Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • plaintextaccounting

    The plaintextaccounting.org website, a portal to Ledger, hledger, beancount and co. Also the PTA wiki.

    I currently use Excel, but I'm looking for something better.

    I have many automatic payments (credit card, telephone, utilities, etc) from a transaction account. I also have a loan with redraw, and I want to have most of my funds keeping the loan balance low, but I don't want my transaction account to go negative. So I need to forecast future transactions.

    Future transactions may be annual, monthly, four weekly, two weekly, etc. It's a real mess. Some are easy to predict accurately, others can only be estimated.

    I have a column to keep track of which future transactions are predictions/estimates/allowances, and which ones have been confirmed.

    I also have a column to keep track of which transactions have been reconciled with the bank. (This is currently a manual cross-checking process, since my bank doesn't have API access.)

    My preference would be a text-based system (https://plaintextaccounting.org/), but haven't found one that neatly allows estimates of future transactions that can be modified once the details are known.

  • python-fints

    Pure-python FinTS (formerly known as HBCI) implementation

    German banks support an open protocol: FinTS/HBCI with which you can automize stuff. There's a Python library for it [1] and I wrote my own little tool that allows you to configure your (potentially recurring) target vs. actual expenses, while setting expiration dates to get notifications about unexpected stuff. Still somewhat WIP though

    [1] https://github.com/raphaelm/python-fints

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • fints-transaction-tracker

    Manage your bank accounts with target/actual transactions (while storing them in a database). Bank needs to support FinTS.

  • beancount

    Beancount: Double-Entry Accounting from Text Files.

  • Fava

    Fava - web interface for Beancount

  • ledger

    Double-entry accounting system with a command-line reporting interface

  • dab-dab

    Basically all I need to do is: login in to the bank's web app and press Ctrl+Alt+P

    I wrote a script which can take transactions from my banks webapp, gave it to dab-dab (https://github.com/Yaser-Amiri/dab-dab), added a key binding to Surfingkeys to extract the token and other related stuff from the cookies, send it to dab-dab to run the script, the script adds the transactions to the ledger files.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • gnucash-helper

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts