cross-posted from: https://eviltoast.org/post/14412290
I've been really lazy with keeping track of my money over the last few years. I still use personal capital (now empower)'s dashboard, but it's not self-hosted and they can be pretty aggressive with their marketing.
Previously, I was using Beancount + Fava to track all of my money, including investments. Every time I think about updating my ledger and importing the last several years of transactions, it just feels overwhelming and I put it off again.
I'm still a fan of plain-text-accounting, but importing a large number of transactions always feels cumbersome.
I tried Firefly-III briefly, but it didn't support investment tracking. I also saw Ghostfolio for the investment side, but haven't tried it yet and it seems to only do investments.
My wishlist of features is below, are there any self-hosted/oss finance apps that would meet most of these?
- self-hosted
- import via csv at minimum, ideally support for yodly/plaid/some other bank syncing api
- support for regular accounts (checking/savings), credit cards, and investment accounts (stocks, 401k, etc)
- misc. asset tracking like for a car or house
- mobile app or mobile-friendly web view
- local llm support for categorizing transactions and fixing merchant semi-automatically
- multi-user support - not required, but it'd be nice if my partner and I can use the same app but still have our own private accounts too
- tags or some other way to group expenses together (like all expenses related to a trip)
- good reporting
- bonus: support for custom reports/calculations like "If i retired next year, how much money would I have per month?"
Alternatively, what do you all use for this type of thing?
I'm currently using firefly-iii + Ghostfolio simultaneously. I'm not really a fan of this approach because Firefly-iii shows the wrong net worth without my investments and Ghostfolio doesn't handle tax lots correctly. The Firefly-iii importer was terrible and created a mess of my transaction history too because I tried to import data from Mint going back a decade. I ended up writing my own Python-based analyzer to clean-up the data to get it imported. Now I just use those tools for visualization until I find alternatives.
Plaid didn't work because I couldn't use OAuth to banks without going through compliance reviews (not sure if that has changed.) I instead focused on building scraping tools to pull directly from banks or my bank aggregator, Monarch (I use this when I couldn't directly scrape from a bank due to auth issues.) I had to build Playwright scripts to scrape website and it's all very janky code, but it technically works. Some of that has been open-sourced, the actual scrapers need to be cleaned up.
Thanks for sharing your scripts. Could you create an account in firefly-iii that is just the overall value and have a script that takes the balance from ghostfolio and updates it in firefly-iii?
For Plaid, I went through the process to apply for "production" access and get oauth access to most banks. It really wasn't bad at all. I basically just said I was going to use it for personal use, not selling anything, and not letting others use it. I haven't used it much, but did get it approved relatively quickly.