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Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

Personal finance software is probably one of the most commonly attacked problems in the development world, and yet there are still a ton of people just building custom spreadsheets.

I've tried Quicken and Mint and PageOnce (now called Check) and a number of other things, and I've still found that the best solution for me is a mix of GnuCash and Spreadsheets.

Why hasn't this problem been solved yet?

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I've discussed this at length elsewhere, so here's my abridged opinion.

The main issue is that a "mainstream" personal finance app must have the following two features:

- Automatic download of financial transactions

- Intelligent categorization from "STBCKS3134" to "Starbucks [Dining]"

Any tool that doesn't have those two features is doomed to be "niche"... used only by people who actually enjoy and/or are disciplined enough to enter their own data regularly.

In short, we need a "Twilio for personal finance" so that people can build creative solutions and not have to reinvent the wheel. There are startups out there that are trying to solve this.

It hasn't been solved because it's not one problem. People have different wants and needs and expectations and banks and tax codes and tolerances for entering data, and are lazy when it comes to testing existing options. Why spend hours searching and signing up for trials and learning new UIs when they know how to make a spreadsheet that does what they want?

But isn't the main purpose of personal finance to influence spending decisions? An ideal solution simply just answers the question "Can I afford to X?"

I've not used any software that helps solve that problem in an elegant way, and maybe I'm just minimizing the problem, but it seems like every path to answering that question is simple arithmetic provided you know what other expenses you have in addition to X.

YNAB is the best option I have found.

For me - data entry. Form-based software takes too long to fill out. With a spreadsheet, I can import csv files or copy and paste data easily. Developers often talk about Excel being misused as a database, and I think the root cause is the same - spreadsheets provide a very friendly user interface for adding and editing data.

Because there isn't one problem with one solution? Case in point: I think most people would not find that the best solution for them is GnuCash and Spreadsheets.

Actually, discovered ledger-cli here last week (thanks HN). It's amazing. Abstracting currency to the concept of commodity + price files makes it trivial to track your shares in 401k, and have the current market value print on the balance report. Handles lots. Recurring transactions support period specifications like "every two weeks starting on 2013/10/01". Maps payee's to accounts, and supports payee aliases. Pretty much anywhere you type a string you can also use a regex. State is a text file and the program does not alter state; just reads it and prints out a report. Finally, it provides a CSV convert which makes it easy to convert an export from your bank to a list of double entry transactions (./convert bk_download.csv >> trx.dat).

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