[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)