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 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.
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?
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
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.
I host my own Monero node
Actual Budget all the way
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there a mobile app that syncs with self hosted?
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.
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
Firefly III
Amazing, really hit’s the spot of fully featured but a tool and not a new system you need to learn
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).
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.
Actual budget with simple fin for bank links. Currently hosted on pikapods, will move to self hosting on prem at some point.
