MenhirMike wrote: | How would LLMs really help though if all you get is usually | an order number? I mean, it can probably figure out that an | order from McDonalds is food related (though does it get | categorized as "Everyday Lunch" or "Going out with Friends" | or "Work Events"?) and Geico will probably be some sort of | Insurance - but that would just be a large database of common | payees, no real need for any AI. That said, if you're | importing years worth of data, it would be a great starting | point to get ballpark estimates of where your money goes, so | that has value. | | And then there's e.g., "Amazon Transaction AB2314ACWERF" | which could be a new Fridge ("Household Appliances"), a 3D | Printer ("Hobby Expenses"), a video game ("Entertainment | Expenses"), or a giant double-headed adult massager ("Fax | Machine Maintenance") - but the bank statement wouldn't have | enough information. | plibither8 wrote: | Yep, that's one of its deficiencies! For me, something like | GPT helps in triaging and "cleaning up" bulk of the | transactions, with little micro-categorization left to be | manually done. | palidanx wrote: | I played around with this quite a bit with chat gpt 4 with | confirmation instructions, and after a bit of time it starts | going haywire. I played around with just creating in a simple | csv format, transactions date, name, category (asking it to | categorize it), and amount. After a couple runs it started | going haywire and hallucinating with transactions I never | created. | | I created an internal rails clone of financier.io and just | created a spreadsheet web area i could copy/paste mass | transactions in so i could add a batch at a time ( I suppose | I could upload a csv also, but the problem is every bank has | different formats) | maherbeg wrote: | If you use hledger, you can actually write a csv importer | directly in the tool: https://hledger.org/import-csv.html | | I wrote my own idempotent parser before this existed but would | give this a try first | hackpelican wrote: | I used to host an instance of Firefly III, which has a | perfectly usable mobile web interface. | | This way, I would log every transaction immediately rather than | wait until I get home. | Zaheer wrote: | The paid accounting tools usually will have integration with | your banks via Plaid or similar | figmert wrote: | I've kind of been thinking that there needs to be an open | source version of Yodlee/Plaid. I keep picking up some project | like Paisa and then realise that I have to figure out how to | import things automatically. I don't really have the patience | to do it manually. | | But for a few months now I've been thinking an OSS service that | does this might be great for such OSS projects. Maybe I'll | eventually start it. | boredtofears wrote: | I think the problem is that you need to establish a business | relationship with the giant banking systems to get them to | give you access and unless you have contacts or a way into | that world this is very hard to do. I don't know how you'd | pull it off in an OSS project. | wingerlang wrote: | I download my bank/cc statements once every few months and run | them through some homemade cleanup scripts, then I could | technically plug it into a tool like this. | jonathankoren wrote: | I also have some clean up scripts, but the worst part is I | have to manually select the tables to extract in the PDF | using Tabula. There's still some serious manual | reconciliation between credit card and bank statements. I | feel good doing it, but it's a slog. | | Technically, I might be able to get something similar by | using some website to download everything, but honestly I | don't trust them. I don't want all of my banking, investment, | and spending information consolidated in one place for some | tech bro douche bag to sell off to some richer fucks and then | lose it to some hackers. | | https://tabula.technology | ananthakumaran wrote: | Paisa supports PDF import (very rough implementation), but | the problem is actually simpler compared to what tabula is | trying to solve. I just need a 2 dimensional array and then | the template can easily filter out non financial data by | checking if specific column is Date. I have tried it | personally on a few PDFs, it worked well except one which | had a two column layout. | [deleted] | boredtofears wrote: | I've been attempting to build a little hobby budgetting app the | past couple weeks that could automatically sync from my bank | since none of the OSS options seem to be able to this and | require manual logging. | | I thought this would be fairly straightforward but it's been | anything but that - what few open formats there were for this | thing are all being sun-setted and most US based banks seem to | only allow API access of any kind to established companies. The | only real option is to go through Plaid which still seems to | require initiating a business relationship with them to get | through all the red tape. | | For whatever reason, if your in the US, real time syncing of | this sort of thing just isn't an option at the personal level. | | Only other solution I can think of at this point is to manually | scrape with a puppeteer script. | eredengrin wrote: | There is a middle ground I think - all my banks/credit cards | (7 or 8 accounts spread across 4-5 providers) offer csv | downloads of transactions. I haven't tried to automate | downloading the csv, but once the csv exists locally | automation becomes straightforward. But yes, for real-time | automated gathering of the data, this wouldn't be appropriate | I imagine. | fstrazzante wrote: | Splitwise user here | freitzkriesler2 wrote: | I honestly just use excel but that's because I use it as a book | of record for receipts as well. Since you're looking for open | source alternatives, OpenOffice would fill that need. | ntoni wrote: | [dead] | girishso wrote: | I tried Excel few years back, it's only easy when all you are | tracking is income and expenses. But when you buy some stocks | or MFs, the amount is debited from Bank but it's not really an | "expense". And good luck tracking fund flows between your own | accounts. | | I've finally settled on hledger for now. There's some issues, | mainly the reports are generated by calendar year, there's no | support for Financial Year reports (Apr-1 till Mar-31 in | India). ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-09-22 23:00 UTC)