this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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Inspired by a comment on my last post.

I feel like I never have a solution that allows me to control it while also being automated to such a degree that I don’t have a huge confusing backup if I don’t do finances for days or weeks.

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[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 33 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This won't help you, but I want to brag. I started using Quicken to track my finances at the turn of the century, back when it was all local storage. Quicken 2012 was the last iteration that used http (not https) to update stock prices. When they discontinued support, I captured the interaction and deciphered the formats. Wrote a proxy to intercept the request, look up the security info, and send back the data.

So, I self-host quicken.com. It's saved me having to update Quicken or submit to their subscription model.

[–] ComradeMiao@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That’s really cool! How did you do that?

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

Super easy, as it turns out. I run my own DNS and web servers, so I pointed quicken.com at my web server to capture the request, then used curl to capture the response. Both turned out to be plain ASCII, request like

stk.1=SMCI;.2=NVDA;.3=INTC;

as POST data, and responses like

qwin.quotes.ASTM.symbol 4 ASTM
.last 7 18.7400
.time 10 1573074000
.time.str 5 16:00
.change 6 0.4000

plus a whole slew of other optional fields for fundamentals, dividends, etc. It was a simpler time on the internet, when no one cared about leaking data and companies didn't care if a handful of geeks reversed engineered their data structures.

[–] neinhorn@lemmy.ca 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

He mentioned it used http, so the traffic is not encrypted. You can easily monitor http traffic with wireshark.

[–] perishthethought@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

It is pretty easy. There’s tons of tutorials and walkthroughs for doing it, but anyone familiar with UIs will be able to work it out pretty quickly I think. Maybe a friction point in using the filter query, but again there’s tons of walkthroughs and guides for using it online.

If you can’t conceptualize a packet, or sockets, or network flows, even with the help of online guides/manuals, I guess it wouldn’t be easy. In that case I’d be wondering why someone would want to use those tools in the first place though, as then they probably wouldn’t have the skills necessary to leverage the information gleaned from the tool in any useful way.

Edit - As we’re in the self-hosted community, I’d argue that anyone who is self-hosting anything would probably be able to easily install wireshark and view http requests, both individual packets and the stream as a whole.

[–] neinhorn@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 months ago
[–] Panda@lemmy.today 25 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I use Actual. How it works is very similar to YNAB (you budget the money you currently have) but it's open source and privacy focused. I started using it a few months ago and I really like it so far!

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I love Actual. So, so good. I cancelled YNAB in favor and can't ever think of going back. Aside from not having to pay $100 a year you're also not supporting the Mormon Church (YNAB is a Mormon-run company).

[–] jg1i@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Do you just use a limit set of YNAB features? It seems like Actual only has a tiny fraction of the features YNAB has. For example, it's currently missing category targets.

[–] asap@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

It's like YNAB4. For those of us in that vintage it's perfect. If you're using the newer YNAB it might have missing features.

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago

Category targets are available and are more flexible than YNAB, but it's still in an experimental phase so it's not fully integrated into the GUI. Check here: https://actualbudget.org/docs/experimental/goal-templates/ I've had zero problems so far though.

[–] geography082@lemm.ee 16 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] dmtalon 5 points 5 months ago

I switched over to Actual last month, and am not looking back. I will miss the native android app, but it is an otherwise direct replacement. I was using YNAB4, and had forever.

[–] jg1i@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Is there some tutorial you'd recommend to get started? I didn't find the docs or demo helpful and a lot of videos seem to be focused on background or setup. I can install the app fine, but like how does one actually use this?

I've never used budgeting apps. I'd like to learn more about them and why they're useful. My current budgeting is: positive balance=good; negative balance=bad

[–] jg1i@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

As a note for people new to budgeting apps, YNAB has a toooonnn of tutorials and videos about how to create a budget and what the end-to-end workflow looks like in their apps.

[–] geography082@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)
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[–] DragonsInARoom@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago

I have a excel sheet on my laptop

[–] redxef@feddit.org 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I have Firefly III and am really quiet happy with it. I might write a companion program to scan bill though, since doing everything by hand is rather time consuming.

[–] Evoliddaw@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I just drooled a little at the thought of integration with Paperless.

[–] Evoliddaw@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] redxef@feddit.org 1 points 5 months ago

I didn't read the whole article, just a cursory glance really, but it seems like that is the exact other way around that I would want it.

I'm thinking of scanning a paper bill with my phone, extracting the text and matching parts of the text to firefly fields, like transaction description, source account, destination account, amount and maybe categories/tags.

[–] markstos@lemmy.world 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Moneydance https://moneydance.com/

Started using it close to twenty years ago and keep using it because it seems fine.

[–] Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I've never seen this recommended before and I've looked for years for self hosted alternatives to YNAB.

[–] markstos@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It’s so old it’s not called self-hosted.

[–] borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 5 months ago

Damn. You’ve given me a vision of a future where people call applications that are installed locally and don’t leverage any cloud/server backend for any functionality “self-hosted” programs and I hate it.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Actual Budget, because it supports SimpleFIN to import my transactions.

It's still not "automated," but I have a lot of rules now so it's getting there.

I'm not super happy w/ how it works, but I'm too lazy to do anything about it. Maybe I'll end up adding SimpleFIN to something else, idk.

[–] Boomkop3@reddthat.com 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

My bank does this for me, but I do like self hosting things. Where's the benefit in this apart from a fun project?

[–] 872XXE@feddit.org 7 points 5 months ago (4 children)

If you only have one Bank (Account) it is maybe fine.

But if you have multiple accounts (I have 4 Bank accounts for savings and another one for my shares), you would like to have one software/application to handle it. Like the one email client for your different email accounts.

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[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Indeed. My bank surely does this better than I could ever do. But if it's "for fun", then it's fine.

[–] Boomkop3@reddthat.com 1 points 5 months ago

Yez, I will be trying it out for fun. It just looks cool.

[–] linuxguy@lemmy.gregw.us 5 points 5 months ago

Gnucash books split for personal, joint, and business with a mysql backend. I wrote a read-only web frontend for wife and OTG access. Sadly no automation so I just stay on top of it.

[–] HotChickenFeet@sopuli.xyz 5 points 5 months ago

I use GnuCash. I typically update every couple weeks up to a month. Beyond that it can be hard to remember what specific transactions were.

It's double ledger and I really like that it forces strict accounting. That sounds cumbersome but once you're set up (it may take some trial and error), for me my workflow is essentially:

  • Copy prior paycheck splits & update them to reflect new paychecks.
  • export QFX files from credit cards
  • import QFX, check / set transaction accounts
  • any small manual updates (interest payments in accounts, etc)

It's not automated but my data always remains local, and I can use the Linux or android application. I don't bother daily tracking on my phone, else it might be cumbersome. I've never used any of the budget features, just tracking where my money comes and goes.

[–] biptoot@lemmy.today 5 points 5 months ago

Actual budget with simple fin for bank links. Currently hosted on pikapods, will move to self hosting on prem at some point.

[–] MTK@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

Firefly III

Amazing, really hit's the spot of fully featured but a tool and not a new system you need to learn

[–] pax0707@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

Actual has been working fine for me. Supports all the family’s banks and credit cards I import manually.

[–] tuhriel 4 points 5 months ago

Since most budgeting tools I found didn't satisfy my need (no cloud, automatic categorization of transactions etc.) I tried to create my own tool to categorize my transactions using camt.053 and csv files which I downloaded from my banks. Got bugged down with the presentation via bokeh, so it was pretty crude.

I recently found beancount in combination with fava, which solved most of my problems I had with my own tool. And the good thing: I was able to re-use most of my 'auto-categorization' code with only small changes. Not sure how universal my importer is, but with a bit of python know-how it should be quite easy to create an importer for your specific bank export.

From my experience, the csvs I got from my bank was insufficient for automatic mapping, which is why I'm using camt.053 where possible. As the camt.053 is not very common in many countries you could go for OFX files.

[–] myrmidex@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I like Maybe Finance. Perhaps a bit basic but it does the trick for me. And the interface is quite nice too. No automation or bank imports though so it probably won't fit your purposes perfectly.

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 3 points 5 months ago

I host my own Monero node

[–] Deckweiss@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago
[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 months ago

I'm saying this as someone who used Mint for years due to how it integrated with banks so easily.

I'm currently using Money Manager EX, which is open source. I "self-host" the database file on my NAS, and simply open the file through MM EX' Windows program.

Since it's just a simple database (encrypted, of course), it's easy to back up.

Now, I lost the ability to automatically sync with my bank. This was a blessing in disguise, since it forced me to go over each transaction carefully.

Granted, Mint had me doing the same, but because I spent a lot of time removing duplicates and fixing errors in their sync system. LOL

MM Ex has been very easy to use, and I don't see a need to self-host the software itself.

[–] AustralianSimon@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

We do excel roughly but invest our surplus.

I have a bunch of we scrapers that check for items on sale and for certain ones trigger purchase and others send me an alert.

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