this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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finance management software suggestions (lemmy.thewooskeys.com)
submitted 1 day ago by mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com to c/foss@beehaw.org
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I used to use Quicken long ago but have been using Moneydance for many years to manage my personal finances. But Moneydance is propietary software and I prefer FOSS now. What's your preferred finance management software?

Thing I need it to do:

  • manage different accounts (common types are banks, credit cards, loans, assets)
  • have basic reporting (e.g., categorized expenses per time period)
  • preferably uses tags
  • export or copy reports or data - could be excel or csv or something that can be pasted or imported into spreadsheets
  • self-hostable with a web app

I'm not a fan of software that's budget-focused. I don't mind it having some budgeting functionality, but I don't want opinionated software to force me to manage my money a certain way. I just want felxible software to help me manage my software how I want to manage it.

I'm wary of source-available/freemium/dual-licensed/open-core licenses. It can't hurt to suggest such apps if you like them and I'll take a look, but I think it's not likely that I'll buy into that philosophy.

So what software do you use and like?

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[–] devtoi@feddit.nu 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I have been satisfied with beancount. https://github.com/beancount/beancount and fava as a ui. It's text based so it is easy to automate imports and exports. It can seem daunting at first to create importers in Python, but it's pretty basic scripting.

Text based accounting lends itself well to easy experimentation with version control.

I tried gnucash for a while, but it felt so slow and not flexible enough for me.

[–] mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com 1 points 6 hours ago

Thanks, I'll take a look (but my hunch is that "pretty easy Python scripting" is beyond my skillset).

[–] Kissaki@beehaw.org 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

https://gnucash.org/

[–] mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com 1 points 11 hours ago

Thanks for the suggestion but it looks like an app, not a server-client situation.

[–] Evkob@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I haven't used it yet, but I want to start keeping better track of my finances and one I've seen recommended a lot and plan to try out for February is Actual Budget.

[–] Templa@beehaw.org 3 points 1 day ago

Actual is great! We have been using for a while now.

[–] Panda 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I used to use You Need A Budget and was looking for an open source alternative. I've been using Actual since last year and I really like it so far. It has all the features I'd been looking for and is free and open source. It seems to fit your list of requirements as well! I'd highly recommend it!

[–] mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com 2 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the suggestion. I looked at Actual but it seemed very budgwt focused and kind of light on any-other-feature. But I'll take another look

[–] colournoun@beehaw.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Check out https://www.firefly-iii.org/

[–] mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com 2 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll take a look.

[–] mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com 2 points 1 day ago

Oh crap - I forgot an important need: it has to be able to import my existing data (decades!) which Moneydance can export to QIF, tab delimited, or JSON.