Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

I use YNAB (https://www.ynab.com/) for budgeting so I already had all of my financial data in a single source. Exporting the CSVs locally and asking Claude to be my financial advisor legitimately gave me good advice. Not just nagging me to save more (which is always useful), but how to organize my budget categories better, detecting longer term spending patterns I wasn't thinking much about, researching credit card reward programs based on my spending patterns, digging deep into interest and tax rates in way I never bothered etc.

That was the first time I felt like real people's jobs were threatened by AI. Financial advisors and tax accountants better adapt quickly.

View on HN

>YNAB

I've fallen behind on keeping it up-to-date, but I feel I ought to plug anything self-hostable: https://actualbudget.org/

This is the big pain-point for me with self-hosted budgeting software.

The corporate players in the space can jump through the security hoops and integrate with Plaid, but if I wanted to automatically pull my own data into the single-user budgeting tool I host entirely on my own network I need to pass the same security checks as a full-on fintech startup.

Currently I enter transactions manually, but manually reviewing multiple credit card and bank statements is a chore and I don't keep up with it as much as I should. To make things worse, since I ideally want a live view of my budget and not a post-statement-issuance monthly review, I'm constantly checking over transactions I've already entered when their ordering changes in my credit card company's app.

The closest thing to a potential solution involves extracting my Monarch Money session key from my browser and pulling data from their GraphQL endpoints with the help of an unofficial Python SDK. That doesn't solve the "relying on a subscription service" problem, but it would at least let me get my data into the custom budgeting tool I built that actually meets my needs.

If I had my 'druthers there would be legal rules around the rights of customers to access their information, using an API key limited to reading past/pending transaction data.

I suppose an extra-paranoia feature might be letting people set a salt value for any data which is too sensitive to release but it needs to be present for comparison/sync purposes.

I'm grateful that this is possible via Up bank here in Australia. Webhooks push the data through a free-tier Worker on Cloudflare and into YNAB within a second of the transaction going through. Full updates across pending/cleared and deleted transactions too. I’ve had this running for 18 months now and it's been a dream.

I built my own financial dashboard and used Enable Banking Accounts API, it's free to use for such limited usage, and they support most European banks at least.

https://enablebanking.com/accounts-api/

Try our app, Pendragon (https://pendragon.foxtrotcommunications.net), and get started with simple expense analysis right away. Easily add your accounts via Plaid or even just a simple csv upload.

We go far beyond a simply budgeting app by providing a solution for your entire financial life. We look at your finances holistically and make judgements that you can rely on.

You can "solve" this by throwing your PDF statements at llms and having them extract the transactions. Has privacy implications if you use hosted llms of course.

As for self hosted accounting/budgeting software, IMO Beancount is the best by far: nothing to host, just text files.

I use Tiller. They take the transaction history from your linked bank accounts and store it in a google spreadsheet for you. That's it. $99 a year.

From there I unleashed claude on my spending habits. I'm only a few months in so I'm more focused on financial hygiene.

I would suggest also simplefin. Only $15/year. Its a bit more simple/restrictive (e.g. they only allow like 25 api calls per day), but if you are just doing simple personal budget tracking they are more than enough.

I spun up a simplefin sync tool recently and they made some surprising errors with some of my accounts (incorrect sign, completely missing some transactions). Also they don't do investments, which is problematic when our primary "checking" is actually a brokerage account.

I found SnapTrade[1] which gives away a free personal account with up to 20 brokerage connections (i.e. logins, not accounts).

I'm using simplefin for credit cards and loans and SnapTrade for investment accounts. Seems to be working well so far.

[1]: https://snaptrade.com

> Financial advisors and tax accountants

Financial advisors giving generic advice, sure. Tax accountants though? I'd be careful. I know the mistakes that llms make when complexity gets involved (especially tax codes and laws) and frankly I don't know enough about them to be able to verify whether what I'm getting out of it makes sense. I could probably verify it with enough research but then I just could so it myself anyway. Or I just pay an accountant a smallish fee and let them handle it.

Yeah, Claude told me what a great idea converting my LLC to an S Corp would be and how much I would save in taxes. When I asked my accountant about he told me it would actually cost me more, because of NYC taxes S Corps.

I didn’t tell Claude I lived NYC, because it didn’t occur to me that it was relevant. I find tax stuff is full stuff like this (often more subtle than where you live).

This is exactly what I found when I was trying to get advice for some business decisions. My friends with businesses all live in different states/jurisdictions, and the biggest takeaway has been that any tax-affecting advice is useless unless it is tailored all the way down to your city.

I think this is the big gap in AI vs real people - they're focused on giving an answer, not asking questions. I've prompted AIs to ask me questions if anything was unclear or if important information was missing and it usually doesn't. Whereas financial advisors do.

> I've prompted AIs to ask me questions if anything was unclear or if important information was missing and it usually doesn't

LLMs don't actually have a concept of importancy.

Sooo true, AI never asks questions. It just makes up requirements. I think it's because the models are trained on benchmarks where task completion is an important metric. But I'd rather have it not finish a task and specify why than make up stuff along the way.

check out what we're building. this is 100% AI-native financial advice and planning software: https://pendragon.foxtrotcommunications.net/ we always appreciate any feedback

> I use YNAB

I was happy to pay for YNAB4, which was local-only data. I have no interest in paying a subscription for YNAB5 when I have no need for cloud-access or cross-device syncing.

If YNAB5 was one-time purchase plus optional syncing, I'd consider the one-time outlay.

I use YNAB4 to this day and the cross-device sync still works

I still use YNAB 4 to this day on both the Android app and my desktop. Every couple of years the Dropbox sync stops working, but someone in the community fixes it and uploads an APK for others to download. It may just be that I'm used to it, but it still feels like the best combination of simplicity and design of any budgeting tool I've used.

> better adapt quickly

maybe they can grow larger brains and an extra hand so they can hold 3 calculators at once?

Nice idea! Do you mind sharing the prompt you used, interested in trying this out myself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com