Submitted 3 weeks ago by Treedrake@fedia.io to selfhosted@lemmy.world
Not affiliated in any way with Actual Budget, but I can't recommend it enough. It's the FOSS version of YNAB pretty much so if you're a fan of envelope budgeting it's a great tool. I'd even say it has quite a few other strengths compared to YNAB, and you can always be sure that your financial data stays within your reach.
The man who originally invented this tech is a really good guy, can’t recommend it enough!
I’ve literally just switched to Actual (3 days in) after living out of a homemade Excel YNAB clone for years and years. Overall it’s great and the bank syncing works really work.
I love that it’s open source, E2E encrypted, self-hostable and the data lives in a SQLite database.
If I haven’t found any major snags, I’ll of course become a supporter in a couple of weeks.
Yeah, I think it’s fantastic as well. The SimpleFIN syncinc works fantastically, and I’m happy enough that I cancelled my TillerHQ subscription, which lapses this month. There’s still a little work to do to clean up some of my older data, but once I get it all rolling nicely, I’ll definitely send the developers a substantial portion of what I was paying for Tiller (like $100/year).
Looks interesting. Marked it for exploration. Too many cool projects to explore and not enough time!
You need a time budgeter
I’ve been using it for almost a year now and it works great. I used to just use a spread sheet to track my bills paychecks and due dates but this made it much nicer
This is the comment that’s going to make me try it. I love my spreadsheet, so I’ll have to see if this does everything that my spreadsheet does.
“That you can self-host” Does a budgeting tool need to be a service that’s constantly running and not an application? I struggle to see how having it running as a service on some box somewhere is going to help. “It’s so you can access it on your phone elsewhere.” Oh great. It’ll have a garbagepuke mobile UI.
In this case, the mobile UI doesn’t even work properly.
That said, I find value in it because it makes it so much easier for my SO and I to see the same thing. Oh, and it supports importing transactions via SimpleFIN, which is really nice.
How does it compare to Firefly III?
I wish they would of pursued a business plan. I feel like we need some software for small business that isn’t run by a huge company ready to screw you over.
Maybe they could of sold support and training.
Would HAVE. Could HAVE.
The original author tried to turn it into a business. Turns out that was next to impossible up against YNAB. Gave it to the community who’s keeping it current.
I switched over to this last month, and I’m already a fan of it. It did take a bit of time to port over my old shtitty excel tracking, and to write a few python scripts to parse the export CSV files from each of my bank accounts, but it is very clearly worth it.
One of the nice things is that it uses a SQLite db to store everything, so if shit ever hits the fan with one of my drives or the software, it isn’t the end of the world.
Looks nice, I’ll check it out. Always open to something that looks nicer than my excel sheets
Maybe I’ll do the homeassistant install option, I’m actually surprised to see that mentioned in their documentation. I didn’t see a docker image, surely there’s a community-maintained one somewhere?
I didn’t see a docker image
My eyes have failed me today, thanks lol
Why would you need to host this? Why not just have a client that does backups?
The self-contained electron app works better for most people I think.
I downloaded the mobile app but it’s asking me for E-Mail straight away and there’s no way to select my own server… What gives?
This mobile app is not associated with the current open source project. Like i think it’s a vestige from before they went open source. They recommend using actual in your mobile browser for now, which works decently well
Ohhhh, thanks for letting me know!
i’ve been enjoying it, the docs are really good. i think it could be a little “smarter” like with recognizing schedules, but it’ll only get better. a major limiting factor for me that isn’t any fault of actual is that my apple card either through simplefin or manually exporting only allows download of the previous month’s transactions after closing. so for that account it’s not really useful for seeing where i’m at budget-wise halfway through the month, only in retrospect and forecasting.
With the price increases which will probably contribute i think this is my next step after YNAB
Does Actual support investment accounts / stocks? I was using beancount/fava for tracking, but have been lazy and haven’t updated it in a long time.
As others said, both Firefly III and Actual Budget do not support stocks. I wish they did, but I guess I’ll have to stick with GnuCash + Metabase for now.
Nope, which honestly annoys me but is pretty par for the course.
I personally use Fidelity for investment tracking. My main “checking” is their Cash Management Account, my “savings” is a brokerage account (invested in t-bills and money market funds), and I can link all of my other accounts and it pulls in specific investments and shows a consolidated view. It’s awesome because it shows all kinds of stuff, like morningstar-style factor weights, sector exposure, etc. It’s not self-hosted, but I trust them with my banking anyway, so it’s not like I’m opening myself up to some new exploit (oh, and Fidelity also has proper MFA; Symantic VIP, which kinda sucks, but it’s way better than any other financial institution).
I used to track this stuff via a Google spreadsheet (couldn’t find a way to get stock quotes in LibreOffice), but this seems to be good enough for me.
Actual budget just dropped, holy hell
Neat, I did already transfer my budgeting to GNUCash a few months ago, but this looks shiny too.
I really love it, been using it for about 2 months, came from YNAB, used that for probably 3-5 years. Although I wish it was a little more mobile friendly, it works on mobile well enuf for me to record my daily transactions and then I just use a desktop once a week when I do all my bill payments and budget catch up.
I really like the reporting options, and also it has some mass note append/prepend/replace functionality which works great for me hashtagging the expenses I have addressed, confirmed and moved around to various accounts.
I do wish it had flagging, I really loved the colored flags, but I’m using the hashtagging as a replacement and it works pretty well.
Last night I just used libreoffice calc. Wish I was told this sooner so I could spend my time configuring this and budgeting next week instead
I will try this out! That looks handy!
Actual is libre and gratis
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 weeks ago
The number one thing that most of these don’t do well for me is the connection with banks. You mentioned that there is bank syncing, how well does that work? Can I say, just click my bank and do an oauth connection, and it will store it? I really loved Mint, and essentially want it to be done the same way
sandwichsaregood@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
In the US it has integration with SimpleFIN. SimpleFIN isn’t free but it’s pretty cheap ($1.50/mo) and supports most banks out there, even my obscure local credit union.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 weeks ago
How well do you find it works? I’m not afraid of the fee, but I don’t want to spend time setting it up and paying the fee to only find out that it won’t do most things
dan@upvote.au 3 weeks ago
Does SimpleFIN use OAuth to log into bank accounts, or do you need to enter your bank’s username and password?
Unrelated to this post, but do you know if SimpleFIN supports investment accounts? If it does, it seems like an easy way to let me write a script to help me rebalanced my investment accounts. I might look into it.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
For me personally, it was easier to just write a few python scripts to parse the CSV files from my banks.