Finance / Investment self-hosted apps? - eviltoast
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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 [https://github.com/beancount/beancount] + Fava [https://github.com/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 [https://plaintextaccounting.org/], but importing a large number of transactions always feels cumbersome. I tried Firefly-III [https://www.firefly-iii.org/] briefly, but it didn’t support investment tracking. I also saw Ghostfolio [https://ghostfol.io/] 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?

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?

  • This2ShallPass@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    Firefly III is an option, but I found it difficult to set up and the importer tool works well for Europe but not the US.

    You could also just create your own Docker container which has Skrooge, GnuCash, or KMyMoney in it. I have done this with Skrooge since it imports data well and is simpler than GnuCash.

    With the Linuxserver.io KasmVNC base image and install any GUI application to run it from a browser.

    • johntash@eviltoast.orgOPEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      I haven’t seen skrooge before, thanks. I was looking for a web app but I guess that isn’t really a hard requirement. I did try gnucash before and didn’t spend enough time learning how to use it. If skrooge is simpler, I’ll try it out.

      Kasmvnc looks really cool too even if I don’t use it for this.

    • johntash@eviltoast.orgOPEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      I’m pretty sure i read that the dev didn’t want to add support for investment tracking.

      I didn’t realize it has plug-ins though, I might give it another shot. Worst case I could use it for everything except investments and find something else for the rest…

      Do you add transactions manually or import them somehow?

  • lemmy@lemmy.technowizardry.netEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • johntash@eviltoast.orgOPEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • lemmy@lemmy.technowizardry.netEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        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?

        I considered that, but that would require me to create deposit or withdrawal transactions every day to represent the change in account value.

        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.

        That changes things. I might go ahead and apply for Plaid and use it for cases where I don’t have my own scrapers. I know it doesn’t give detailed information for investments to the degree that I am looking for.