[kayson]

Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that's also worth checking out) just takes way more time than its worth. (OFX was not as straightforward to obtain or use as one would hope). Mint is so much easier to use - it automatically pulls and categorizes transactions from pretty much any institution imaginable without no user effort needed. I stopped using Mint after a brief stint because of data privacy and security. No matter how many security claims they made, I just couldn't justify giving them my bank passwords in plain text. I suppose it doesn't matter as much for credit cards, but for my checking/savings accounts, a compromise would actually jeopardize my money. Apparently some of the big US banks are starting to roll out authentication APIs (e.g OAUTH) so it may be worth another look.

It does seem like there's still room for a FOSS/selfhosted Mint clone that gracefully and automatically handles data import (I wouldn't even mind having to enter my banking passwords each time I want to update, to avoid storing them)

[chrsig]

I hated all of the advertising in mint. I recently started using ynab[0], which can also import balances & transactions from banks. It supports oauth and 2fa, which was nice for the reason you listed: I don't want to give my credentials to anyone, even a "trusted" vendor like intuit. It also has a rest api, which I haven't gotten to try yet, but stands out as a very nice to have feature for me.

The downside is that ynab is some $, but I think it's worth it not to have ads for insurance, loans, or credit cards being shoved down my throat.

I evaluated personal capital[1] as well, but I got really turned off by them having a "continue with google" auth workflow that leads you to a page saying they haven't implemented it yet. Not a great way to build trust, which is a absolute must for any financial application.

If any HNers have good recommendations, I for one would appreciate hearing them. I'm ok spending ~100/yr on a good financial management app.

[0] https://youneedabudget.com

[1] https://www.personalcapital.com/

[hirvi74]

I recently ended my subscription for YNAB after more than half a decade of usage. I was grandfathered into the old price, but they took that away with the most recent price increase, so I could not justify staying.

However, since I have quit, I have not found my habits to have changed. I think some part of the system is permanently burned into my brain. I am exploring my options with hledger, and it's been a neat experience so far.

[chrsig]

oh, hledger does look pretty neat. If I were the only person involved in my budgeting, I'd definitely give it some serious consideration.

[sundarurfriend]

There's also beancount [1] which has a (local) web interface via fava [2].

[1] https://beancount.github.io/ [2] https://beancount.github.io/fava/

[hirvi74]

I think Beancount might actually be better than hledger for the ways I intend to use it, but I wish Beancount was a bit more relaxed with naming conventions and account names/structure.

[chrishas35]

Where would you like to see it be more relaxed? While the documentation has some pretty strong recommendations, other than the top 5 accounts, you can pretty much do as you wish.

[thefringthing]

It's still possible to use the version of YNAB from before they switched to a subscription model.

[ktta]

This might be just what you're looking for: https://www.monarchmoney.com/

Although I'm not sure how it compares to YNAB since I've heard good things about it too. What I like about Monarch is the nice UI, no ads, responsiveness and that the sync doesn't fail (often) like it failed (often) with Mint all the time.

[chrsig]

That does look like just what I'm looking for. I'm going to have to give the 7 day trial a shot.

I like that it has investment tracking as well.

Agreed that mint was terrible with syncing. I don't know if it's improved at all in the last several years.

[hanklazard]

+1 for ynab.

I’ve been using it for 3-4 years now and happily pay for it. It makes tracking our family expenses manageable in a way that I can’t imagine with many other systems. It is especially helpful during times when your expenses suddenly skyrocket (buying a house, wedding, etc). The reports / graphing features are pretty useful too when you’re trying to understand how to shift your spending habits.

It’s essentially a “cash envelope” budgeting system made digital. The idea is to take all of your available cash and distribute it into categories with specific purposes. When you find there is extra money that needs to be distributed, you pay down some debt or maybe start saving for that vacation you’ve been needing. It really helps you get ahead of your spending and to act responsibly with money.

[kayson]

The thing that turned me away from ynab is that their marketing seems to say that they're trying to change spending/saving behavior in some way. I don't need to plan or make a zbb, I just want to easily categorize and track my spending. Admittedly, I didn't even try their free trial, but it just didn't seem like a good fit.

[sentientslug]

Yeah YNAB is pretty much full steam ahead with the ZBB mindset. I've tried to use it without doing the ZBB part and it really is not set up for that.

[chrsig]

Yeah, I can understand if you're not looking for something to help you with a zero balance budget, then it wouldn't be a great fit.

I think my biggest gripe is the reporting tools. They give a couple basic charts, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

[m-app]

I have personally been using Banktivity for some years. It’s a great app with decent feature velocity (not too slow, but not too fast either), has decent support for EU banks now, and syncs really well. You do have to be in the Apple ecosystem to enjoy its benefits though.

[Mister_Snuggles]

I've been using Banktivity for years, but the recent change to a quasi-subscription model leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I understand why they're moving this way, but I'd much rather have $x for the software (with upgrade pricing for major versions) and $y/mo for the features that require their backend to work.

[rodonn]

FWIW Mint now offers a premium subscription that removes all of the advertising. https://mint.intuit.com/premium

[apatters]

Can't stress enough how valuable this is for small business. Auto-importing and auto-classifying transactions from financial institutions completely changes the way that bookkeeping functions. It also gives you real-time understanding of your financial situation and lowers cost/time.

Our accounting software auto-imports all of our transactions daily via the Plaid API and our classifying ruleset categorizes 95% of them automatically. All that's left for our bookkeeper is to spend a few hours a month going over the unusual ones and doing some general accuracy/sanity checks. In addition we get dynamically generated reports every week which are ~90% accurate. Prior to these features the model was "bookkeeper manually imports a bunch of transactions from multiple sources and does a ton of work at the end of each month and produces one monthly report." Automation here has been a huge win, lower costs and better results.

As much as I appreciate and prefer FOSS software I would never go back to the old way of doing things, the last thing a founder wants to spend a lot of time or money on is bookkeeping.

[kkfx]

Personally I hope a day enough people join to push a law that impose banks to have a standard open API (like SEPA OpenBank, witch is mandatory here in EU BUT only open to institutions not private citizens) open to any customer NOT ONLY as read-only but also for disposing transactions to avoid the need of crappy web-banking porcals.

Unfortunately too many use computers every days without even understanding how can they work for their user profit instead of some third parties mostly employing the human customer as a data cow and small-microfinance bank...

[apatters]

If we legally mandate this what will the consequence be for small businesses that can't afford the cost to comply? (Even if you mandate it for only the big players - what if there end up being only three players who can afford it, they do it well, no one else does and you end up with only three banks?)

I'm super supportive of banks opening up their data for the reasons in my prior post. But the second order effects of regulation are often overlooked--this is exactly what has gone wrong in the US financial industry where we used to have thousands of credit unions across the country and since 2008 most of them have been driven out of business by compliance costs. Naturally the handful of banks that remain are the ones that were the biggest and had the best lobbying effort in Washington...

[kkfx]

What "small businesses", the smallest bank I know can afford such change, indeed they already have anything in place because OpenBank is mandatory here, only artificially limited to just business operators. There is no costs for no one else.

[pylua]

There sort of is in the us, (ofx) but it is old and poorly supported. Most banks do not implement the newer versions of it.

[BeetleB]

I use KMyMoney which has probably the same "support" as GnuCash for online banking.

I now just download transacations from the institution (CSV, OFX, etc) and import the file. Many institutions charge extra for being able to pull automatically, but their export is free. Sounds like a pain but it isn't that bad.

[brewdad]

I've found that I appreciate the manual download and import process. It makes me look over each transaction more deliberately than I would if it were just an automated update. I've caught 3 or 4 fraudulent or erroneous charges over the past half decade because I'm forced to look at each charge on my credit cards.

Probably 90-95% of my spending goes on a credit card and then gets paid off at the end of the month. GnuCash has been great for tracking everything. I'll have to look at KMyMoney too.

[BeetleB]

I didn't mean to imply KMyMoney is necessarily better. I switched a decade ago as it had a better interface - but I don't even remember what aspect was better. I think it did a better job with autocompleting entries or something.

[yonrg]

Gnucash supports importing transactions from my bank account via aqbanking. It uses FinTS/HBCI afaik. And I am surprised and very happy that this still works after PSD2. A manual import, copy& pasting every single transaction would increase the effort intensely.

I use gnucash for about half a decade now for private financing and it is absolutely a valuable helper. I run it at most once a week: Fetch transactions, query balance and reconcile.

[Diris]

You can easily import data into Firefly III using their data importer[0] and Nordigen API or Spectre (usage is explained in [0]). Doing so automatically is just a matter of running a cron job

[0] https://docs.firefly-iii.org/data-importer/

[ParetoOptimal]

> Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that's also worth checking out) just takes way more time than its worth. (OFX was not as straightforward to obtain or use as one would hope)

In the past I used the plaid api to get transaction data.

[Fnoord]

Firefly III uses plugins to import the data. Any9ne can write one, in theory.

[kodah]

A Mint clone would require that banks facilitate much more open access. Being centralized is a good position for Mint because all the financial institution has to do is trust Intuit.

[LAC-Tech]

"Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards"

What is this wizardry? I go to the web portal of my (banks) and basically do double entry.

[atmosx]

US banks support access via API and apps use to fetch data. European banks usually don’t do that, for security reasons.

[amaccuish]

Umm, in the EU due to PSD2, all banks must provide a standardised API: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking

[Plasmoid]

Sort of. IIRC, (either the EU as a whole or just the UK) basically killed open banking. To even use the standard you were required to be an accredited broker even if the data was kept local to the user's device. Getting accredited cost a fortune and basically made it impossible for anyone but the Intuits of Europe to use it.

[p_l]

I think most "normal" accounts in Poland have CSV report options, and some have standardised MT940.

"Enterprise" accounts are pretty much dead in the water without some APIs for over a decade now, as far as I know - the big clients want their SAP and whatnot to directly integrate.

[shellfishgene]

I think all German banks at least support getting transaction data via am API.

[LoveMortuus]

I've heard many good things about Mint, but my problem with it is that it's US only... Or at least I from EU am unable to use it...

[iimblack]

Mint had a data breach and got my bank account hacked which was the first strike. They’re also owned by intuit.