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.
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?
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
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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.
I ended up long down the rabbit hole with auto-downloading Amazon orders (originally with https://github.com/jbms/finance-dl, but then my own custom scraping) and importing and matching them up with credit card transactions using beancount-import (https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import).
This ultimately resulted in me spending a lot less on Amazon - to the point that now doing it manually wouldn't be too bad...
They do this lack of info lift and then recommend category splits.
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.
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
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.
It's a lead magnet for an Indian PMS service.
https://plan.capitalmindwealth.com/
All you really need from that dataset is your current portfolio. Everything else you need is specific to investing -- variance of investment, portfolio mix, covariance of returns, age of retirement, life expectancy, etc. From that standpoint, it's practically an entirely new product.
There's also something to be said about the 4 percent rule, and whether additional forecasting work actually improves outcomes. Heuristics seem do to a decent job.
When we released its beta, early users were happy with the new-age design and one of the best user experiences in a web app for India. Later, I heard MoneyControl sued Paisa.com (I’d consider that a success).
The Paisa team went on to become Helpshift.com. One of the founders became an investor, and another is now the co-founder of teamohana.com. Another key member started his own Startup, later acquired by GoJek.
And a lot of stories in between. It all started in 2007-2008 when I started in a spare attic in my erstwhile boss’s office and assembled a small but brilliant team. I retained that Startup’s domain for a long time and sold it this year. I need to write about all of this one day. A few publications have written strange stories about it, and I’ve not been interested enough.
Now, I’m doing things with Satellite and stuff for Climate and the like.
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.
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.
This tracks all my cashflows, investments, net worth etc, and since it's in excel there's no risk of it disappearing after 10 years
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/cantino/reckon
I (mostly) don't find it too onerous. But it is very much Inbox Zero. If you keep on top of it then it isn't much additional effort. While I'm waiting for the cashier to make change or print a receipt or while I'm walking out of the shop I can enter the transaction. But if I let a few days of them build up it becomes a more annoying 5-10 minute effort.
Also you need to do manual entry for anything you pay with cash anyway.
But the manual approach starts to fail in a family unless all involved are on-board with the data entry. (Which is almost never the case in my experience.) In practice that means all of my wife's expenses are a bit of a black hole.
I used to dread it too. But actually, in normal life, the volume of daily transactions is not that large. Besides, filling out a journal disciplines you. And VS Code does autocomplete for accounts and payees.
Very nice to see! I look forward to trying this out properly soon. I recommend not bothering with PDFs, OCR errors however occasional ruin it - it's worse if they're rare in a way, since you come to trust it. If you really do want it, extract the actual text layer instead. There won't always be one, tables will be a mess, and sometimes there'll be a lot of nonsense - but at least the correct content that is there will be £74.97 or whatever, not misread as £24.87.
NB this means that your site cannot be used in Europe,
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preferences are not essential as you can just use the default.
i usually accept cookies for Preferenceis but not for measurement and not for any sort of advertising.
1: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/setup/ensuring-d...
The way of deselecting is very unusual way to do that. The icons just do not suggest that you can unselect them.
I and others as shown by the upvotes did not realise that.
You should split them by functionality. Having to choose by source first is odd - I have seen sites with 10s of providers - I just never use them)
I love that this has a web interface, but still seems to have a fairly simple data model based on `ledger` and plain text files.
I see some other posts about data import from banks, and that's always been the thing keeping me from doing this for all of my personal finance. I just don't think I'd be able to keep up if I had to manually log into bank, brokerage, and credit card accounts, download my data for each one (assuming they even allow a CSV-style download), and import into GNUCash (or whatever).
I'm curious about the Plaid option (and really cool a Plaid employee is posting here), but I've always been wary of them. It looks like they have some sort of OAuth-like process for one of my financial institutions, but the others are all "give Plaid your credentials and we promise to keep them safe". Not really comfortable with that. Everyone gets hacked eventually. Regardless, I'm not too keen on giving Plaid literally all of my financial data; just doesn't seem like a great idea.
But it seems like there's really no alternative, at least in the US. I wish the government would mandate that all of these institutions implement a standardized API, and that they give regular people (not just big companies) access to their own data through it. Sigh...