What Linux software is good for managing a household budget?
Up to now I enter receipts by hand into a spreadsheet and cross-reference everything to my bank statements. Is there a Linux program that'll let me download a bank statement and then intelligently categorize different entries on my bank statement? Or allow me to manually categorize entries? No spyware or intrusive software.
Here are your choices to try out yourself and see if they can do what you need:
And for Android:
We use KMyMoney for all our stuff for years now. Very happy with it! It came in very useful when we were considering some big purchases to figure out what we could afford.
It can read Quicken files which most banks support. Those have account numbers inside them, so KMyMoney will automatically recognize which account it should go into if you set enter those numbers when setting up the account in KMyMoney in the first place. Some banks only allow you to export to CSV which is a bit more cumbersome, but KMyMoney supports that too.
It will intelligently categorize statement entries too. If you've set a particular entry as belonging to a certain category once, it will remember that for the next time you import a statement. Then you just confirm.
Those categories are very handy when making the reports to see our spending and income patterns.
Anyway, I highly recommend it.
I've been using Homebank for years now and I'm very happy with it. Download transaction data from your bank in QuickBooks format and import it into homebank. Then, you can create auto-categorizing rules for all those recurring purchases, and manually assign a category to the other transactions. I do this every month and it now takes 10-15min max to go through all my transactions and check/categorize everything, and see some nice customizable charts of where my money's going.
I also use Homebank, and it’s more than enough for my needs as a single guy
I heard ActualBudget can do this, but less a software but a server.
Actual Budget is software. It can be run on a home server if desired.
If you are not indimidated by selfhosting, then definitely give Firefly III a try.
Second this! I like the interface. Especially useful for euro banks where you can auto sync.
GNU Cash may satisfy at least some of your requirements.
I have used GNUCash for maybe a decade (sounds impossible to me) but it's actually difficult to get much out of it for all the data one puts in. I'm in the XML data store I think, so maybe the SQL data implementation is better.
The graphs are ok and correctly setting up sub accounts as virtual envelopes within your normal account for your current account allows you to replicate the buckets/envelopes/spaces in, say, Starling bank (UK bank which sells its software to other banks as hussle).
I'm looking to set up something like Actual Budget (server) going forward.
Personally I use ledger for something like this. It's a double-entry accounting system and from what I've heard similar to GnuCash though I haven't used that one.
Parsing and Categorizing of bank statements would probably need to be done manually or with a self-developed script, though maybe there's already something made for that. I haven't looked so far.
i tried GnuCash, but i didn't find it very useful.
there's also Homebank & KMyMoney; i haven't tried either.
i doubt any will auto import statements, so there's work to be done there.
Here we run a docker image of Actual Budget. We just need to update it by importing the bank statements and you can create rules that will automatically categorize things, it is great.
I use Buckets . It's a small 1 person freeware, dev asks for a 30 dollar one time donation but it isn't mandatory. It's based on the software and idealogy of ynab which enshittified several years ago. The learning resources of ynab should be mostly compatible but I haven't looked at it in a while.
It interopts with simplefin, an open source tool that reads your bank transactions and gives read only access to buckets. It costs 10dollars per year to use their servers. It creates some annoying quirks that is mostly the fault of my bank but its passable. The app can also take csv files if you would prefer (which most banks allow you to export).
I manually add receipts from my partner and myself to a CSV file, too. I have a custom R scripts to calculate the monthly contribution. This way we can see who paid more/less each month and needs to componsate.
In the future I want to plot graphs to see how we are affected by inflation over the past years.
You should be able to do all that stuff with spreadsheets. Any program you use will be a spreadsheet under the hood anyhow.
Indeed, came to add spreadsheets, e.g. LibreOffice Calc or OnlyOffice on NextCloud if you want it Web based. If it's "good enough" to manage the budget of countries, huge corporations, etc and is taught in schools, it's probably good enough for a household.
I don’t know what people call this, but I’m curious if you also need future balance prediction, basically “here’s how much left over you’re going to have this payday, next payday, etc”. I might switch from my homegrown spreadsheet to one of these recommendations if they also support that.
(I’m talking about something where you input your known scheduled debits and credits, especially for people with biweekly paychecks but monthly debits, and then you match recent actual activity with what’s expected. So you get “current balance is $1800 but it’ll get as low as $300 before you get paid next” type info to keep you from over spending.)
I use firefly-iii. You can setup rules and import from csv files. I even have it integrated with enablebanking so it is fully automatic.
There are also mobile apps that will work with your own server.
MoneyManager EX. It is the closest FOSS application I've seen to Quicken. Imports bank statements, catagorize different expenses, monthly budgets . .
Linux, Windows, Android, iOS versions all available.
I used Kresus some times ago on a server. It was nice, but my bank don't play nice and it is not my thing to manage like that.
It should auto import and… I did not follow developments so don't remember the functionalities.
Great question I've been wondering the same thing. I've been using a spreadsheet with some fancy lookup sheets for far too long, which results in only one 'category' of expenses ever being tracked.
If you're willing to use a web app and pay $50 a year. Monarch has been incredible for me.
neovim