Budgeting software

Recommendations
21

Yeah I was following the logical path in my mind and for a moment I was thinking @bamboo was suing someone and somehow a budgeting software can help in this situation. Hmm maybe in divorce :smile:

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22

Sorry, misspelled suing instead of using.
It has been corrected.
Yeah, open source software is great!:blush:

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23

If you have investments across multiple banks and brokers how else would you track your total net worth and rate of investment return? Each individual institution would only provide you reports for accounts at them, but not a global view. You need a ledger

If you put enough efforts into it you can do really nice things with it, I can generate a very precise estimate of my taxes for the current year straight from my beancount ledger files for example

I’ve been using GnuCash for a while before first switching to ledger-cli (the grandfather of plain text accounting tools) and finally beancount. Plain text accounting shine in that you can easily version control them (with gnucash you got binary blobs instead), refactor your accounts structure and entries which is more and more necessary as your ledger grows, programmatically access your data in them for custom reports. They also handle multiple currencies much nicer than GnuCash - where you need a separate account per currency/stock

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24

just leaving this here for all mustachian YNAB trial users, there’s one interesting comment which actually works.

I for myself though don’t find the application very useful as it requires a lot of manual work.
Thus I cite the minimalsim documentary: Always ask yourself - do I really need this - does it add value to my life?
I think training your self-control adds way more value to your life than a budget software could.

Cheers

25

Can you connect any of these softwares to swiss ebanking directly? Or at least in a semi automated fashion like CSV export?

I guess it would be possible with Beancount to transform the CSVs yourself but then again 
 I am lazy

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26

On my knowledge, there is no software in Switzerland which can connect to multiple ebankings to gather data

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27

You can export the postfinance data to a csv file for ynab 4 – but you have to use this script in your browser: https://github.com/Kagemaru/ynab_postfinance_export/blob/master/ynab_postfinance_export.user.js

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28

so I tried the web version of YNAB (not the old software) and its quite questionable to me why anyone would pay money for that. The interface is quite clunky in itself and the import of the CSV worked with some tricks but basically you have to do all the work that you could just as well do in Excel or in any other tool. Saw no benefits and unsubscribed

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29

I was recently researching the subject and got across a new startup called GOKONG. They have an app that can connect to various financial institutions and gather data. But they don’t offer much functionality (yet?) do deal with this data

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30

I’m actually using pocketsmith: it allows me to import different format files from various e-banking, create different accouns in different currency, it provides some type of auto-labelling.

In this year, did anyone find a good (free) alternative?

31

Really depends on your setup and (programming) skills. For me beancount with fava is great. Otherwise I was quite happy with gnucash before which introduced me into double entry accounting. Where gnucash is limited is imports and non cash assets like stocks

32

thank you, I’ll take a look at beancount.

one of gnucash’s drawback is that its “double entry accounting” totally replace the lalbelling of expenses. Which is not always great, because sometime I’d like to have multiple ortogonal set of labels. Plus the importing from ofx/csv/mt940 is pretty limited, in my opinion