If you continue developing this, I recommend completely scrapping the UI and finding a person or AI who can create something usable. What you're showing there is really that bad -- if you consider it acceptable, and expect to be able to sell it, then you really need to partner up with someone who knows what they're doing.
Honestly my biggest pain point with all personal accounting systems was that there was no easy, free way to automatically pull my transaction data from all my accounts into a single, local file that I can play with as I want. I really don't want to go to all my accounts every month and click download.
There still isn't, but I did recently find simplefin(https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/). Its not great (e.g. quota of only ~25 requests per day), but its good enough and the price was cheap enough that I just bit the bullet. It also paired well with Actual budget, and now I have a personal accounting system that I am reasonably happy with.
I also found teller.io, which is frankly a better dev experience (and good free tier!), but they don't support all the banks I'm on and somehow simplefin does.
It would be nice if financial institutions simply created end-user/app centric APIs for consumption... As it is, the best you can do is something akin to puppeteer with a real browser agent and your authentication credentials and scraping... I mean there can be APIs underneath, but there's not a good open resource/repository that I'm aware of...
Would be nice/interesting to see something like that come about, but It's a bit frustrating. A delegated read-only api key against a specific account shouldn't be that hard to do.
I've slowly built up a set of scripts to do this:
too many different methods, but eventually I get csv files for each account,
then hledger import - and finally I manually fix up details
Is there use for this for individuals? Or is this like advanced note taking apps: you feel productive but are just busy talking about the things you need to do instead of doing the things you need to do
This is what I use & like as well, but I definitely think there's space for a more GUI-focused option that isn't Quickbooks or Gnucash. It's not a good fit for me, though, I require my important tools to be open source. Closed source software has way too many misaligned incentives for me to use it for anything important.
+1 to that. I used https://ledger-cli.org/ and the accompanying Emacs mode for a long long time. I used small slips of paper to record cash spends during the day and by bank statements for online ones. Then kept track. I kept a "reconciliation" account to catch misses and it was quite low after several years.
I somehow fell out of the habit but I really need to get back to it.
came to say this. the fact that I don't have to launch a seperate program to add a transaction or my bank's csv is what finally got me to actually keep track.
Author here. I'm a certified accountant. I ran my own finances in a double-entry Excel/VBA system for years because the off-the-shelf options forced a choice I didn't like: GnuCash (correct, but heavy enough that even I dreaded the daily entry) or the app-store budgeting apps (pleasant, single-entry, cloud-hosted, usually wanting a bank login).
So I built a local-first double-entry desktop app — a plain local database file on your own machine, no telemetry, no aggregator. Happy to talk about the local-first trade-offs (no auto bank sync is the price), or why I went one-time-purchase instead of subscription. Not here to pitch — genuinely interested in how others in this crowd handle their own books.
The bank might not appreciate it, but couldn't you extend with a headless browser to scrape your bank occasionally or even on demand when the program launches?
I've been using hledger and I usually just plug in purchases as I make them, but I do that on purpose because it's like a self-balancing checkbook so I'm always aware of what's going where.
Did you write the blog post entirely on your own? It reads like AI slop to me but maybe I'm just getting more sensitive. I can't decide whether we are all starting to mimic the same turns of phrase that LLMs like to use or whether just nobody writes anymore. I suspect the latter.
The cadence and wording sure reads like AI to me. OP, personally I find this really off putting and does not make me want to learn more about your app.
If you continue developing this, I recommend completely scrapping the UI and finding a person or AI who can create something usable. What you're showing there is really that bad -- if you consider it acceptable, and expect to be able to sell it, then you really need to partner up with someone who knows what they're doing.
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Honestly my biggest pain point with all personal accounting systems was that there was no easy, free way to automatically pull my transaction data from all my accounts into a single, local file that I can play with as I want. I really don't want to go to all my accounts every month and click download.
There still isn't, but I did recently find simplefin(https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/). Its not great (e.g. quota of only ~25 requests per day), but its good enough and the price was cheap enough that I just bit the bullet. It also paired well with Actual budget, and now I have a personal accounting system that I am reasonably happy with.
I also found teller.io, which is frankly a better dev experience (and good free tier!), but they don't support all the banks I'm on and somehow simplefin does.
It would be nice if financial institutions simply created end-user/app centric APIs for consumption... As it is, the best you can do is something akin to puppeteer with a real browser agent and your authentication credentials and scraping... I mean there can be APIs underneath, but there's not a good open resource/repository that I'm aware of...
Would be nice/interesting to see something like that come about, but It's a bit frustrating. A delegated read-only api key against a specific account shouldn't be that hard to do.
I've slowly built up a set of scripts to do this: too many different methods, but eventually I get csv files for each account, then hledger import - and finally I manually fix up details
Is there use for this for individuals? Or is this like advanced note taking apps: you feel productive but are just busy talking about the things you need to do instead of doing the things you need to do
> Accounts you can create inline as you go. Scheduled and automatic movements that just happen.
Things Gnucash does.
See also https://hledger.org/
and plain text accounting in general
This is what I use & like as well, but I definitely think there's space for a more GUI-focused option that isn't Quickbooks or Gnucash. It's not a good fit for me, though, I require my important tools to be open source. Closed source software has way too many misaligned incentives for me to use it for anything important.
+1 to that. I used https://ledger-cli.org/ and the accompanying Emacs mode for a long long time. I used small slips of paper to record cash spends during the day and by bank statements for online ones. Then kept track. I kept a "reconciliation" account to catch misses and it was quite low after several years.
I somehow fell out of the habit but I really need to get back to it.
Big fan of hedger! It's not easy to start but I think it's one of the best ways to keep track of accounting, PTA files are very convenient.
They leave you with lots of options though, which could be a problem if you're starting into accounting
came to say this. the fact that I don't have to launch a seperate program to add a transaction or my bank's csv is what finally got me to actually keep track.
LLM-written drivel. Painful to read, and (weak) evidence that the project is equally sloppy. The “author” evidently does not respect their readers.
"a real balance sheet, assets against liabilities, not a spending feed dressed up with colours"
Ugh. Just write your own damn post already
Author here. I'm a certified accountant. I ran my own finances in a double-entry Excel/VBA system for years because the off-the-shelf options forced a choice I didn't like: GnuCash (correct, but heavy enough that even I dreaded the daily entry) or the app-store budgeting apps (pleasant, single-entry, cloud-hosted, usually wanting a bank login).
So I built a local-first double-entry desktop app — a plain local database file on your own machine, no telemetry, no aggregator. Happy to talk about the local-first trade-offs (no auto bank sync is the price), or why I went one-time-purchase instead of subscription. Not here to pitch — genuinely interested in how others in this crowd handle their own books.
The bank might not appreciate it, but couldn't you extend with a headless browser to scrape your bank occasionally or even on demand when the program launches?
I've been using hledger and I usually just plug in purchases as I make them, but I do that on purpose because it's like a self-balancing checkbook so I'm always aware of what's going where.
What's the difference betweeen this and either Quicken or Microsoft Money?
Did you write the blog post entirely on your own? It reads like AI slop to me but maybe I'm just getting more sensitive. I can't decide whether we are all starting to mimic the same turns of phrase that LLMs like to use or whether just nobody writes anymore. I suspect the latter.
The cadence and wording sure reads like AI to me. OP, personally I find this really off putting and does not make me want to learn more about your app.
It's definitely AI slop, yeah:
> It's also the work of one accountant who happens to be the daily user, built with a lot of AI assistance.
The comment you're replying to is clearly AI slop as well...