Foss Finace manager?

Open Source@lemmy.ml – 72 points – 11 months ago

Hej hej,

Simply wondering if peeps here has any experience with any good apps for managing finance with either friends or spouse. Open for any suggestions, looking for something privacy focused.

GnuCash

Takes a minute to get used to and the budgeting is... Sparse but I won't use anything else. It works and works well.

I tried a demo of firefly and was amazed that it was even more difficult to use than gnucash. If you want a ton of customization and details, firefly is it but I think gnucash has a great balance of usability and capability.

I think my biggest complaint of firefly is you can’t create budgets and a few other items on the fly while entering transactions. Which you can do in gnucash.

https://actualbudget.com/

https://www.firefly-iii.org/

I never found a self-hosted budgeting solution I liked until I found actual budget. I wish it had more reports, but it seems like they've got a pretty active development community since it recently went fully open-sourced.

I've tried them both and I find Actual Budget a bit better. It also has an importer (directly from banks) which Firefly III has, but as a separate app and it's not so smooth to use.

Actual lets your budgets go negative, which is why I chose it when I was testing apps.

Edit: This is in contrast to Firefly III, which does not and explicitly said they won't.

I wish there were a selfhosted alternative that would sync with banks like mint.com does, but I haven't found one yet.

I've also dabbled a little trying to make one, but it seems like banks don't really want you to use their API unless you're Intuit.

Beancount + Fava

No system worked better for me than hledger - a doubly entry accounting tool for text files. It is super extensible, privacy focused and will be usable in 20 years still. No other tool has helped me stay on top of my finances as well as this, and I have tried them all. This is very subjective of course, but you might want to give it a try.

I made a comment about this some time ago:

I came across GreenStash sometime ago.

If it's not what you are looking for, take a look at the "Expense Managers" section here. It lists both FOSS and proprietary apps.

Take a look in this thread: https://feddit.nl/post/1428354