The number one thing that most of these don't do well for me is the connection with banks. You mentioned that there is bank syncing, how well does that work? Can I say, just click my bank and do an oauth connection, and it will store it? I really loved Mint, and essentially want it to be done the same way
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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I got simplefin sync working. But I was surprised how manual everything still is. Actual syncs line items but not balance. You have to manually reconcile it. Actual does not handle transfers automatically, you have to set up rules for it and it's very tedious and often requires manual fixes.
For someone used to mint or monarch, I would say sync functionality is extremely mininal. I want to like it more. I'm kind of surprised so many people don't mind this stuff. Maybe I'm lazy.
In the US it has integration with SimpleFIN. SimpleFIN isn't free but it's pretty cheap ($1.50/mo) and supports most banks out there, even my obscure local credit union. It works pretty well, though sometimes the banks fuck with stuff and seem hell bent on breaking any kind of API access, but SimpleFIN support was really responsive for me to get it fixed when it happened. I do also have to reauthenticate my bank every day when I want to sync, but that's also just the banks being assholes and isn't too bad to do.
How well do you find it works? I'm not afraid of the fee, but I don't want to spend time setting it up and paying the fee to only find out that it won't do most things
Worked really well for me, just put in an API key to actual budget and it pulls all the info from simple fin. Only thing that doesn't pull for me it categories of the transactions so you have to manually set them up in actual but it does allow for rules.
Yeah I started using Actual about a week ago. Setup SimpleFin in a few seconds within a couple of minutes actual was auto populated. I ran into a syncing snag and messaged Simple Fin support. They worked with my credit union and I was all good in a couple of hours. Been running smoothly ever since. I really like it. And I don't have the guilt of not budgeting anymore. Plus, ynab tutorials and advice are basically Actual tutorials.
Tried it and it works pretty well! I'll have to keep playing with it, but so far so good!
Has worked really well for me. Like I mentioned I've had a couple instances where the banks change their login flow and I had to open a support ticket to get it fixed, but they (SimpleFIN) were very responsive in working on it when I opened a support request and had it fixed within a couple days. Two of my accounts also have to be re-authenticated every time I wanna pull data into Actual, but that's also the banks' fault and it's not that big of a deal to do.
As for integration with Actual is basically flawless and just works. Setup is super easy, just paste in a token from SimpleFIN and boom you see all the accounts you have linked and can attach them to accounts in Actual. Sync is rock solid too, I don't have any issues with it messing up transactions with duplicates etc.
Does SimpleFIN use OAuth to log into bank accounts, or do you need to enter your bank's username and password?
Unrelated to this post, but do you know if SimpleFIN supports investment accounts? If it does, it seems like an easy way to let me write a script to help rebalance my investment accounts. I might look into it.
It varies by bank but for all mine you have to use the username and password unfortunately. My understanding is that it's just how the underlying bank APIs work in general, because that's what I have to do when I link accounts for my banks elsewhere too, not just in SimpleFIN. I don't think they actually store your credentials though, I think it proxies it to the bank login and then caches a token. You can probably ask their support about the details if you're concerned, they have been pretty responsive to me and willing to answer technical questions.
It does support investment accounts, I have my retirement and investment accounts in there. It supports just about every account I have, actually, credit cards included which is super handy. I think it's all read-only access through, so you can only use it to import data not make new transactions.
I think it's all read-only access through, so you can only use it to import data not make new transactions.
That's alright. Even read-only access is useful. I could write a script that pulls my current investments, prompts for the amount I'll be investing in total, and prints out the buys (eg "buy 10 x VOO, 5 x VXF, 20 x VXUS") that'll keep the account balanced based on some percentages.
Not sure if it tracks like your actual portfolio breakdown, it might have access to that info but for Actual Budget it just shows the balance on the account.
If you're in the EU you can do bank syncing for free with GoCardless integration. If you're in the US you need to go with SimpleFIN which costs a small sum and is in a more experimental phase than the GoCardless integration I think. Either way, GoCardless has been working great for me. Actually far better than YNAB which didn't even support my bank. It's literally just set up and forget.
Because the actual export, transform and loading of multiple banks and accounts data is cumbersome its holding me back.
So curious to read about GoCardless.
But is that also for consumer?
And is it this: https://gocardless.com/pricing/
Yes, it works a treat in the EU (due to PSD2, which mandates open banking) and U.K. (which is copy/pasting PSD2 to ensure their banks aren’t left behind).
I’m syncing with Handelsbanken UK, American Express, Lloyds, Monzo and Starling, all in the UK. Works a treat except most of the banks actually rate limit you to a couple of syncs per day.
Yes. You can read about on Actual Budgets documentation. It's free for personal use. You just generate an API token. https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync/gocardless/
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The man who originally invented this tech is a really good guy, can’t recommend it enough!
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 really works (except with a weird issue around starting date and starting balance).
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.
For anyone finding this later. Unfortunately I’ve had to come off Actual :-(
While the gocardless syncing works really well, Actuals code for merging transactions is just too flaky for the banks I use. I end up having multiple similar transactions, done on the same day for the same amount, collapse into one and while you’re meant to be able to just set a starting date and an account value, Actual kept on syncing transactions from before the starting date.
I appreciate it’s open source and given I’ve paid nothing I should expect nothing. All good. But there wasn’t any engagement in the discord support section nor any response to bugs filed. It’s clearly under active development but the QA side doesn’t get enough attention that I could get it to work for me.
While I understand they don’t want to accept bugs without repro steps, there’s not enough scaffolding for capturing data and submitting issues inside the app.
I know I could get on that and fix it. I’m not complaining. I’m glad Actual works for many. But the transaction syncing totally did not work for the banks I used and so I’ve had to stop using it.
Yeah, I think it's fantastic as well. The SimpleFIN syncinc works fantastically, and I'm happy enough that I cancelled my TillerHQ subscription, which lapses this month. There's still a little work to do to clean up some of my older data, but once I get it all rolling nicely, I'll definitely send the developers a substantial portion of what I was paying for Tiller (like $100/year). I've only used it for a couple months, and I plan to play with it a bit in the next month or two as I'm preparing EOY stuff.
Looks interesting. Marked it for exploration. Too many cool projects to explore and not enough time!
You need a time budgeter
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.
"That you can self-host" Does a budgeting tool need to be a service that's constantly running and not an application? I struggle to see how having it running as a service on some box somewhere is going to help. "It's so you can access it on your phone elsewhere." Oh great. It'll have a garbagepuke mobile UI.
In this case, the mobile UI doesn't even work properly.
That said, I find value in it because it makes it so much easier for my SO and I to see the same thing. Oh, and it supports importing transactions via SimpleFIN, which is really nice.
How does it compare to Firefly III?
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
i've been enjoying it, the docs are really good. i think it could be a little "smarter" like with recognizing schedules, but it'll only get better. a major limiting factor for me that isn't any fault of actual is that my apple card either through simplefin or manually exporting only allows download of the previous month's transactions after closing. so for that account it's not really useful for seeing where i'm at budget-wise halfway through the month, only in retrospect and forecasting.
Why would you need to host this? Why not just have a client that does backups?
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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 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.
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 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!
With the price increases which will probably continue i think this is my next step after YNAB
Neat, I did already transfer my budgeting to GNUCash a few months ago, but this looks shiny too.
Actual budget just dropped, holy hell
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.
Nope, which honestly annoys me but is pretty par for the course. That said, when it comes to budgeting, I mostly care about where money is going and care less about the "whole financial picture." If I need to estimate what retirement looks like, I want more than a simple budgeting tool.
I personally use Fidelity for investment tracking. My main "checking" is their Cash Management Account, my "savings" is a brokerage account (invested in t-bills and money market funds), and I can link all of my other accounts and it pulls in specific investments and shows a consolidated view. It's awesome because it shows all kinds of stuff, like morningstar-style factor weights, sector exposure, etc. It's not self-hosted, but I trust them with my banking anyway, so it's not like I'm opening myself up to some new exploit (oh, and Fidelity also has proper MFA; Symantic VIP, which kinda sucks, but it's way better than any other financial institution).
I used to track this stuff via a Google spreadsheet (couldn't find a way to get stock quotes in LibreOffice), but this seems to be good enough for me.
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I will try this out! That looks handy!
Last night I just used libreoffice calc. Wish I was told this sooner so I could spend my time configuring this and budgeting next week instead
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