Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

This looks awesome. I love that it&#x27;s built on ledger. I have been wanting to move away from Simplifi Money for some time for obvious reasons (owned by Intuit). It seems that the real moat is pulling the data in a consistent and correct way. Yes, you COULD try to find every single export option for every bank, but I think Plaid is really the only service that pulls this data somewhat correctly, due to the U.S. not having a PSD2 equivalent in our laws.<p>So the question is, would it make sense to have a Plaid plugin for this? Obviously because they are a 3rd party, it negates some of the benefits, but I simply cannot use this system manually because I have so many accounts. Maybe one workaround is to pull from Tiller (which uses plaid), then export a csv&#x2F;excel.<p>Any chance there&#x27;s a good plan in place to get automated data imports working, even if we need a 3rd party to do it?

It&#x27;s interesting how many tools can analyze where your money has been going, but few go deep on the planning + forecasting side.<p>Have you thought about building out the &quot;retirement&quot; module more? If you need any inspiration, I&#x27;ve been working on a personal finance simulator [1] for the past two and a half years as a side project.<p>Really great job with the docs on this, and I love that you include a demo environment!<p>I imagine that eventually we&#x27;ll see an app that pulls budgeting, tracking, and planning all together in a fully seamless way. Whoever manages that will probably be a force to be reckoned with.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectionlab.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectionlab.com</a>

Nostalgia. I led a small team in 2009 and built Paisa.com - a financial&#x2F;investment Startup. I still have the initial mockup designs I did in a hotel room in Delhi&#x2F;Gurgaon to pitch to NDTV.

This is incredible!<p>Great job building this and also writing the documentation that explains concepts as well as how they are implemented.<p>I can&#x27;t believe how many comments here are dismissive. If you are happy using a paid solution to manage your finances and don&#x27;t want to get into the weeds yourself, you are probably not the target audience for this.<p>One suggestion would be to make the country-specific pieces like tax calculations module so others can contribute their own.

How are people automating the data import? I can&#x27;t imagine someone entering everything by hand. Lots of places don&#x27;t even provide an export file you can work with... most of them offer a PDF.<p>It seems like most financial places rely on Plaid for the data integration, but that&#x27;s a paid service I don&#x27;t think Open-Source or free personal finance apps would use.

This is really weird for me, a few years ago I was trying to build exactly this - as in same ledger-based, local-first&#x2F;only etc. decisions - only difference really was that I never got as far as visualisations, and faffed about with PDF-&gt;ledger instead until I lost motivation for the project.<p>Very nice to see! I look forward to trying this out properly soon. I recommend not bothering with PDFs, OCR errors however occasional ruin it - it&#x27;s worse if they&#x27;re rare in a way, since you come to trust it. If you really do want it, extract the actual text layer instead. There won&#x27;t always be one, tables will be a mess, and sometimes there&#x27;ll be a lot of nonsense - but at least the correct content that is there <i>will</i> be £74.97 or whatever, not misread as £24.87.

Unfortunately I can&#x27;t see your web site as it does not work without sending cookies to Google. Please implement the site with only needed cookies.<p>NB this means that your site cannot be used in Europe,

Wow, this is fantastic! I&#x27;ve been using GNUCash for some simpler tasks, like tracking income and expenses for a rental property, not for all of my personal finance. But GNUCash is... kinda clunky, and I&#x27;m not sure of the best way to share the data, as my partner would appreciate having access to it too.<p>I love that this has a web interface, but still seems to have a fairly simple data model based on `ledger` and plain text files.<p>I see some other posts about data import from banks, and that&#x27;s always been the thing keeping me from doing this for all of my personal finance. I just don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d be able to keep up if I had to manually log into bank, brokerage, and credit card accounts, download my data for each one (assuming they even allow a CSV-style download), and import into GNUCash (or whatever).<p>I&#x27;m curious about the Plaid option (and really cool a Plaid employee is posting here), but I&#x27;ve always been wary of them. It looks like they have some sort of OAuth-like process for one of my financial institutions, but the others are all &quot;give Plaid your credentials and we promise to keep them safe&quot;. Not really comfortable with that. Everyone gets hacked eventually. Regardless, I&#x27;m not too keen on giving Plaid literally all of my financial data; just doesn&#x27;t seem like a great idea.<p>But it seems like there&#x27;s really no alternative, at least in the US. I wish the government would mandate that all of these institutions implement a standardized API, and that they give regular people (not just big companies) access to their own data through it. Sigh...

Tools where you control the underlying data in plain text are <i>severely</i> underrated. I love this.

Today I learned &quot;paisa&quot; is a subunit of the Indian rupee - here we call &quot;paisa&quot; to all things related to a specific region of Colombia (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Paisa_(region)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Paisa_(region)</a>)

Has anyone compared this to YNAB4? (Not the cloud-only subscription-only YNAB, but the good one that was killed off in 2019)<p>It&#x27;s by far the best household bookkeeping tool I&#x27;ve ever used, but it won&#x27;t ever get updates again (running it in a VM just so I can make sure I will always be able to run it), and it would be nice to have something that can track stocks and maybe even foreign currency - but for now, I would be happy with something that can just replace YNAB4.<p>The lack of Quicken OFX Import is a bummer :( But if the CSV import is good, it would still work. (As much of a pain as OFX is to implement for developers, especially since there&#x27;s at least two major versions, it is pretty widely supported by US banks to download my transaction history)<p>Will probably give it a spin on the weekend, since the demo actually looks promising!

Here&#x27;s something that always trips me up when I look into non professional software for double entry accounting (or more accurately, instructions around them).<p>It&#x27;s been a long time, so I may be getting it wrong, but I do have some introductory information of accounting. And according to that, in a transaction such as salary received, the accounting would look something like:<p>Income: Salary - Credit<p>Assets: Checking - Debit.<p>The Golden rule&#x2F;s that apply here (Debit the receiver, credit the giver)<p>However, looking at the tutorial, the example given is:<p>2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;01 Salary<p>Income:Salary:Acme (Debit Account)<p>Assets:Checking (Credit Account)<p>This is the opposite of what I expect, however, I see this all the time when looking at tutorials&#x2F;information written by SW devs.<p>What am I missing or is everyone else just getting it wrong?

This looks really cool I&#x27;ve used beancount&#x2F;fava for tax planning, but of course I had to code up my own tax models. In the US tax table change every year (by a predictable formula) and some forms of income are weird, like I bonds are exempt from federal tax, but are taxed by state income tax. It seems unlikely that you could support all the cases, but is there a straightforward way to plug in your own model? I did see in tax.go you had long term, short term, but couldn&#x27;t quite find the income tax tables, like long term capital gains has different rates depending upon filing status and amount.

I&#x27;m a longtime user of gnucash and this is a great product to convince me to move to ledger&#x2F;hledger.<p>Question for author - Is it mostly a reporting tool or does it work similar to h&#x2F;ledger where I can input my transactions from paisa?<p>Question for HN users - have you found ledger to be easier to use compared to gnucash? My challenges have been my lack or ease of understanding on how to input transactions in ledger and also getting good reports comparable to gnucash. It&#x27;s highly likely I&#x27;m unaware of how to use the tool properly but I am not sure where to learn this.

This is great!<p>If you could add multi-language support, then I&#x27;m sure my family will use it :)<p>&gt; I am interested in knowing what people normally want to understand about their finances<p>For my family use cases - seeing upcoming expenses and how much is left in the account on the specific dates in a calendar time-flow view, this way we can see how and when things are spent and if new entries are added we can plan for how much is left at a specific target date (like a trip). I&#x27;ve seen nothing like this, so would be extremely useful.

I want to know where my money goes. I like to look at stacked-area (or column) charts of the categories of spending. To make this work I have some software I made ~20 years ago that does double-entry book-keeping. At the end of the month, I import statements from financial service providers (eg: Wells Fargo, Chase, PayPal, Stripe, etc). Lots of stuff is repeat purchases (eg: Shell Gas) and my software automatically categorises. Some transactions I have to categorise manually. Each category &#x2F; vendor becomes an expense-account and my banks and CCs exist as assets and liabilities.<p>Once the import and reconciliation is done I pull up a my column chart that shows where the money went -- and can compare over time -- see a full year of movement. I&#x27;ve been through various charting libraries with it and most recently moved to ECharts[0] -- so I&#x27;m planning to expand with Treemap and Sankey style visuals.<p>The import process, which I do monthly takes maybe an hour. I&#x27;m importing from like 5 bank accounts, 3 payment processors, 4 CC providers. The part that takes the longest is signing into their slow sites, navigating past pop-up&#x2F;interstitial, getting to their download page and waiting for it to download. Loads of these sites (WF, Chase) have been &quot;modernised&quot; and have some real bullshit UI&#x2F;UX going on -- lags, no keyboard, elements jump around, forms can&#x27;t remember state, ctrl+click won&#x27;t open in a new page cause that damned link isn&#x27;t actually a link but some nested monster of DIVs with 19 event listeners on each one -- and somehow still all wrong.<p>I think the most-best feature would be to have some tool automatically get all my transactions from all these providers into one common format. Gimmee some JSON with like 10 commonly-named fields for the normal stuff and then 52 other BS fields that each provider likes to add (see a PayPal CSV for example). Does that exist and I just don&#x27;t know?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;echarts.apache.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;echarts.apache.org&#x2F;</a>

What is the difference between this and GnuCash?<p>GnuCash also allows you to generate reports from double-entry accounting.

Looks good! Paisa Vasool! Especially as it is free :-)<p>You don’t have to, of course, but do you plan to open source it? That way others can contribute to it too.<p>How tightly is it bound to ledger? How hard would it be to adapt it to other plaintext accounting programs like beancount?

I was looking for some software that I could use to make sense of my bank transactions from imported statements, and sadly found that none of the FLOSS options I tried could import the counterparty&#x27;s bank account number.<p>I have to ask, do people mostly enter transactions manually into their personal finance software? Or do they just go by names for imported transactions? This means that I can&#x27;t meaningfully import transactions between my multiple accounts. Do others just fix them up manually?

This looks pretty great! I used to use beancount + fava a lot, but have been slacking lately because it just feels like work to input everything and catch up.<p>I might give this a try and then see if I can convert my beancount files to ledger.

This is awesome! I like how it&#x27;s built and I looks like it&#x27;s open for integrations of any kind.<p>I&#x27;m also too impatient to manually enter all transactions but import from PDF statement form a bank looks like a doable task. The only transactions that would be required to enter manually is cash&#x2F;crypto&#x2F;etc but for them there are no other choice.<p>Contrats with the the release Anantha and I hope your project will gain attention it deserves!

Very cool! I was trying a different approach of packaging a vscode experience with beancount &#x2F; fava built-in, but haven&#x27;t had time to get quite as far as you: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;seltzered&#x2F;beancolage">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;seltzered&#x2F;beancolage</a><p>Have you considered incorporating a split view of the ledger with the reports?

Awesome! I&#x27;ve been using Beancount&#x2F;Fava for over 2 years now and this looks really slick.<p>One thing off the bat I noticed, it doesn&#x27;t look like custom Tags are supported? I use tags all the time in beancount, say to filter for a trip #trip-europe-2022 which would break down my cash flow and balances (and the rest of the fava UI) for a subset of transactions.

This looks very similar to Beancount, which has been around for a while and has quite the community and extensions.<p>How does this differentiate?

I use “pocketsmith” because I like the look ahead calendar view. Does this offer that? I could not see it in the demo.

It&#x27;s nice and has a lot of quite advanced features.<p>If you want a simple app to track lent and borrows among friends and circle then try Debitum. But it&#x27;s for Android only..<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marmo&#x2F;debitum">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marmo&#x2F;debitum</a>

I must admit as a Western-denomination consumer I was thrown off by the display of the monetary convention such as this --&gt; 1,25,80,568 then realized it must be in Lakh and the author coming from this convention. The difference in perception is interesting.

I have a tool to easily convert bank csv&#x27;s to ledger format <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;muralisc&#x2F;bank2ledger-cli">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;muralisc&#x2F;bank2ledger-cli</a>

@ananthakumaran, can this be installed via Docker and ran in the browser like your demo[1]?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.paisa.fyi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.paisa.fyi&#x2F;</a>

I love the idea, but to me one of the key things is being able to record expenses manually from the phone, in the same account my wife uses. I&#x27;m stuck with ynab for this requirement

I got turned off with the cookie popup. There&#x27;s literally no reason why you need any of that. You want to know which pages people are visiting? Mine your htaccess logs.

This looks great. Is there any way this can be integrated with bank accounts, credit cards and mutual fund transactions? In India specifically?

Love this project! I&#x27;ve been trying out Paisa off late and it&#x27;s been great at just de-cluttering my investments in various assets (which are spread all over).

Thanks for creating this tool! I was really in need of something open source, and something I can contribute to.

Love the app, will try it for a few days. Thanks for making it. Hopefully I can contribute after trying it for a few days!

Is there any good non-web non-plaintext (which is unsuitable for rich data despite its initial allure) alternative?

Amazing I stumbled across Paisa a while back on plaintextaccounting subreddit and has come a long way since

having using hledger for a little more than a year, this is all my reporting dreams came true. thank you so much

I’m using beancount with fava as UI, any experience why you choose based on Ledger vs Beancount ? Thanks

Thrilled to see something like this building on Ledger (a great tool by itself). Will definitely check it out!

This looks great.<p>Semi-related to this: does anyone know of any double entry ledgers backed by actual databases like dynamo?

I’ve been using YNAB as of late. Cheap enough it’s a no brainer and it’s really good.

i won&#x27;t use any finance manager that doesn&#x27;t employ the envelop method, like ynab.<p>looking at the demo for 10 seconds it looks like a web based gnu cash.

I honestly just use excel but that&#x27;s because I use it as a book of record for receipts as well. Since you&#x27;re looking for open source alternatives, OpenOffice would fill that need.

Love the clean interface example into ledger-cli!

It has a CLI? And it’s on macOS? I’m sold.

Any plans for a Linux version?

Great work but not useful unless there is integration with 3rd party via plaid

wow, now I can say I like my personal finance manager the way I like my women.

Slightly off topic but how do people use these? Depending on where&#x2F;what I pay, I pay with an assortment of credit cards, bank account, debit cards, paypal, etc.<p>Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something?

I am probably the target audience for this kind of thing, but I’m having trouble seeing myself slog through hundreds of household transactions every month (or putting in the time to automate transaction imports from my credit union and credit cards). I’m happy to huck money at YNAB to do all this for me, on top of which they give me an app that my wife and I can both use to check the budget and enter transactions on our phones. Reconciling the accounts and budgeting for the next month becomes maybe a half-hour exercise. Whereas with Paisa I see nothing but entire weekends lost in service of the machine.

After building and using my own bookkeeping solution for my small business, one of the main takeaways for me before and after I built it was that bookkeeping software is only useful once you know the bookkeeping rules. Whatever software solution you use - whether that&#x27;s some webapp, an Excel sheet, or some homegrown solution - you always need to know these rules. Even the simple rules for a small business take some time and understanding to get a grip on. I haven&#x27;t seen bookkeeping software that is plug-and-play, so without knowing these rules as a user, if that&#x27;s even possible!?<p>Knowing this for my own situation made me decide to opt for a homegrown software solution, because I had to learn these rules anyway. I felt more capable in my programming language of choice than in Excel, and I didn&#x27;t want to pay for a SaaS solution, let alone learn another interface.

That cookie banner is straight from hell. Took me a solid minute to realize how to disable tracking. Ugghh.

I think it helps if personal finance managers explicitly describe at least the following:<p>1. What automation, if any, exists for entering transactions? This is the most laborious&#x2F;cumbersome part of personal finance. Some tools use financial data aggregators (plaid, yodlee etc.) that involves sharing login credentials with a third party, sometimes disabling 2FA, or other steps that are anti-security or anti-privacy. It sucks that in the USA at least, there is practically no way for customers to fetch their bank data via an open API. Until recently, many financial institutions supported OFX, but that is being phased out.<p>2. How is categorization of transactions accomplished? Ideally, I want autocategorization based on my own previously categorized transactions, since the bulk of my transactions are repeats at the same merchants.<p>3. What sort of reporting, dashboarding, and potentially sharing capabilities exist? Ideally, I want to share some reports with my partner<p>A while ago, I created my own homegrown system to automate my personal finances[1]. It is capable of doing all of the above, without sharing data with a 3rd party. Unfortunately, the automated transaction retrieval mostly does not work because financial institutions are dropping support for OFX.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sagar.se&#x2F;blog&#x2F;where-is-the-money&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sagar.se&#x2F;blog&#x2F;where-is-the-money&#x2F;</a>

This looks great! We&#x27;ve been building a wealth tracker with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;markets.sh" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;markets.sh</a> and were a bit flabbergasted when people started &quot;abusing&quot; our automatically syncing Yodlee connection to hook up all of their checking and credit card accounts (technically we market only for brokerages and investment accounts). We have a free and simple API and plain CSV download which in itself seems to be a real pain point for people.<p>Apparently, just being able to pull your financial data into open-source tools and excel could be a product since Yodlee and other aggregators are often too expensive and technical to set up for individuals.<p>I think we need to force all financial companies to have a modern API and OAuth available for everyone via legislation.

I wondered about the name. I guess I&#x27;m unfamiliar with a bunch of South Asian references, apparently it is Hindi and related to currency: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%88%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%BE" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%88%E0%A4%B8%E...</a><p>I was perplexed a bit because <i>paisa</i> (like <i>paisano</i>, countryman) is also a word I hear a lot among Latin American immigrants in the US, seems like one of those things that can be taken offensively but I mostly seem to hear it as a term of endearment.

LICENSE AGPL3<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ananthakumaran&#x2F;paisa&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;COPYING">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ananthakumaran&#x2F;paisa&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;COPYING</a><p>I won&#x27;t use this because I can&#x27;t ensure all my systems can be agpl3. Like bank systems I don&#x27;t control.

What&#x27;s with the thousand separator being placed on every 2 digits except for the last 3 digits?<p>How do you even do that, unless you manually regex it?<p>If that&#x27;s the case, already looks weird on technical decisions.<p>There&#x27;s never a decent open source self finance management app somehow.<p>It&#x27;s either bloated or just doesn&#x27;t look easy on the eyes for simple day to day use.