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Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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GnuCash can import directly from your bank [1]. There are also some mobile apps [2], but they are not super well integrated with the desktop application - I think you have to manually export and import every time.

[1] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-manual/tools-on-li...

[2] https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/GnuCash_and_Mobile_Devices

It can import directly from some banks maybe, but certainly not my bank. I haven't had any success importing to GnuCash from _any_ bank I do business with.

There is also the plaid api to gnucash [1], which should work with a lot more banks. Personally, I have not used any of these. My banks allow csv downloads, which works well enough for me. I wouldn't give my data to a 3rd party in any case.

[1] https://github.com/ebridges/plaid2qif

I used to have this problem, but then I found most banks offer free export to some file format - even those that charge for SW integration. You just have to dig around the site to find the feature.

Every bank I've ever used has had functionality to do csv exports (or xlsx, for which I have a one-liner to convert to csv), which can trivially be imported into gnucash.

At least in the UK/EU, it seems to be a common feature.

That's true, I mean the automatic direct import though.

I wonder if there is a nice local browser automation tool one can use to do the download of the csv files directly from the bank.

2-factor authentication and session expiry makes it a pain in the neck

To be precise, the wonderful aqbanking is doing the job for gnucash. I do not see why paisa could not use aqbanking as well

There is import option available on Paisa, but I agree, it won't match YNAB level experience.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I've used YNAB for almost a decade now, but wish it were more powerful for things like investment tracking. I tried last month to get into the ledger systems (beancount, specifically), but it's a huge additional time sink. And implementing YNAB-style envelope-based budgeting on top of them is always a bit of a hack. Went back to YNAB quickly.

> wish it were more powerful for things like investment tracking.

Community needs an open-source version of YNAB, not another gnu cash clone.

Plaid solves the transaction import problem, the hardest part, unfortunately at the expense of privacy.

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