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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

I use YNAB and love it but I'm always interested in alternatives. That said I opened the main website [0] and the animation [1] shows a bunch of crypto logos. To my eye this seems to be a product aiming itself at people using crypto. I don't think that's the case given the blog post I just read but it's not a good look. Anyone catering to the crypto market is at least a little suspect in my book. Maybe it's just a feature of BeanHub and you don't have to touch it at all but to be featured so prominently is icky/

[0] https://beanhub.io/

[1] https://cs.joshstrange.com/5njjtGND

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Yeah, the site and service seem to be trying to attract a range of people. However, `beancount` and the other `ledger-cli` like tools are all just plain-text files with a semi-rigid markup for recording transactions.

https://plaintextaccounting.org/ is the resource for most of them, and has good resources for making them work for you. It's not for everyone, though, many people just prefer spreadsheets or apps, and that's fine.

Hi, the author here.

So BeanHub is built on top of Beancount and uses double-entry accounting. It's one of the benefits of double-entry accounting. Many accounting software are not good at dealing with multi-currencies or custom currency. With Beancount, you can define any commodity you want, create transactions, and convert them with different currencies easily. For example, you can define a commodity TSM and create transactions[1] like this:

2025-01-01 commodity TSM

2025-03-05 * "Purchase TSMC"

  Assets:US:Bank:WellsFargo:Checking                        -2,000 USD @ 100 TSM
  
  Assets:US:Bank:Robinhood                                      20 TSM

I think many people trade crypto, and traditional accounting software may not be that friendly to them. That's why I emphasized a bit to the crypto target audience. But you're right; I should make it clearer that it's not just for crypto.

[1]: https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_language_syntax.h...

Your homepage has an animation where a list of credit and debit transactions are labelled assets and liabilities. That does not bode well to a provider of accounting software.

YNAB seemed WAY too involved for me. I spent so much time in the fucking app and barely understood it. I had to "give each dollar a job" which is a total inversion of the traditional "set a dollar amount you want to spend on each category and then exercise some self control". I pay for everything on a credit card and then pay back that CC at the end of the month, and doing so complicated the UI when it automatically pulled in my spending from my bank account. I've found GNU Cash to be a bit more intuitive with a little bit of training.

I feel that there are some people who legitimately enjoy looking at money on spreadsheets and implementing budgets/categorizing purchases and I think that YNAB is great for those people, but I personally hate even THINKING about money, let alone interfacing with budgeting software every couple days

> "set a dollar amount you want to spend on each category and then exercise some self control"

How is that different from "give each dollar a job"? The only difference I see is that it forces you to make the categories add up to the amount of your paycheck.

Yes, that's the difference. When I asked on help forums questions like "Can I just set the budget with the assumption that how much money I make this month will be the same as next month", they said no, because I don't know what will happen to my paycheck this month. I need to divy up real dollars, and not expected dollars, meaning that the budget is a constantly moving target and I need to readjust and give a job to my actual dollars every two weeks instead of just my expected paycheck.

Understood.

I copy over all the previous months budget amounts and tweak it to match the current paycheck, if it's different. And frankly don't care too much if it's a few dollars off.

I do this in a spreadsheet. I had written an app for budgeting but it was too much hassle keeping it up to date. New versions of Mac OS would break it in subtle ways and wasn't worth the effort of all the bug fixes.

People should use what works best for them but I'd like to respond a bit to the YNAB issues you ran into (not to convince you to switch or anything).

YNAB with Credit Cards was difficult for me, as was envelope-based budgeting (what "give every dollar a job" is called) because I also was used to the typical "set limits on categories and stay within them"-style budgeting (Like Mint, at least Mint way back when it first came out, I haven't touched it in years). YNAB is very different in that it doesn't let you allocate dollars that are not in your bank account. You can't say "$300 for eating out" unless you have $300 in your bank account and YNAB doesn't care that you might have that money available by the time you want to spend it, it forces you to allocate the money you actually have and every time you get paid you allocate it into categories with the long-term goal of getting a month (or months) ahead in your budgeting (not spending the money you made this month on stuff you need in this month).

Credit cards were also hard to wrap my head around. In a debit-only world it all made sense but CC's complicated things for me. I really enjoyed Nick True's videos on Youtube, they helped me with this a lot but a simplified way to think about this is:

* You put $200 in your "groceries" category (aka envelope)

* You go to the store and spend $60 (on eggs I assume?) and pay with your CC

* In YNAB-land you will record that transaction (or it will be auto-imported) and you will assign it to the groceries category but since YNAB knows you spent this on a CC (you always record which account the transaction happened on) it essentially takes $60 out of the "Groceries" envelope and moves it to the "Chase Sapphire" (or whatever you name it) envelope. You set aside the money for your CC purchases at time of purchase and then when the CC bill comes due it's paid out of that "envelope".

In this way YNAB has become a layer on top of all my finances and I care little about how much money is in any given savings/checking account since YNAB tracks everything. I just make sure there is enough to cover CC payments (there always is) or any big transfers I want to make (like moving money to a HYSA).

I've automated as much as I can with YNAB but I do spend 30min-1hr every few weeks (this is not what they recommend, but it works for me) reconciling my accounts. I totally get if people don't want to do that or don't see the value in it. Personally I love knowing where every dollar of mine is and tracking every purchase/transfer.

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