Comment by Fiahil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fiahil | Hacker News Reader

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I tested a lot of similar project in the past 2 years: Buxfer, GNUCash, YNAB 4 & 5, Mint, and Banktivity (currently using) and I'm willing to pay as high as $70 per year for a product that fulfills my needs.

I liked your project, the interface is clean, responsive and fast. If I may, I would like to give you my list of the most useful features :

- Self-hosted: Although, I used online apps in the past, this is now an _absolute_ requirement. I'm never, ever, going back to linking my bank accounts to a SAS app. I would be, of-course, happy to pay a premium for this (and for the Kubernetes templates).

- Transaction imports: OFX, QIF, CSV, XLSX...

- Regex category matching: For automatically matching transactions to the correct category

- Subset selection on reports: Ignoring specific accounts, categories or tagged operations from specific reports reports

- Multi-currency: I tried apps where the only currency available was USD, they did not stick around

- Exports: transactions and reports

- Rewrites: Rewriting transaction labels automatically (following user-defined rules)

- Sanity checks: Travel expenses + Reimbursements must equal zero. If not, Amex messed up again and I should know about it

Hope this helps!

> Banktivity (currently using)

> - Self-hosted: Although, I used online apps in the past, this is now an _absolute_ requirement.

Based on the rest of your post, your feature requirement list matching my own, as well as the privacy aspect, how do you reconcile the forced cloud-sync aspect of Banktivity? There doesn't appear to be an option to use anything except that which results in them getting an (encrypted) copy of your accounts.

Or am I failing to see that they actually support (at the very least) iCloud or custom storage providers (e.g. self-hosted NextCloud)?

I bought their software but I didn't log in their app. Without and ID or Direct access configured, they can't sync with their remote services.

I'm backing up the file using an encrypted git repository to a local NAS.

This is a great list of my exact same needs. I believe that the correct solution is a desktop application. How many of you/us do you think there are? And how much would you/they pay for this?

For personal budgeting, I believe it's crucial to have a mobile app for entry on the go and basic reports.

Going through statements monthly/weekly and assigning the correct categories retroactively is just too hard.

I’ve always found it much easier to lean on downloaded transactions.

Data entry through the day is way too cumbersome to me.

Am I alone on this?

Same here, I tried the data entry way (telling myself that the friction encourages thinking more before spending). It lasted about 2 years before I started creating import helpers to get transactions from my current accounts and etc.

Now, I put together some JS to create custom import helpers that adapts to different bank formats. Unsurprisingly, banks doesn't seem to want to converge/adopt a standard on transaction exports still (like a simple standard on the CSV will do), despite all the hype about open banking and such. Step by step?

I have some libraries that I reuse to create these custom helpers documented here:

https://docs.prudent.me/docs/dev/creating_ext

This works with the wrapper that I created as well :)

For people already tracking their finances, more than half of the one I talked to prefer self-hosting. I would personally pay as high as 70 EUR a year. Amazon prime is 50 EUR, Netflix 144 EUR, Spotify 180 EUR.

I have similar requirements, except I wanted something on my laptop (well, I could self-host locally too). After about 10 years or so with GnuCash, I started using Ledger-CLI. Both satisfied those requirements...But I wanted to have more control over imports and reports.

As I go about normalizing that in my life, I started writing GUIs to make interaction easier and import helpers to make imports easy. Sometime ago, I packaged all of that into a desktop/laptop app: https://prudent.me

Any thoughts on GoodBudget? It's what I've been using for the last couple of years and it does not link bank accounts (and I wouldn't want it to).

Long term I'm looking for something self-hosted too, but I think we're a very small subset of users.

I didn't try GoodBudget, but I'm more of a Mac/ipad user for that sort of things.

can you provide a comparison of the products you've used?

Absolutely ! Here is a small personal description of the tools I used :)

- YNAB 4: Wonderful tool ! Simple, efficient, and locally available ! I was not a big fan of their budgeting strategies/options (especially when you go over the allocated envelopes) and I wanted more reports.

- YNAB 5: The interface was nice, but it was not self-hosted. It has the same negative points as YNAB 4. So I decided I won't pay for it.

- GNUCash: I don't remember testing it for a long time. It was self-hosted, and the reason I'm not using it today is probably personal taste.

- Ledger: Amazing. The CLI interface was too arcane for me.

And now, the bad experiences:

- Mint: Kept trying to sell me stuff. Not self-hosted. My financial institution was not available for linking, and I think they were using my transaction information to train their ML models on category assignments. Their automatic categorization was - of course - shitty.

- Buxfer: It started well, but then quickly degraded. I linked only one of the financial institution I use. They were accessing my personal account automatically without my approval (I had connection alerts in my bank's interface, and they were popping everyday at midnight). They kept accessing my bank account, even when I disabled the sync and deleted the bank account from the interface. Their automatic category assignment was - again - shitty (spoiler alert: IT'S ALWAYS SHITTY), but they offered rule-based category assignment ! Their account reconciliation was not accounting-ly correct (they changed the balance without adding a rectification transaction, so sum(transactions) == account_balance, would be false >< ). And finally : "Can I exclude certain transactions/accounts/tags from my Reports and Budgets?" "Buxfer does not support excluding transactions or accounts from Reports/Budgets. Excluding data can sometimes cause confusion and not lead you to see a complete view of your finances. (https://www.buxfer.com/help/reports)". Well, not-excluding my travel expenses from reports give me a completely inaccurate view of my finances and leads to even more confusion. Bonus : they were unresponsive to support and feature requests and I was on the PRO plan before they introduced the PRIME one.

Generally, online services are very bad at automatic category assignment. You will absolutely be exposed if they don't maintain a high-level security practice. They can be acquired by bigger companies, they can be terminated because they lacked funds. They will do "UI improvements" when you don't want that and they will clusterfuck a perfectly working version once in a while. They can also keep your data hostage, remove the "export" button, "reorganize" their pricing every 2 years and more.

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