actual VS hledger

There is some experimental work being done with SimpleFIN integration[1] for US banks but I can't comment on how well that works.

Personally, I add each transaction manually. It allows me to stay on top my budget.

[1] https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues/2272

If you know how to self host, or have someone to teach you, you should check out Actual, https://actualbudget.org

Please upvote the feature request: https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues/2042

ActualBudget

But several months ago I went back to check out Actual budget which was a sort of YNAB-clone whose author decided to release as open source. If you are comfortable with a bit of command line work, you can install it easily enough running as a hosted service in the free tier of a provider. I'm running in fly.io (docs for that are here). It was a bit fiddly trying to get set up for the first time, but the docs are detailed, and since I got it working it's been flawless and easy.

The repo is pretty active too, wonder if there’s a follow up blog post about the transition. https://github.com/actualbudget/actual

I'm surprised that there is no mentions of a great hacker-friendly plain-text accounting software called `ledger` https://ledger-cli.org/ in this thread. It has amazing documentation when it comes to understanding basic principles of double-entry bookkeeping and goes through many typical situations and usecases. There are also several forks, most popular and advanced is `hledger` https://hledger.org/ (h is for Haskell), which provides some neat features out of the box, such as a simple web interface. All of them are very primitive compared to "professional" accounting software, but in return it offers great opportunities for hacking around while ensuring validity of your books.

I've been using hledger[1] - similar tool but has more features like balance sheet, income statement generation with a plain text file for the last 3 years and it's been working out great. Before that I used iBank (rebranded as Banktivity) and don't miss it at all.

[1] - https://hledger.org

I can offer this (warning, crufty real-world scripts ahead!): these [make](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Makefil...) [files](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Makefil...) and this [bash script](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/a3c300b/bake) have been replaced by this roughly equivalent [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Justfil...) (some old things were commented out, some new things were added).

I'm only a few weeks in, and just has its own learning curve, but I'm very pleased overall. Cognitive load is down, usability is up, robustness is up.

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/2047 . Thanks!

For help getting started or more info, see https://hledger.org and join our Matrix/IRC chat or mail list: https://hledger.org/support . Newcomers, experts, contributors, sponsors, feedback are welcome! For more about plain text accounting, see https://plaintextaccounting.org .