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?

  • devtoi@feddit.nu
    1·
    15 hours ago

    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 WooskeyOPEnglish
      1·
      11 hours ago

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