I think it helps if personal finance managers explicitly describe at least the following:
1. What automation, if any, exists for entering transactions? This is the most laborious/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.
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.
3. What sort of reporting, dashboarding, and potentially sharing capabilities exist? Ideally, I want to share some reports with my partner
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.
> 1. What automation, if any, exists for entering transactions? This is the most laborious/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.
It has import support (can be templated using handlebars), no
automated fetch though
> 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.
It has a very crude tf-idf based categorization. I do have plans to improve it.
> 3. What sort of reporting, dashboarding, and potentially sharing capabilities exist? Ideally, I want to share some reports with my partner
You can checkout the https://demo.paisa.fyi It's just a web app that
works over http, so you can run it on a machine and share them
access. You have to figure out the authorization part, I do plan to
add some password based auth soon.
> It has a very crude tf-idf based categorization. I do have plans to improve it.
You could use the same algorithm that was used for spam filtering in my Linux Journal article from back in 2003[1]. I have thought about making a plugin to do it with MoneyDance but haven't gotten around to it. But I think it would be quite easy for you to integrate into Paisa if you are looking to do that sort of thing. I have actually made some improvements to the algorithm since then; let me know if you're interested...
> 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.
One of my aggregators categorizes any alcohol purchases (purchases from a state 'ABC' store) as 'home improvement'. While technically the house looks better when I'm drunk, I still thinks it's a mistake, and I submitted feedback to them. 2 years ago. No change.
Would you rather your aggregator sell your alcoholism data to your health insurance company, or your joy of maintenance and taking good care of your property to your home insurance company?
Why not both? I would not be surprised to find the banks already sell that data to other entities anyway (directly or indirectly). I end up buying perhaps $100 of hooch per year; unsure I personally care if anyone knows, but yes, for some it might be an issue.
1. What automation, if any, exists for entering transactions? This is the most laborious/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.
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.
3. What sort of reporting, dashboarding, and potentially sharing capabilities exist? Ideally, I want to share some reports with my partner
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.
[1]: https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/