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 36 points 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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

[–] neinhorn@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago
[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] Panda 26 points 3 weeks ago (4 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!

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[–] geography082@lemm.ee 16 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)
[–] dmtalon@infosec.pub 5 points 3 weeks 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.

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[–] DragonsInARoom@lemmy.world 15 points 3 weeks ago

I have a excel sheet on my laptop

[–] markstos@lemmy.world 13 points 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] redxef@feddit.org 13 points 3 weeks ago (3 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 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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.

[–] Boomkop3@reddthat.com 1 points 3 weeks ago

Ah that makes sense. Right now I have one account, but it has multiple cards and pools of money under it (for lack of a better word).

So for me this is still easily managed, even with four bank accounts and about nine sub-pools under them collectively.

I guess I just got very lucky with the bank I've kinda stuck with just because it's what my mom got me over a decade ago.

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[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 2 points 3 weeks 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.

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[–] bolapara@lemmy.ml 8 points 3 weeks ago

I use hledger mostly because of the plain text format. I came from YNAB as well but I just hated how you couldn't easily undo changes or see when you made a change, etc. This is so easily to track changes and you can add comments explaining your reasoning around things and you can keep everything in source control so you have all the power of that as well. Not for everyone but if you're a programmer or just comfortable on the command line it's great.

[–] abeorch@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago

Id love to find a #creditunion that supported #openbanking and offered API access to my data so I could easily download it and use it with Actual or FireflyIII. I think working with a credit union to build this feature would be a great open source project.

[–] linuxguy@lemmy.gregw.us 6 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] biptoot 5 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago

I’m waiting for Actual to support multiple currencies. Until then, as an Apple user, I’m using iFinance which works on all my platforms.

[–] HotChickenFeet@sopuli.xyz 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] cyclohexane@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Weird question, but what does GnuCash do that you wouldn't get easily from excel? I haven't used any of these apps and wondering what I'm missing out on.

[–] HotChickenFeet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 weeks ago

Under the hood its mostly tables and reports, so ultimately not much, if you were dedicated enough to using Excel to rebuild GnuCash's views. It's more streamlined than excel would be because you won't have to worry about implementation, overhead of adding a new account, etc. Some things like auto-recommending accounts during import (and import itself) could be arduous in excel if not supported natively. Split transactions could be a headache (think your paycheck, which might be split into 401k contributions, several taxes, money into your bank, etc).

But fully recreating it in excel when it already exists would be a headache. More than likely you will have a more limited view in Excel if you're just creating a handful of tables to represent all of your many accounts.

[–] tuhriel@infosec.pub 4 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] MTK@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago

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

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 weeks ago

I host my own Monero node

[–] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I use ledger. I have not automated so much outside of autocomplete macros in my text editor, but it doesnt't take too much time and forces me to look over my spend, so I like it. I will eventually attempt to build some kind of Dash-application for visualisation of the output, but have only started on the parsers so far.

[–] ouch@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

Ledger is awesome.

[–] myrmidex@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks 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.

[–] Deckweiss@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago
[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 weeks 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.

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