cross-posted from: https://eviltoast.org/post/14412290
I've been really lazy with keeping track of my money over the last few years. I still use personal capital (now empower)'s dashboard, but it's not self-hosted and they can be pretty aggressive with their marketing.
Previously, I was using Beancount + Fava to track all of my money, including investments. Every time I think about updating my ledger and importing the last several years of transactions, it just feels overwhelming and I put it off again.
I'm still a fan of plain-text-accounting, but importing a large number of transactions always feels cumbersome.
I tried Firefly-III briefly, but it didn't support investment tracking. I also saw Ghostfolio for the investment side, but haven't tried it yet and it seems to only do investments.
My wishlist of features is below, are there any self-hosted/oss finance apps that would meet most of these?
- self-hosted
- import via csv at minimum, ideally support for yodly/plaid/some other bank syncing api
- support for regular accounts (checking/savings), credit cards, and investment accounts (stocks, 401k, etc)
- misc. asset tracking like for a car or house
- mobile app or mobile-friendly web view
- local llm support for categorizing transactions and fixing merchant semi-automatically
- multi-user support - not required, but it'd be nice if my partner and I can use the same app but still have our own private accounts too
- tags or some other way to group expenses together (like all expenses related to a trip)
- good reporting
- bonus: support for custom reports/calculations like "If i retired next year, how much money would I have per month?"
Alternatively, what do you all use for this type of thing?
I've been using Actual Budget in a docker container. It's worked well for me but not sure if it checks all the boxes for you.
I love Actual. It’s fantastic and easy to use. I use off-budget accounts and weekly / monthly reconciliation just to keep the general value of these accounts at stable intervals.
I have a slight bone to pick with the PWA version of the site though. After a couple months of using the PWA front end to keep my budget and transactions accurate manually, I opened the site on my desktop browser and it completely lost all that work due to a sync issue. Apparently the PWA for weeks had not remained in sync and so all manual entries were not making back to the server. But the app works so well I never noticed because it kept just working. Supposedly there’s an alert saying it’s not synced with the server but it’s not prominent enough. So if you use that feature (the PWA) then be sure it’s syncing often.
Oof, good to know about the sync issue. That would be pretty annoying to lose all that work.
Lol, rip
I tried Actual before, but I don't remember what I didn't like about it. I'll take another look at it. The budgeting part does remind me of YNAB.