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 (free bank syncing in the EU with more banks supported for example), and you can always be sure that your financial data stays within your reach.
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.
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
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.
The number one thing that most of these don’t do well for me is the connection with banks.
A bit of an anecdote, but i was a long-time user of Mint, which integrated with all my banks and credit cards, which was nice.
When I decided to selfhost, I was disappointed that bank syncing wasn’t a thing, or it had these roundabout ways of working, or they simply didn’t support the banks and credit cards i use.
So… I ended up wity Money Manager EX.
Once i did the initial importing of my records, everything since has been manually entered.
Now, this might seem tedious depending on how many transactions and accounts you manage, but it’s really not.
Depending on how often you update your records, you can do an easy export/import of your transactions from your bank (usually a csv export). Doing this once a month isn’t terrible.
I just manually enter all my transactions. Yes, more work, but also less frustration and it makes me feel more in touch with my spending.
Even not having to worry about the hassle of syncing not working, or having to fix things like that is a huge weight off my shoulders.
Anyway, just wanted to share my experience because bank syncing shouldn’t be a make-or-break thing.
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!
