Alternatives to Actual
reddit / selfhosted

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hazukun · 2023-10-03 13:16

Hi everyone!

I am hosting an Actual server instance but I don't use some of its
features. I am entering transactions manually because my bank does not
have export or sync features. Also I really want to do it manually to
have more control. The budgeting feature also is not something that I
could work with a lot. My country has a 10% monthly inflation so I
have to adapt all the budgets all the time.

The problem is that I have many transactions that I am paying with
credit card but that relation does not exists in Actual, so when I pay
my credit card I have to search all the transactions and mark them as
cleared and add the extra fees that the bank may apply.

Aside of that I really enjoy the simplicity of Actual and the
reporting feature is a bit limited but I read that they want to
improve it a lot.

TLDR: I use Actual only to track txs manually, know where my money is
going and I would like to have some credit card management to know
what txs are being cleared when I pai them. And want a good reporting
feature. Is there any alternative that has this?

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XxNerdAtHeartxX · 2023-10-03 14:39

The reality is that every budgeting app doesn't deal with credit cards
well. Even YNAB - which is one of the biggest paid products for
budgeting - has a whole section about using [credit cards in their
app](https://www.ynab.com/category/credit-cards/).

Because Actual follows the same philosophy of YNAB (Envelope
Budgeting), perhaps spending time learning how to track a CC in Actual
is better than abandoning it completely.

It took me a few weeks to understand how to make my Credit Cards work
in Actual, but now that I input transactions (almost) daily, its
become second nature efor me.

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hazukun · 2023-10-03 15:50

Thanks for the reply and the info. I will dig a bit on ynab and how it
handles credit cards. I guess that creating a credit card account and
creating the txns there could be the best, and the credit card payment
could be represented by a transfer to that account.

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ApricotRembrandt · 2023-10-03 23:18

I started using Actual last month and it takes a little getting used
to how to use CCs, but it's not too bad. What you've just described is
largely the best way to handle it. Actual also has its own
documentation on handling CCs:
https://actualbudget.org/docs/budgeting/credit-cards/

That said, I could definitely see it being annoying having to
constantly adjust for substantial inflation. I don't really think any
particular application is going to handle it well without frequent
readjustments.

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hazukun · 2023-10-04 15:03

Thanks for the doc link. Yes, the inflation adjustments are the main
issue that make me want to track all my money movements. Every month I
can have a fixed amount of USD as income, so I will try to figure out
some strategy to check if my categories have a stable budget in USD
and if that works with the conversion rate at the paycheck date. So in
the future I can make a report and check what my categories inflation
rate was, how the conversion rate changed and compare it with the
country's official index.

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ApricotRembrandt · 2023-10-04 17:15

I forgot to mention this earlier, but there's also a quite active
Discord community that could probably help you figure out some of your
questions. It's linked at the bottom of their webpage:
https://actualbudget.org/