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Comment by Kovah | Hacker News Reader

Can highly recommend Firefly. Used for a while and it is really powerful, impressive work has been done here. What bothers me (too much) as a former YNAB-user is the limited budget planning view. But the dev already has this on his to-do list.

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I'm a current YNAB user find it hard to use any other financial manager software because they only seem to record what happened and not plan for the future.

What made you leave YNAB if you don't mind me asking?

In additional to my personal finances, I currently use Xero for my business, but I also run everything through YNAB as well to actually know the health of my business and how much money I'm making. The book "Profit First" made a lot of sense through a YNAB approach.

I feel you. I spent countless hours trying to find a suitable YNAB replacement, but there is none. I want to see what is possible, not was has happened to my money.

I am about to leave YNAB because I am using version 4 (standalone software) which is 32-bit only. My main machine is a Mac so I won't be able to use the software with the next major version. Also, I do not want to use the new YNAB web-based app because the privacy policy is contradictory and their subscription offer is just shitty.

Currently I am using Outbank, which is more like a banking app but has automatic categorization which is quite cool, and you can define budgets. Still, no suitable replacement. I really hope for Firefly to take off with a powerful budget planning somewhere in the future.

Thanks. Makes sense and really appreciate you clarifying.

I feel your pain – but I'm a happy YNAB user and I've only ever 'known' the web version. (I'm aware of the desktop versions.) I don't use the auto-import features anymore – they never worked consistently with all of my financial providers and I've found that manually reconciling is much better anyways.

Given how awesome YNAB is for me managing my finances, I'm more than happy to pay the subscription.

I honestly thought about moving to the web version, but as stated, especially the storage of my financial data on some server of a random company is a no-go for me. The privacy policy is also everything but nice. They state that all data is encrypted but somewhere else they state that they may have access to it for support and in case of legal obligation. Not really trustworthy.

There's an option in your settings to share your data with their support people and you have to explicitly enable it for them to see your data/info.

But I understand your reluctance nonetheless.

There's an open-sourced clone of YNAB (standalone version) called financier (https://financier.io). There's been a few efforts to easily run it locally:

-https://gitlab.com/caleb3141/financier

-https://gitlab.com/josh-whitney/financier-backend

Biggest downside is that it doesn't have an OFX/QFX import option.

Yeah, I also tried Financier. Although it provides everything needed, I didn't feel very comfortable with it running in the browser and storing the database in the browser too. Backups are hard in this case. Also, when moving to a new system, the import of transactions was a requirement.

One thing that I find surprisingly missing from most budget platforms is a recurring rolling budget post. For instance, let's say we have a clothing "category" I want spend $200 monthly for the entire family. I don't know when I'm going to buy a new winter parka, or the recurring biannual event of buying new shoes for the children. But I do know that $200 monthly is what I believe is reasonable for our income.

I just want the balance on that budget to roll over for every month, so I know how much there is for that particular thing. And if you don't buy any clothing for 2 months, $400 is added to the available fund for that particular budget category.

It extends to a lot of things:

  * Day trips
  * Saving for car repairs and ultimately a new one.
  * Groceries
  * Holidays
  * Hobbies
  * Takeaway

With anything with double entry bookkeeping, you can book an expense each month for $200 for clothing and have a liability account set up as a clothing reserve account. Then you would have a built up total over time, less anything you purchase.

I could do that - but is it really that foreign to center a budgeting tool around it, so I don't have to go about creating accounts and transactions for every budget category?

In essence, it's just the "envelope" system with a rollover - i.e. if I don't spend all my grocery money this month, just add them to the next months envelope.

It's more than that... when you are living on a tight budget you really want a line graph that tells you what your checking account is going to look like in a week, two weeks, three weeks. Your problem is not necessarily income but cash flow, and you do all of this cash-flow reasoning informally, “I'd better postpone any doctor’s visit until the 15th because usually things are less tense in the middle of the month and I’d like to keep my copays out of it,” but it would be really handy to say “look, if you need to you can spend up to $200 and things will get tight in 9 days time but you will not go broke, assuming you have put everything in properly.”

This sort of diagram is only easily possible if you can specify “here are the deposits that I think are going to happen, and here are the expenses that I think are going to happen.”

And for that, those envelopes are crucial, especially the ability to graph the amounts in the various envelopes and the amount that’s not in any envelope.

Yes, exactly – when I was using GnuCash I tried to create my own 'cash flow' tool using data exported from GnuCash because this was exactly what seemed to be missing in GnuCash. I miss double-entry bookkeeping but YNAB has turned out to be better for me overall.

That is a matter of fixed recurring bills. I know when I have to pay rent, insurance, loan payments, to a degree utilities ect. Once you have plotted those in the system, you know how much to set aside for that every month and those are funds you cannot touch without a very very good reason. And should you do so anyway because you're terribly ill, you make a plan for how to make up the deficit before the payment happens.

For my personal economy it come out such that the "account" for all of those recurring payments are always significantly in the positive - in other words, I can "borrow" from that "account" without it interfering with my ability to pay the bills. E.g. you have two annual bills of $600, one has a payment date of Jan 1st and the other have Jul 1st. I need to set aside $100 monthly to pay them, but at any payment date there will be $900 in the account, so it's always at least $300 in the positive. It's just a peculiarity that can happen.

So that leaves all the variable expenses, food, clothing, going out, ect, things you can control the magnitude of. Those are well suited for the envelope system. I would personally treat necessaries such as food and transportation as a special envelope in the sense that it's only variable down to a minimum but no further. Clothing on the other hand can be turned down for $0 for quite a while, and "going out" certainly can be $0 for as long as it need to.

How does all that fit in a cash flow analysis then? Well for bills and fixed income it's easy - just make the graph. But for variable expenses it's a bit more hand wavy, because I cannot not buy food for my children, but I can certain not go to that sushi restaurant. And that is where the envelope system is helping me. If I have an unforeseen expense that is greater than what I have in my emergency fund, and there is not enough to borrow from the fixed expense account without compromising payments. Well I have to transfer some funds from the envelops that have a surplus that i can control, such as the "going out" envelope.

This is exactly it. The ability to build up a reserve for larger expenses later has been the single most important thing. Also, the concept of spending money you have, rather than putting everything on a credit card and trying to pay it off next month with 'new money'. That's been a game changer for me.

This is a great case for envelope budgeting, as seen in tools like YNAB and GoodBudget. You can kinda get it to work with liabilities in a double-entry system, but it gets a little strange to spend out of liabilities instead of assets.

I set this up in ledger, making use of virtual accounts and automatic transactions. Automatic transactions trigger on a certain rule, so I have them setup to Income:Salary transactions and most of my Expense accounts.

This way, every time I receive salary, a fixed amount of my Income:Salary is (virtually) is debited to the virtual account "Clothing". In turn, whenever I make an expense in "Expense:Clothing", the amount is credited from the virtual "Clothing" account with an automatic transaction.

The way ledger keeps track of virtual and real accounts means that I can both see the (accurate) real balance of my checking account, as well as the virtual balance of my Budget accounts.

You do have to set this all up manually however, and it's... complicated. I really like ledger because it lets me setup things this way, but it's not something I'd recommend to others.

Doesn't YNAB (which is mentioned in the comment you are responding to) support this via a "Monthly funding" goal?

YNAB rolls over unspent budgets (I can only speak of the desktop version which I use, but I assume it’s the same for the modern one).

This depends on how you look at financing and budgeting (duh). But Firefly III was originally designed to lower your running expenses. It doesn't feature a lot cool budget automation because that leads to more charts but less money.

The original idea was to make it hard (or at least with some friction) to create transactions. This also excluded any way of importing data. That way you feel your transactions twice. Once when you spend the money, and twice when you have to enter it.

Making you finances tangible is a very good way of spending less money. Importing all your shit just gives GIGO but with nicer graphics.

But budget rollover isn't a bad idea at all and it could fit what Firefly III is doing at the moment. I'll make sure to think of a way to implement it.

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