One of my favorite parts of GnuCash is the transaction splits, and I end up using these heavily.
For one example, imagine an Amazon order. You order 3 things, partly paid for by CC card rewards, maybe a gift card, and a CC charge for the balance. With transaction splits, it's easy to put each thing you bought into the appropriate expense account with the correct cost, reconcile the CC charge correctly when your statement comes and you import the OFX/QFX data, and track your gift card balance. In GnuCash, that's all one transaction, with many splits. For expensive durable purchases, I'll sometimes also go and add the serial number to the text of the transaction split from when I purchased it, for lightweight home inventory without a separate program or redundant data entry about what/date/cost.
Compare to a simpler personal finance program that just imports the CC charge and lets you tag it as a single expense category (or takes whatever the CC company says the category is), and if you ever need any more information, you're stuck with keeping a separate program or spreadsheet up-to-date.
(You could use GnuCash the same way as the simpler personal finance program, but GnuCash has more powerful features that are there when you want them.)
Splits are also key for couples that maintain distinct finances. If I pay $100 for groceries, only half of that should show up in my monthly expense report, the other half belongs to my SO's expenses.
Most of my GnuCash transactions are actually split transactions for this reason.
I tried this out and switched to ledger-cli instead. All of the features listed above are possible and the the flexibility is incredible. The hardest part is data entry. For accounts that provide API access I wrote curl/jq/awk parsers and for accounts that you can only get via download, I wrote short csv parsers in awk. I have ~ 15 accounts to keep track of and various loans/securities and I use ledger-cli to keep track of cost basis, interest vs principal on loans and my mortgage, all expenses, etc.
Took some time to write the transaction parsers, but updating everything takes about 5 min/month now and I have a complete financial picture without sending any data to something like mint.
I envy you, this has been my dream for years. But obscure payment gateways make this a task for the chosen few in this country. If somebody could point me to a workable solution (on Linux / cross platform) for Germany it would be highly appreciated.
“Every financial system is broken in its own way” (ex-coworker who had worked in financial services)
I use `aqbanking-cli` for grabbing transactions from my banks' FinTS/HBCI API and generate a CSV out of that. That CSV then goes through a bit of Python that splits up the entries into transactions. Those get rendered out as `beancount` transactions (but `ledger` works as well, I used that before I switched to beancount) and appended to my actual ledger.
I then use `fava` (a beancount web UI) to fix mistakes, and have another piece of code (this time written in Go, but could be Python/whatever as well) that takes transactions that are generated from my brokerage account and enriches them with data parsed from my brokers' PDF reports (since the FinTS/HBCI info doesn't contain stuff like ISINs or taxes/fees separately).
This is for my personal finances, but I used the same system (minus the brokerage stuff) when I managed the finances of a hackerspace in the middle of Germany for a few years.
There are companies that offer APIs to access bank accounts as a service. Plaid.com is one of them, although you might need to search around for another one that supports your bank.
At one point, there was a decent standard called "OFX" which financial institutions were supposed to support. It let you use an app like GNU Cash or QuickBooks which could automatically connect to your bank account. That died apparently and was replaced by some API/standard called "Open Banking". It's shittier in every way since it seems to require a middleman now (like Plaid) whereas with OFX you could just query an endpoint easily.
Neat thing about gnucash in germany at least is that most traditional banks(but not the fintechs) support hbci/fints and there is a plugin(?) for this. Paired with the auto-assign its very easy to import transactions
I did not, mostly because the parsers are custom to how I want things displayed. Here is a simplified example for Chase, though:
BEGIN{
FS = ",";
}
{
if(FNR > 1){
date = gensub(/([0-9]{2})\/([0-9]{2})\/([0-9]{4})/, "\\3-\\1-\\2", 1, $1);
print date, $3
print " liabilities:chase"
if($5 != "Payment"){
print " expenses:" $4, " $", $6 \* -1.0
}else{
## This exists because I have an offset in the account
## I use to pay the card with. If the amount in my residual
## account != 0, I know there is something wrong
print " liabilities:chase:residual $", -$6
}
}
}
Suppose this script is called 'parse.awk', you would then run:
awk -f parse.awk myfile.csv
I've been doing this for a couple years now and so far I haven't had file formats change on me. Most of the complexity I have experienced so far is when the regex to parse line-items into the appropriate ledger account is non-trivial. It started off as a way for me to learn awk and double entry bookkeeping and somehow turned into something useful.
In the US, every bank account and credit card I've found will let you download OFX or QFX files of transactions, and use the GnuCash import features (to match up with transactions I've already added, and to add any I've missed).
There's also a way for GnuCash to sync data with some financial institutions automatically, but I prefer to save the data interchange files long-term anyway.
Sounds like this UK Open Banking isn't entirely an open standard for open interoperation, but maybe a little closer to a cabal?
> UK Open Banking isn't entirely an open standard for open interoperation, but maybe a little closer to a cabal?
That's correct, "open" is a sham, there's nothing open about it. You need to either have regulatory approval or piggyback off a gatekeeper's (TrueLayer, Plaid, etc) regulatory license to even get access, and when you do, you realize how terrible the data quality is and that it's near-impossible to build anything serious on top of it.
Unfortunately USAA has disabled OFX and QFX. I hope this doesn't become a trend. I can't believe getting programmatic access to finances can be so difficult in this day and age.
Same experience here and with all due respect to their work. I could understand accountants using it but for the general public it forces you to use accounting concept that unnecesary (could be done internally) for managing your personal finances.
In another context this also happens with CRMs where marketing and sales people end up using spreadsheets and from time to time uploading information to the CRM with some push.
> for the general public it forces you to use accounting concept that unnecessary
Strong disagree on the unnecessary part, as far as I know there is one correct way to count money and a billion wrong ways.
Fortunately the correct way, double entry accounting, is actually fairly easy. People were already using this method 400 years ago. It also scales down very well to the level of an individual and scales up to the level of a megacorp.
It's a skill that takes 30 minutes to acquire and pays dividends your entire life.
ActualBudget (https://actualbudget.org/) supports open banking via GoCardless (https://gocardless.com/). GoCardless (previously nordigen) deal with meeting the Open Banking standards and connecitng to all the banks and provide you with a fairly straightforward API for it.
It looks like automatic importing of transactions isn't supported yet[0]: "There are a couple ways to get transactions into the system. For now, automatic transaction downloading is not available but it will be available very soon."
What I really want is some system that lets me just click "Import", and it goes out to my various CC/bank sites and pulls in the data automatically. Or, imports on a schedule 2x/day or something. The thing I want to avoid is having to log in/download/import these files manually from like 7 different sites. I want that because I handle this stuff on a random basis, when I have a few free minutes, and the time it takes to get my records up to date the manual way is about the same amount of time I have overall to do it. And I find reconciling everything on a fixed schedule, say at the end of the month, is much harder than doing it on the fly, because a lot of times I will not remember what a charge was even for if I wait 30 days to process it.
Open Banking and open-source client-side software is a poor fit (btw, the "open" is a sham, there's nothing open about it).
Open Banking is implemented as a set of REST APIs using oAuth offered either by the banks directly (if you have the necessary regulatory approval) or by a gatekeeper such as TrueLayer/Plaid/etc (and I believe you can piggyback off their license, so no regulatory approval necessary).
Consuming oAuth APIs relies on guarding a client ID & the associated secret which would be impossible in an open-source app (or any client-side app for that matter, since extracting those is merely a reverse-engineering problem), therefore out-of-the-box Open Banking support is impossible.
However, nothing prevents them from developing the integration and let the end-user provide their own client ID/secret from their own accounts, and I believe most of these Open Banking providers have a free dev plan that can nevertheless connect to real accounts and would be enough for this.
In the EU and UK, banks are required to impose onerous security and authentication requirements on third party software before granting account access. The rules are designed to protect consumers from insecure or malicious software but unfortunately a side effect is that open source projects are quite unlikely to be able to comply. The most we can hope for is usually that a bank lets you manually download statements as OFX. HSBC does that for example but some other banks/ credit card providers only give you QIF or CSV.
That thread seems to be attacking the wrong question. The controls are on people, not the software. Individuals should be getting access, and gnucash should just be implementing the protocols for access. Gnucash shouldn't have any secrets in it in the first place.
Not that that would change anything, I doubt banks would give individuals access either.
I used gnucash religiously for few years after we moved to the USA. With limited finances and having no clue where money typically goes in a new place, gave me quite a bit of anxiety about our financial future here. Gnucash allowed me to have a very precise understanding where money comes from and where it goes. Yes, it took valuable time to keep it going, but gnucash with double entry system, ability to import statements and often automatically reconcile transactions, made it doable.
If it helps anyone, I wrote a blog post[0] (based on this comment[1]) explaining how double-entry accounting works.
I have recently been thinking about building my own program that implements double-entry accounting in a more approachable form for individuals. I’m not sure if pure accounting concepts are ideal for the average person for keeping track of their budget like how they are essential for businesses. My bias says yes, but perhaps a greater amount could be handled in the background to present a more intuitive interaction for those unfamiliar with accounting concepts. Currently, I prefer using ledger[2] to GnuCash, but I appreciate that both exist.
I continue to be confused how people use these kinds of programs. They're cool, yeah, but how do you keep track of your credit card(s), bank account(s), possibly your significant other's as well, subscriptions, fees, automated payments, cash in/out, taxes, varying income, investment returns, savings, balances on platforms you may use like wise/revolut (for travel) in different currencies, automated "fees" like interest on savings, loans, which may change every now and then, etc?
I dont see any good way to manage this stuff, maybe just by monitoring what goes in and out of a main account. I would love if there was a protocol that all these services supported, but there sure as hell isn't.
At that point, does something like GNU Cash become just another inaccurate representation of in, out and have?
Edit: Maybe you just update it once a month from statements?
You have to be a "personal accounting hobbyist" to really make your ledger match up with reality. If you have even moderately complex finances, you will have to take input from several different sources, do a lot of preening of transactions that were imported a bit incorrectly, reconcile against external sources of truth like bank statements, and in general spend time keeping your accounts straight.
How much time you need to spend to do a good job can vary widely. It depends on your data sources, your tolerance for error, and how well your use cases match up with your software's assumptions.
Balance that cost against the benefits, which are subjective -- how much do you value easier tax preparation? How much do you value peace of mind from having your financial state clearly articulated? How much do you value understanding your in and outflows, making a budget, monitoring activity for potential fraud?
> but how do you keep track of your credit card(s), bank account(s), possibly your significant other's as well, subscriptions, fees, automated payments, cash in/out, taxes, varying income, investment returns, savings, balances on platforms you may use like wise/revolut (for travel) in different currencies, automated "fees" like interest on savings, loans, which may change every now and then, etc?
I do things like that.
All those accounts can be represented. Many of those things are Scheduled Transactions.
When you Reconcile a statement from a bank or something, it'll even prompt you for recurring interest, in case you don't already have a transaction for that (because, e.g., the interest transaction was already there when you imported the OFX/QFX for that statement).
Investments like stocks and funds are tracked by shares, you can easily enter dividend reinvestment, and you can pull data for the current value in whatever primary currency.
You can also mix many world currencies in the same file, and see the totals according to exchange rates, and you can even define your own units and exchange rates for some purposes (which I've done in the past for metals and cryptocurrencies).
You can enter transactions as you go, and when you periodically Import, any transactions you didn't enter will be added. You can check this when you Reconcile a statement.
You can do all of this and more with something like gnucash, and also foreign exchange fees, tax accounts,etc. I ran a small business off this for a while some years ago without much trouble, mostly because I wanted to understand what was going on. You could also do invoicing and AR/AP which is t needed for home finances.
Process was pretty easy. Some entries manual or automatic during the month. At whatever period you want download OFX/QFX from bank accounts, CC accounts, etc. and import. Or CSV files or whatever you can get from your banks. When you get statements, reconcile those accounts.
Double entry is the only way to really keep track of things and catch errors, but you control granularity so in some sense amount of work. So in your scenarios, you would have expense accounts for interest fees per bank, loans, income accounts for different sources etc. the number of accounts you have is not a reflection of the institutions (eg banks) but the the things you want to keep track of.
If you want things accurate, you pretty much have to add a reconciliation step somewhere, tools like gnucash will let you see what has been reconciled and what hasn’t yet.
> They're cool, yeah, but how do you keep track of your credit card(s), bank account(s), possibly your significant other's as well, subscriptions, fees, automated payments, cash in/out, taxes, varying income, investment returns, savings, balances on platforms you may use like wise/revolut (for travel) in different currencies, automated "fees" like interest on savings, loans, which may change every now and then, etc?
I use a phone app (there are many out there) for my needs instead of desktop software, but in my case I log every single bit of income/expense ASAP - if I buy groceries, I pull up the app and categorize it (takes like 20 seconds). Sometimes my bank is kind enough to have their phone app alert me of new changes in account balance, but that's really flaky, so I check the balance on their website/app occasionally as well and log the changes.
Since I log just my own data, the approach scales wonderfully well (since it doesn't need to scale much). If I ever want to have a look at more data, I export the statements from my bank and either just open them up in LibreOffice, or maybe do some light Python code.
I do the same (ledger, not GnuCash). A few minutes each day. I used to outsource (part of) the work to my daughter when she was ~8yo (and paid her for that) to teach her that work is where you get money from.
I did this when I was still by myself, but a) having family and b) having more and more micro transactions (like coffee, transit, lime scooters…) and c) more and more accounts (amazon, paypal) means I had to declare time bancruptcy meanwhile
How can you NOT keep track of “keep track of your credit card(s), bank account(s), possibly your significant other's as well, subscriptions, fees, automated payments, cash in/out, taxes, varying income, investment returns, savings, balances on platforms you may use like wise/revolut (for travel) in different currencies, automated "fees" like interest on savings, loans, which may change every now and then, etc?”.
There’s a lot of people who would absolutely panic at the thought that they have all their money flowing around and they can’t even keep track of it.
Also, there’s an argument that if your finances are so complex that you can’t keep track of it (and youre not wealthy enough to pay someone to keep track of it) maybe that in itself is the problem, and that you need to simplify your finances.
Also, is it really that hard? Is it harder to note that you spent money buying something, or transferred money internationally than to actually spend that money buying the thing or transfer it internationally?
And recurring expenses are fairly easy to keep track of with even the most legacy software solutions.
I use GnuCash to track all of my family accounts. I feel better not letting any third party have my financial data and it served me as a forcing function to learn about accounting.
I does take less than 20 minutes each months to cleanup and import transactions from my accounts, without any automation and with some checking for data correctness.
I don't mind the lack of automation (yet), I set aside time to go through expense classification and to look at the past months.
Reports are kind of dry but helpful. The pain point is that they are not easily shareable
You automate all the recurring things (this is built into Gnucash), enter the non-recurring things (takes a minute or two a day if that day even had any transactions) and reconcile against the bank's statement/app/website monthly to make sure its representation stays accurate.
Once you've entered a transaction once, its autocomplete handles those going forwards so entering a new transaction is as quick as typing the first couple of letters of the shop name, pressing tab a few times, then entering the amount.
> You automate all the recurring things (this is built into Gnucash
Is it? When I last looked at GnuCash (which, admittedly, was like 7 years ago) you could not setup automatic categorization of transactions. You couldn't say, while going through imported transactions, "Every transaction where the payee is utility company should come from the Utilities account". The idea was that GnuCash was using some kind of Bayesian scheme to learn how to categorize your transactions automatically, but you had to input your transactions manually 3 or 4 times before it started working. Which, for me, seemed like a huge waste of time since 90% of my transactions could be automatically categorized by simple keyword matching against the payee or description.
I do this. Sometimes I add the info the same day, or just do it all on the weekend. Probably takes 10 minutes a week. I can then take that info and compare to any budgets or predictions and see where things are going right or wrong.
I’ve had everything balance down to the penny for 20 years now. If you have some attention to detail and make it a habit, it’s not really that difficult or time consuming.
It’s also kind of like paying cash. It makes you more aware of what you are spending.
I track everything as only three accounts regardless of where they are. Debit, Savings, Investments. Credit charges are just uncleared debit charges until I pay the bill.
I use tags to categorize recurring charges and on the 1st of the month I will sit down and pre-enter all of last month's recurring charges into the next month, as well as check the statement to make sure that last month's were really what I expected them to be.
I enter new charges on the day that they happen. It's 5 minutes a day instead of an hr or three at the end of the month.
What I end up with is that I know where everything has been going, and I have a good forecast for where it's going to go in the near future. If I need to answer a question like 'how much of a rent hike can I tolerate' or 'how much car can I afford' I have a good basis for deciding it. I also have a single 'available spending money' number that I can refer to if I need to, but honestly im a casual minimalist and not buying things is a great way to keep your finances afloat with minimal stress.
I just update it monthly-ish from CSV (or occasionally OFX) files I can download from my bank, credit-card companies, and brokerage.
You can save the mapping of columns <-> GNU Cash fields for each one, and it takes me about 10 minutes for my most heavily used CC account. GNU Cash supports guessing the balancing entry, which speeds things up quite a bit.
The only issue I have is that you can't enter splits from the import dialog, so I leave split transactions unbalanced then go through those manually. My only regular splits are my mortgage payment (Interest, Principle, and Escrow) and deposits (I usually deposit multiple checks at a time, but they show up as a single entry on the CSV I get from my bank).
I'm a recent convert to YNAB. I tried multiple times over the years, but always gave up after only a few days.
The key for me and my wife to get it to work was getting into the groove of entering your transactions and reconciling daily. It is a bit obsessive, but we've been able to completely overhaul our finances with it.
Basically every morning I start my day by opening up YNAB and my bank, and for our personal finances, just making sure everything matches. For my business finances, I actually manually input all expenses (from receipts, invoices, etc) then once a week, I will go through and reconcile with online banking (I usually miss a transaction or two).
Do you not link to your credit card/bank (respect if you don't want to, of course) - I use YNAB and only check it once a week or so and mostly just edit the names of new merchants and double-check categories of the new transactions.
Yes, uploading statements is the way I do it. I try to do it once a week and it takes barely any time at all. Lately I'm not so good at that and end up doing it every few weeks, so it might take 1-2 hours. Most of that time is spent tracking down one or two expenditures to see how they should be categorised if it's not clear from the face of the statement. Recurring payments or payments to frequent payees are generally correctly categorised by GnuCash without any intervention by me.
I found that, to be really effective, you need to import the transactions from your bank somehow. I use YNAB to have it automatic, but you can also manually export/import CSVs from your bank (I used to do that before they supported EU banks).
> Maybe you just update it once a month from statements?
In my experience, this is the only reliable way. Most banks also support exporting transaction data as CSV, but the data quality is usually too poor for automatic account assignments.
If some people have some recommendations, my wife is asking me for an app to basically input our family expenses. It should be fast, painless and very simple. Open the app, select the date (default today), select the category, the shop, amount and payment method. Done. Both of us should be able to input the data (so web based).
At the start, nothing more in the app. She would be happy to do the data analysis using her laptop.
I was thinking about a stupid CRUD app with an SQLite database, but I do not want to reinvent the wheel.
If some of you have ideas, we do not need banking integration.
You can set up GnuCash like that. Example usage for recording a grocery trip:
1. Double-click on "Expenses" -> "Groceries" in the account tree.
2. In the blank entry that appears at end end of the list of earlier transactions, edit the date if necessary (it will default to today's date).
3. Next to that date (click or press Tab), enter a description, such as the shop name. With text completion.
4. Next to that, enter the payment method (with completion and default). (Note that this will also add the transaction to the GnuCash account for your bank account, credit card, etc.)
5. Next to that, enter the amount.
6. Press Enter to commit the transaction.
You can also leave some of these accounts open as tabs, if you want, rather than find them in the account tree each time.
1) Imports from our credit cards automatically or from a CSV/Quicken/etc. file
2) Supports entering transactions manually when you can't or don't want to link to a bank
3) Supports reconciliation of the actual account balance with the in-app balance
4) Supports budgeting, but if you just want to track categories then just assign the amounts you spend to each budget at the end of the month and the system will be happy.
I highly recommend YNAB. It pulled my financial life together a decade ago. Synced apps on the phone and web. It also introduced me to envelope budgeting, which I found to be super useful.
If you want to do investment tracking, I don’t think it’s the best for that.
Here here for YNAB. I would have preferred something FOSS, but the mobile app makes it much simpler to record transactions as they happen rather than saving receipts and doing it at home.
I've been working on an app for iOS. You can essentially add transactions, categories and accounts.
- It's a document based app, the file format is open (JSON zipped), so you can store it on iCloud Drive, Dropbox or anywhere else, thereby giving you and your wife access via cloud sharing.
- No Signup, No Account, No Ads
I've been using it for a few months to track all my transactions and account balances.
It's still a WIP right now. Planning to add a few features more before making it available on Apple App Store.
I used it for a while and I found that it is not worth my time. It's a good piece of software but it's too much for my needs.
A well done spreadsheet is way easier to handle in the long run. For a company or someone with complex finances it may be the right tool but it's not for most people who just want to track their income and expenses..
There are also many services that connect directly to your banks accounts, retrieve the data, categorize everything and shows you fancy charts with everything you need.
Readit News
For one example, imagine an Amazon order. You order 3 things, partly paid for by CC card rewards, maybe a gift card, and a CC charge for the balance. With transaction splits, it's easy to put each thing you bought into the appropriate expense account with the correct cost, reconcile the CC charge correctly when your statement comes and you import the OFX/QFX data, and track your gift card balance. In GnuCash, that's all one transaction, with many splits. For expensive durable purchases, I'll sometimes also go and add the serial number to the text of the transaction split from when I purchased it, for lightweight home inventory without a separate program or redundant data entry about what/date/cost.
Compare to a simpler personal finance program that just imports the CC charge and lets you tag it as a single expense category (or takes whatever the CC company says the category is), and if you ever need any more information, you're stuck with keeping a separate program or spreadsheet up-to-date.
(You could use GnuCash the same way as the simpler personal finance program, but GnuCash has more powerful features that are there when you want them.)
Most of my GnuCash transactions are actually split transactions for this reason.
Is that an American custom, going as far as accounting for split groceries runs ?
You Need A Budget stands out as an amazingly useless piece of software that also, for some reason, comes highly recommended.
Took some time to write the transaction parsers, but updating everything takes about 5 min/month now and I have a complete financial picture without sending any data to something like mint.
“Every financial system is broken in its own way” (ex-coworker who had worked in financial services)
I then use `fava` (a beancount web UI) to fix mistakes, and have another piece of code (this time written in Go, but could be Python/whatever as well) that takes transactions that are generated from my brokerage account and enriches them with data parsed from my brokers' PDF reports (since the FinTS/HBCI info doesn't contain stuff like ISINs or taxes/fees separately).
This is for my personal finances, but I used the same system (minus the brokerage stuff) when I managed the finances of a hackerspace in the middle of Germany for a few years.
Edit: Missed that his is about ledger-cli, not gnucash. Sorry.
At one point, there was a decent standard called "OFX" which financial institutions were supposed to support. It let you use an app like GNU Cash or QuickBooks which could automatically connect to your bank account. That died apparently and was replaced by some API/standard called "Open Banking". It's shittier in every way since it seems to require a middleman now (like Plaid) whereas with OFX you could just query an endpoint easily.
I've been doing this for a couple years now and so far I haven't had file formats change on me. Most of the complexity I have experienced so far is when the regex to parse line-items into the appropriate ledger account is non-trivial. It started off as a way for me to learn awk and double entry bookkeeping and somehow turned into something useful.
For my own accounts, I don't have time to deal with reconciliation, so I just do csv -> paste into spreadsheet -> have sql queries that sum things up
If it was possible for an open source application to support Open Banking (it isn't), that might now be different.
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2020-March/...There's also a way for GnuCash to sync data with some financial institutions automatically, but I prefer to save the data interchange files long-term anyway.
Sounds like this UK Open Banking isn't entirely an open standard for open interoperation, but maybe a little closer to a cabal?
That's correct, "open" is a sham, there's nothing open about it. You need to either have regulatory approval or piggyback off a gatekeeper's (TrueLayer, Plaid, etc) regulatory license to even get access, and when you do, you realize how terrible the data quality is and that it's near-impossible to build anything serious on top of it.
The co-founder of a business I consulted for previously recently wrote a nice summary of the issues you'd get if you wanted to embark on that path: https://www.adamjgo.com/p/the-open-banking-non-standards
In another context this also happens with CRMs where marketing and sales people end up using spreadsheets and from time to time uploading information to the CRM with some push.
Strong disagree on the unnecessary part, as far as I know there is one correct way to count money and a billion wrong ways.
Fortunately the correct way, double entry accounting, is actually fairly easy. People were already using this method 400 years ago. It also scales down very well to the level of an individual and scales up to the level of a megacorp.
It's a skill that takes 30 minutes to acquire and pays dividends your entire life.
What I really want is some system that lets me just click "Import", and it goes out to my various CC/bank sites and pulls in the data automatically. Or, imports on a schedule 2x/day or something. The thing I want to avoid is having to log in/download/import these files manually from like 7 different sites. I want that because I handle this stuff on a random basis, when I have a few free minutes, and the time it takes to get my records up to date the manual way is about the same amount of time I have overall to do it. And I find reconciling everything on a fixed schedule, say at the end of the month, is much harder than doing it on the fly, because a lot of times I will not remember what a charge was even for if I wait 30 days to process it.
[0] https://actualbudget.org/docs/transactions/importing
Open Banking is implemented as a set of REST APIs using oAuth offered either by the banks directly (if you have the necessary regulatory approval) or by a gatekeeper such as TrueLayer/Plaid/etc (and I believe you can piggyback off their license, so no regulatory approval necessary).
Consuming oAuth APIs relies on guarding a client ID & the associated secret which would be impossible in an open-source app (or any client-side app for that matter, since extracting those is merely a reverse-engineering problem), therefore out-of-the-box Open Banking support is impossible.
However, nothing prevents them from developing the integration and let the end-user provide their own client ID/secret from their own accounts, and I believe most of these Open Banking providers have a free dev plan that can nevertheless connect to real accounts and would be enough for this.
Not that that would change anything, I doubt banks would give individuals access either.
I have recently been thinking about building my own program that implements double-entry accounting in a more approachable form for individuals. I’m not sure if pure accounting concepts are ideal for the average person for keeping track of their budget like how they are essential for businesses. My bias says yes, but perhaps a greater amount could be handled in the background to present a more intuitive interaction for those unfamiliar with accounting concepts. Currently, I prefer using ledger[2] to GnuCash, but I appreciate that both exist.
[0] https://www.winstoncooke.com/blog/2023-10-20-a-basic-introdu...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955637
[2] https://ledger-cli.org/
I dont see any good way to manage this stuff, maybe just by monitoring what goes in and out of a main account. I would love if there was a protocol that all these services supported, but there sure as hell isn't.
At that point, does something like GNU Cash become just another inaccurate representation of in, out and have?
Edit: Maybe you just update it once a month from statements?
How much time you need to spend to do a good job can vary widely. It depends on your data sources, your tolerance for error, and how well your use cases match up with your software's assumptions.
Balance that cost against the benefits, which are subjective -- how much do you value easier tax preparation? How much do you value peace of mind from having your financial state clearly articulated? How much do you value understanding your in and outflows, making a budget, monitoring activity for potential fraud?
I do things like that.
All those accounts can be represented. Many of those things are Scheduled Transactions.
When you Reconcile a statement from a bank or something, it'll even prompt you for recurring interest, in case you don't already have a transaction for that (because, e.g., the interest transaction was already there when you imported the OFX/QFX for that statement).
Investments like stocks and funds are tracked by shares, you can easily enter dividend reinvestment, and you can pull data for the current value in whatever primary currency.
You can also mix many world currencies in the same file, and see the totals according to exchange rates, and you can even define your own units and exchange rates for some purposes (which I've done in the past for metals and cryptocurrencies).
You can enter transactions as you go, and when you periodically Import, any transactions you didn't enter will be added. You can check this when you Reconcile a statement.
Process was pretty easy. Some entries manual or automatic during the month. At whatever period you want download OFX/QFX from bank accounts, CC accounts, etc. and import. Or CSV files or whatever you can get from your banks. When you get statements, reconcile those accounts.
Double entry is the only way to really keep track of things and catch errors, but you control granularity so in some sense amount of work. So in your scenarios, you would have expense accounts for interest fees per bank, loans, income accounts for different sources etc. the number of accounts you have is not a reflection of the institutions (eg banks) but the the things you want to keep track of.
If you want things accurate, you pretty much have to add a reconciliation step somewhere, tools like gnucash will let you see what has been reconciled and what hasn’t yet.
I use a phone app (there are many out there) for my needs instead of desktop software, but in my case I log every single bit of income/expense ASAP - if I buy groceries, I pull up the app and categorize it (takes like 20 seconds). Sometimes my bank is kind enough to have their phone app alert me of new changes in account balance, but that's really flaky, so I check the balance on their website/app occasionally as well and log the changes.
Since I log just my own data, the approach scales wonderfully well (since it doesn't need to scale much). If I ever want to have a look at more data, I export the statements from my bank and either just open them up in LibreOffice, or maybe do some light Python code.
It's not for everybody, but I want to see every transaction.
I do this by going to the website for the bank account or credit card and looking at the Activity section (or whatever it's called).
I know that I'm weird. This is not for everybody.
How can you NOT keep track of “keep track of your credit card(s), bank account(s), possibly your significant other's as well, subscriptions, fees, automated payments, cash in/out, taxes, varying income, investment returns, savings, balances on platforms you may use like wise/revolut (for travel) in different currencies, automated "fees" like interest on savings, loans, which may change every now and then, etc?”.
There’s a lot of people who would absolutely panic at the thought that they have all their money flowing around and they can’t even keep track of it.
Also, there’s an argument that if your finances are so complex that you can’t keep track of it (and youre not wealthy enough to pay someone to keep track of it) maybe that in itself is the problem, and that you need to simplify your finances.
Also, is it really that hard? Is it harder to note that you spent money buying something, or transferred money internationally than to actually spend that money buying the thing or transfer it internationally?
And recurring expenses are fairly easy to keep track of with even the most legacy software solutions.
Once you've entered a transaction once, its autocomplete handles those going forwards so entering a new transaction is as quick as typing the first couple of letters of the shop name, pressing tab a few times, then entering the amount.
Is it? When I last looked at GnuCash (which, admittedly, was like 7 years ago) you could not setup automatic categorization of transactions. You couldn't say, while going through imported transactions, "Every transaction where the payee is utility company should come from the Utilities account". The idea was that GnuCash was using some kind of Bayesian scheme to learn how to categorize your transactions automatically, but you had to input your transactions manually 3 or 4 times before it started working. Which, for me, seemed like a huge waste of time since 90% of my transactions could be automatically categorized by simple keyword matching against the payee or description.
I’ve had everything balance down to the penny for 20 years now. If you have some attention to detail and make it a habit, it’s not really that difficult or time consuming.
It’s also kind of like paying cash. It makes you more aware of what you are spending.
I use tags to categorize recurring charges and on the 1st of the month I will sit down and pre-enter all of last month's recurring charges into the next month, as well as check the statement to make sure that last month's were really what I expected them to be.
I enter new charges on the day that they happen. It's 5 minutes a day instead of an hr or three at the end of the month.
What I end up with is that I know where everything has been going, and I have a good forecast for where it's going to go in the near future. If I need to answer a question like 'how much of a rent hike can I tolerate' or 'how much car can I afford' I have a good basis for deciding it. I also have a single 'available spending money' number that I can refer to if I need to, but honestly im a casual minimalist and not buying things is a great way to keep your finances afloat with minimal stress.
You can save the mapping of columns <-> GNU Cash fields for each one, and it takes me about 10 minutes for my most heavily used CC account. GNU Cash supports guessing the balancing entry, which speeds things up quite a bit.
The only issue I have is that you can't enter splits from the import dialog, so I leave split transactions unbalanced then go through those manually. My only regular splits are my mortgage payment (Interest, Principle, and Escrow) and deposits (I usually deposit multiple checks at a time, but they show up as a single entry on the CSV I get from my bank).
The key for me and my wife to get it to work was getting into the groove of entering your transactions and reconciling daily. It is a bit obsessive, but we've been able to completely overhaul our finances with it.
Basically every morning I start my day by opening up YNAB and my bank, and for our personal finances, just making sure everything matches. For my business finances, I actually manually input all expenses (from receipts, invoices, etc) then once a week, I will go through and reconcile with online banking (I usually miss a transaction or two).
GnuCash is made for common people, my wife uses it and loves it.
In my experience, this is the only reliable way. Most banks also support exporting transaction data as CSV, but the data quality is usually too poor for automatic account assignments.
Now I'm thinking if there's an easy way to just give all transactions with metadata to chatgpt and let it tag everything. This would be great!
At the start, nothing more in the app. She would be happy to do the data analysis using her laptop.
I was thinking about a stupid CRUD app with an SQLite database, but I do not want to reinvent the wheel.
If some of you have ideas, we do not need banking integration.
1. Double-click on "Expenses" -> "Groceries" in the account tree.
2. In the blank entry that appears at end end of the list of earlier transactions, edit the date if necessary (it will default to today's date).
3. Next to that date (click or press Tab), enter a description, such as the shop name. With text completion.
4. Next to that, enter the payment method (with completion and default). (Note that this will also add the transaction to the GnuCash account for your bank account, credit card, etc.)
5. Next to that, enter the amount.
6. Press Enter to commit the transaction.
You can also leave some of these accounts open as tabs, if you want, rather than find them in the account tree each time.
1) Imports from our credit cards automatically or from a CSV/Quicken/etc. file
2) Supports entering transactions manually when you can't or don't want to link to a bank
3) Supports reconciliation of the actual account balance with the in-app balance
4) Supports budgeting, but if you just want to track categories then just assign the amounts you spend to each budget at the end of the month and the system will be happy.
If you want to do investment tracking, I don’t think it’s the best for that.
- It's a document based app, the file format is open (JSON zipped), so you can store it on iCloud Drive, Dropbox or anywhere else, thereby giving you and your wife access via cloud sharing.
- No Signup, No Account, No Ads
I've been using it for a few months to track all my transactions and account balances.
It's still a WIP right now. Planning to add a few features more before making it available on Apple App Store.
Ticks most of your boxes. Nothing fancy, but gets the job done.
Just took the opportunity to use it as a personal project to experiment with rust and htmx.
A well done spreadsheet is way easier to handle in the long run. For a company or someone with complex finances it may be the right tool but it's not for most people who just want to track their income and expenses..
There are also many services that connect directly to your banks accounts, retrieve the data, categorize everything and shows you fancy charts with everything you need.