Ask HN: Personal finance software | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Personal finance software

13 pointsashton3146 comments

I've used MoneyWell (https://moneywellapp.com) for several years now. Unfortunately, there are some bugs with macOS Mojave, and it doesn't seem to be getting fixed any time soon. (I've emailed several times to support and got nothing, where they were once very responsive a few years ago.)

I'd like to find a new financial software program, either proprietary or libre.

Must-haves:

- One-time purchase (if applicable); I hate software subscriptions, and I'm willing to shoulder an up-front cost if it means I don't have to keep paying for a thing - Automatic transaction synchronization with my bank - macOS or Linux - Native app; I don't like YNAB's browser-based model

Really nice things:

- Event-based budgeting. This was MoneyWell's killer feature: instead of guessing how much you would spend every month for a particular category, you would define how often a particular expense comes up (e.g. fill up the car, once a week, $40) - Native mobile version

Other thing that would be cool, but not super important:

- Command-line interface (would be amazing) - Scriptable

Banktivity (https://www.iggsoftware.com/banktivity/) looks pretty good. I've also looked at Mvelopes (https://www.mvelopes.com), but it wasn't the right fit. Any other suggestions? Thanks!

YNAB [0] is great if you can get behind their somewhat unique budgeting system. It is a subscription product but is easily the most valuable subscription product I use.

[0] https://www.youneedabudget.com

It's been a while since I've used it, but have you tried GnuCash? http://gnucash.org/

Tiller Money and Google Sheets. Use their templates or make your own. I use it to track all spending, see daily transactions from all my accounts in one spreadsheet, and to manage cash flow. I budget with it too, but not dogmatically. Just to see what I can afford to save. Tillerhq.com.

plaintextaccounting.com specifically ledger-cli or with emacs mode. You can do things like YNAB and far more complex things like forecasting, or like other comments try jupyter notebooks for analysis.

I stopped using (hledger)[https://hledger.org] before they added the forecasting. Instead I started my own little webapp (after I did try to contribute to hledger-web, but haskell...) and dug deep into R and its forecasting library. Fascinating stuff but you need really nice and clean data to get good results from it.

The periodic expressions in ledger-cli are good (and it makes forecasting a lot more predictable when you don't have a lot of existing data) but basic compared to [ice_cube](https://github.com/seejohnrun/ice_cube) the recurrence library that I started using. Last-week-day in the month? No problem with that. Creating the UI for that is tough though...

Monito (Android) and Jupyter for analysis on computer!

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