I have a excel sheet on my laptop
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
57 points (93.8% liked)
Selfhosted
40474 readers
381 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I use GnuCash. I typically update every couple weeks up to a month. Beyond that it can be hard to remember what specific transactions were.
It's double ledger and I really like that it forces strict accounting. That sounds cumbersome but once you're set up (it may take some trial and error), for me my workflow is essentially:
- Copy prior paycheck splits & update them to reflect new paychecks.
- export QFX files from credit cards
- import QFX, check / set transaction accounts
- any small manual updates (interest payments in accounts, etc)
It's not automated but my data always remains local, and I can use the Linux or android application. I don't bother daily tracking on my phone, else it might be cumbersome. I've never used any of the budget features, just tracking where my money comes and goes.
Weird question, but what does GnuCash do that you wouldn't get easily from excel? I haven't used any of these apps and wondering what I'm missing out on.
GnuCash running locally on my PC. Had worked for me for about 25 years.
Actual Budget, because it supports SimpleFIN to import my transactions.
It's still not "automated," but I have a lot of rules now so it's getting there.
I'm not super happy w/ how it works, but I'm too lazy to do anything about it. Maybe I'll end up adding SimpleFIN to something else, idk.
This won't help you, but I want to brag. I started using Quicken to track my finances at the turn of the century, back when it was all local storage. Quicken 2012 was the last iteration that used http (not https) to update stock prices. When they discontinued support, I captured the interaction and deciphered the formats. Wrote a proxy to intercept the request, look up the security info, and send back the data.
So, I self-host quicken.com. It's saved me having to update Quicken or submit to their subscription model.
That’s really cool! How did you do that?
Super easy, as it turns out. I run my own DNS and web servers, so I pointed quicken.com at my web server to capture the request, then used curl to capture the response. Both turned out to be plain ASCII, request like
stk.1=SMCI;.2=NVDA;.3=INTC;
as POST data, and responses like
qwin.quotes.ASTM.symbol 4 ASTM
.last 7 18.7400
.time 10 1573074000
.time.str 5 16:00
.change 6 0.4000
plus a whole slew of other optional fields for fundamentals, dividends, etc. It was a simpler time on the internet, when no one cared about leaking data and companies didn't care if a handful of geeks reversed engineered their data structures.
He mentioned it used http, so the traffic is not encrypted. You can easily monitor http traffic with wireshark.
easily
It is pretty easy. There’s tons of tutorials and walkthroughs for doing it, but anyone familiar with UIs will be able to work it out pretty quickly I think. Maybe a friction point in using the filter query, but again there’s tons of walkthroughs and guides for using it online.
If you can’t conceptualize a packet, or sockets, or network flows, even with the help of online guides/manuals, I guess it wouldn’t be easy. In that case I’d be wondering why someone would want to use those tools in the first place though, as then they probably wouldn’t have the skills necessary to leverage the information gleaned from the tool in any useful way.
Edit - As we’re in the self-hosted community, I’d argue that anyone who is self-hosting anything would probably be able to easily install wireshark and view http requests, both individual packets and the stream as a whole.
Thank you
Actual Budget all the way
I switched over to Actual last month, and am not looking back. I will miss the native android app, but it is an otherwise direct replacement. I was using YNAB4, and had forever.
I'm saying this as someone who used Mint for years due to how it integrated with banks so easily.
I'm currently using Money Manager EX, which is open source. I "self-host" the database file on my NAS, and simply open the file through MM EX' Windows program.
Since it's just a simple database (encrypted, of course), it's easy to back up.
Now, I lost the ability to automatically sync with my bank. This was a blessing in disguise, since it forced me to go over each transaction carefully.
Granted, Mint had me doing the same, but because I spent a lot of time removing duplicates and fixing errors in their sync system. LOL
MM Ex has been very easy to use, and I don't see a need to self-host the software itself.
Moneydance https://moneydance.com/
Started using it close to twenty years ago and keep using it because it seems fine.
I've never seen this recommended before and I've looked for years for self hosted alternatives to YNAB.
It’s so old it’s not called self-hosted.
Damn. You’ve given me a vision of a future where people call applications that are installed locally and don’t leverage any cloud/server backend for any functionality “self-hosted” programs and I hate it.
Gnucash books split for personal, joint, and business with a mysql backend. I wrote a read-only web frontend for wife and OTG access. Sadly no automation so I just stay on top of it.
I use Actual. How it works is very similar to YNAB (you budget the money you currently have) but it's open source and privacy focused. I started using it a few months ago and I really like it so far!
I love Actual. So, so good. I cancelled YNAB in favor and can't ever think of going back. Aside from not having to pay $100 a year you're also not supporting the Mormon Church (YNAB is a Mormon-run company).
I use ledger. I have not automated so much outside of autocomplete macros in my text editor, but it doesnt't take too much time and forces me to look over my spend, so I like it. I will eventually attempt to build some kind of Dash-application for visualisation of the output, but have only started on the parsers so far.
Ledger is awesome.
I have Firefly III and am really quiet happy with it. I might write a companion program to scan bill though, since doing everything by hand is rather time consuming.
I just drooled a little at the thought of integration with Paperless.
I didn't read the whole article, just a cursory glance really, but it seems like that is the exact other way around that I would want it.
I'm thinking of scanning a paper bill with my phone, extracting the text and matching parts of the text to firefly fields, like transaction description, source account, destination account, amount and maybe categories/tags.
My bank does this for me, but I do like self hosting things. Where's the benefit in this apart from a fun project?
If you only have one Bank (Account) it is maybe fine.
But if you have multiple accounts (I have 4 Bank accounts for savings and another one for my shares), you would like to have one software/application to handle it. Like the one email client for your different email accounts.
Yup, I have a ridiculous amount (like 8? bank accounts and 15? credit cards), so having something that automatically pulls in transactions is nice.
That said, my main "bank" is a Fidelity brokerage, so I don't really need those other bank accounts to sync since they mostly exist for temporary transactions, such as Zelle and cash transactions (Fidelity doesn't support those) and transfers for bank account bonuses (I net a >$2k/year on that). And for credit cards, I mostly use 1-2 credit cards these days, the rest are mostly for signup bonuses.
So for me, the $1.50/month is totally worth it to keep track of all that nonsense. If I only had 3-4 accounts, I'd probably use something like GNUCash instead, but I have >20, and I will for the foreseeable future.
Why so many accounts and especially credit cards?
I mentioned it, but mostly signups bonuses.
For example, here are a few checking accounts I did recently:
- US Bank - $450
- Citi - $325
- Wells Fargo - $325
I've closed Citi, but I'm keeping the others open for a bit before closing (branches are convenient for depositing checks around the holidays).
Likewise for credit cards, here are some I've done recently:
- Bank of America Premium Rewards - ~$500 net after the annual fee - this is straight cash
- US Bank Altitude Reserve - ~$650 net after annual fee; a little more complicated because i need to redeem for travel
- Wells Fargo Active Cash - $200 straight cash
I actually use 2 banks (Fidelity brokerage for main, and US Bank for cash and zelle) and usually two credit cards (US Bank Altitude Reserve and some 2% card; was my Costco card and Citi double cash before I got the US Bank card). However, I have some category bonus cards I rotate in every so often, such as my Discover card, which is 5% at Amazon and Target through the end of the year.
Anyway, since I have so many accounts, I need something to keep track of them so I don't pay maintenance fees or miss a payment or something.
It sounds complicated, but I've automated pretty much everything, so I just check in every couple months or so. And I think it's worth the hassle because I make thousands every year on it.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Id love to find a #creditunion that supported #openbanking and offered API access to my data so I could easily download it and use it with Actual or FireflyIII. I think working with a credit union to build this feature would be a great open source project.
I use hledger mostly because of the plain text format. I came from YNAB as well but I just hated how you couldn't easily undo changes or see when you made a change, etc. This is so easily to track changes and you can add comments explaining your reasoning around things and you can keep everything in source control so you have all the power of that as well. Not for everyone but if you're a programmer or just comfortable on the command line it's great.
Since most budgeting tools I found didn't satisfy my need (no cloud, automatic categorization of transactions etc.) I tried to create my own tool to categorize my transactions using camt.053 and csv files which I downloaded from my banks. Got bugged down with the presentation via bokeh, so it was pretty crude.
I recently found beancount in combination with fava, which solved most of my problems I had with my own tool. And the good thing: I was able to re-use most of my 'auto-categorization' code with only small changes. Not sure how universal my importer is, but with a bit of python know-how it should be quite easy to create an importer for your specific bank export.
From my experience, the csvs I got from my bank was insufficient for automatic mapping, which is why I'm using camt.053 where possible. As the camt.053 is not very common in many countries you could go for OFX files.
Actual has been working fine for me. Supports all the family’s banks and credit cards I import manually.
Actual budget with simple fin for bank links. Currently hosted on pikapods, will move to self hosting on prem at some point.
I like Maybe Finance. Perhaps a bit basic but it does the trick for me. And the interface is quite nice too. No automation or bank imports though so it probably won't fit your purposes perfectly.
view more: next ›