Not affiliated in any way with Actual Budget, but I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the FOSS version of YNAB pretty much so if you’re a fan of envelope budgeting it’s a great tool. I’d even say it has quite a few other strengths compared to YNAB, and you can always be sure that your financial data stays within your reach.
Neat, I did already transfer my budgeting to GNUCash a few months ago, but this looks shiny too.
I switched over to this last month, and I’m already a fan of it. It did take a bit of time to port over my old shtitty excel tracking, and to write a few python scripts to parse the export CSV files from each of my bank accounts, but it is very clearly worth it.
One of the nice things is that it uses a SQLite db to store everything, so if shit ever hits the fan with one of my drives or the software, it isn’t the end of the world.
Does Actual support investment accounts / stocks? I was using beancount/fava for tracking, but have been lazy and haven’t updated it in a long time.
I don’t think one takes into account investment accounts with envelope budgeting, if I’m not wrong. All the accounts in this kind of budgeting should be involved in the budget, to be money that is to be assigned. “Give every dollar a job” kind of style. Money in investment accounts is for the most part saving for savings sake. But I guess people can assign that kind of money as well, e.g. “this is money that I’m investing to be able to buy a house in 5 years”. I’m not an expert on this so you could look up how YNAB does it, or if Actual has any docs on this.
I really love it, been using it for about 2 months, came from YNAB, used that for probably 3-5 years. Although I wish it was a little more mobile friendly, it works on mobile well enuf for me to record my daily transactions and then I just use a desktop once a week when I do all my bill payments and budget catch up.
I really like the reporting options, and also it has some mass note append/prepend/replace functionality which works great for me hashtagging the expenses I have addressed, confirmed and moved around to various accounts.
I do wish it had flagging, I really loved the colored flags, but I’m using the hashtagging as a replacement and it works pretty well.
I’ve literally just switched to Actual (3 days in) after living out of a homemade Excel YNAB clone for years and years. Overall it’s great and the bank syncing works really work.
I love that it’s open source, E2E encrypted, self-hostable and the data lives in a SQLite database.
If I haven’t found any major snags, I’ll of course become a supporter in a couple of weeks.
I downloaded the mobile app but it’s asking me for E-Mail straight away and there’s no way to select my own server… What gives?
This mobile app is not associated with the current open source project. Like i think it’s a vestige from before they went open source. They recommend using actual in your mobile browser for now, which works decently well
Ohhhh, thanks for letting me know!
Actual budget just dropped, holy hell
How does it compare to Firefly III?
at first I thought this required hosting but it looks like maybe its stand alone software now. Am I right or did I misunderstand the site?
You can self host it so you can access it over the web, or you can choose to run it entirely locally. It’s pretty nifty, and I’ve elected to using it for the second option.
I’ve been using it for almost a year now and it works great. I used to just use a spread sheet to track my bills paychecks and due dates but this made it much nicer
This is the comment that’s going to make me try it. I love my spreadsheet, so I’ll have to see if this does everything that my spreadsheet does.
Why would you need to host this? Why not just have a client that does backups?
Looks interesting. Marked it for exploration. Too many cool projects to explore and not enough time!
You need a time budgeter
Looks nice, I’ll check it out. Always open to something that looks nicer than my excel sheets
Maybe I’ll do the homeassistant install option, I’m actually surprised to see that mentioned in their documentation. I didn’t see a docker image, surely there’s a community-maintained one somewhere?
My eyes have failed me today, thanks lol
The man who originally invented this tech is a really good guy, can’t recommend it enough!
With the price increases which will probably continue i think this is my next step after YNAB
