Inspired by a comment on my last post.
I feel like I never have a solution that allows me to control it while also being automated to such a degree that I don’t have a huge confusing backup if I don’t do finances for days or weeks.
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I have a excel sheet on my laptop
Firefly III
Amazing, really hit’s the spot of fully featured but a tool and not a new system you need to learn
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.
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.
Is there a mobile app that syncs with self hosted?
Yes, but it’s incompatible with the way I handle access control. I think I did it with Remote User authentication, which breaks all the login mechanisms of diverse apps, even though it’s officially supported by the projects. That’s why I only choose projects where the frontend is a PWA or they support oidc.
So I just installed the PWA, which works great.
Not selfhost but I use Hibiscus https://www.willuhn.de/products/hibiscus/
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.
Is there some tutorial you’d recommend to get started? I didn’t find the docs or demo helpful and a lot of videos seem to be focused on background or setup. I can install the app fine, but like how does one actually use this?
I’ve never used budgeting apps. I’d like to learn more about them and why they’re useful. My current budgeting is: positive balance=good; negative balance=bad
As a note for people new to budgeting apps, YNAB has a toooonnn of tutorials and videos about how to create a budget and what the end-to-end workflow looks like in their apps.
They have an excelent documentation for new starters. https://actualbudget.org/docs/getting-started/roadmap-for-new-users
That link kinda showcases exactly my point… It’s pretty useless to me. I know how to install the app. I don’t know what the daily workflow looks like.
Compare that to the tutorials YNAB has on YouTube. Those talk more about how to use the app to budget.
Anyway, it’s fine. I understand I’m not the target audience for Actual. It seems like it’s for people who already have prior experience with finance apps.
Hehehe hold on. Just try it and fins your own way to use it. You never know what you can find out. I can give you my experience, my only past experience was with Excel files to control my spending. It was pretty enough to be honest , at first when tried this app I was like ok why I need to do all this job of put every spending … Then after two month I realized that mechanical doing so made more aware of my day by day spending and my month budget became better. It’s just that, helps to be aware of what you are doing every months and it feels good filling it every 2 or 3 days. And also having all visualized and granular of were are doing it wrong or what can be adjusted is excellent .
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).
Do you just use a limit set of YNAB features? It seems like Actual only has a tiny fraction of the features YNAB has. For example, it’s currently missing category targets.
It’s like YNAB4. For those of us in that vintage it’s perfect. If you’re using the newer YNAB it might have missing features.
Category targets are available and are more flexible than YNAB, but it’s still in an experimental phase so it’s not fully integrated into the GUI. Check here: https://actualbudget.org/docs/experimental/goal-templates/ I’ve had zero problems so far though.
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 0.4000plus 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
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.
GnuCash running locally on my PC. Had worked for me for about 25 years.
Same here but now struggling to keep on top of it. I wish there was a mobile solution that would just nicely integrate with selfhosted
Actual has been working fine for me. Supports all the family’s banks and credit cards I import manually.
We do excel roughly but invest our surplus.
I have a bunch of we scrapers that check for items on sale and for certain ones trigger purchase and others send me an alert.
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.
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.
