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.
“That you can self-host” Does a budgeting tool need to be a service that’s constantly running and not an application? I struggle to see how having it running as a service on some box somewhere is going to help. “It’s so you can access it on your phone elsewhere.” Oh great. It’ll have a garbagepuke mobile UI.
In this case, the mobile UI doesn’t even work properly.
That said, I find value in it because it makes it so much easier for my SO and I to see the same thing. Oh, and it supports importing transactions via SimpleFIN, which is really nice.
How does it compare to Firefly III?
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.
Yeah, I think it’s fantastic as well. The SimpleFIN syncinc works fantastically, and I’m happy enough that I cancelled my TillerHQ subscription, which lapses this month. There’s still a little work to do to clean up some of my older data, but once I get it all rolling nicely, I’ll definitely send the developers a substantial portion of what I was paying for Tiller (like $100/year). I’ve only used it for a couple months, and I plan to play with it a bit in the next month or two as I’m preparing EOY stuff.
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.
In the US it has integration with SimpleFIN. SimpleFIN isn’t free but it’s pretty cheap ($1.50/mo) and supports most banks out there, even my obscure local credit union. It works pretty well, though sometimes the banks fuck with stuff and seem hell bent on breaking any kind of API access, but SimpleFIN support was really responsive for me to get it fixed when it happened. I do also have to reauthenticate my bank every day when I want to sync, but that’s also just the banks being assholes and isn’t too bad to do.
Does SimpleFIN use OAuth to log into bank accounts, or do you need to enter your bank’s username and password?
Unrelated to this post, but do you know if SimpleFIN supports investment accounts? If it does, it seems like an easy way to let me write a script to help rebalance my investment accounts. I might look into it.
It varies by bank but for all mine you have to use the username and password unfortunately. My understanding is that it’s just how the underlying bank APIs work in general, because that’s what I have to do when I link accounts for my banks elsewhere too, not just in SimpleFIN. I don’t think they actually store your credentials though, I think it proxies it to the bank login and then caches a token. You can probably ask their support about the details if you’re concerned, they have been pretty responsive to me and willing to answer technical questions.
It does support investment accounts, I have my retirement and investment accounts in there. It supports just about every account I have, actually, credit cards included which is super handy. I think it’s all read-only access through, so you can only use it to import data not make new transactions.
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.
Why would you need to host this? Why not just have a client that does backups?
The self-contained electron app works better for most people I think.
With the price increases which will probably continue i think this is my next step after YNAB
Looks nice, I’ll check it out. Always open to something that looks nicer than my excel sheets
Maybe I’ll do the homeassistant install option, I’m actually surprised to see that mentioned in their documentation. I didn’t see a docker image, surely there’s a community-maintained one somewhere?
My eyes have failed me today, thanks lol
I switched over to this last month, and I’m already a fan of it. It did take a bit of time to port over my old shtitty excel tracking, and to write a few python scripts to parse the export CSV files from each of my bank accounts, but it is very clearly worth it.
One of the nice things is that it uses a SQLite db to store everything, so if shit ever hits the fan with one of my drives or the software, it isn’t the end of the world.
Looks interesting. Marked it for exploration. Too many cool projects to explore and not enough time!
You need a time budgeter
Does Actual support investment accounts / stocks? I was using beancount/fava for tracking, but have been lazy and haven’t updated it in a long time.
I don’t think one takes into account investment accounts with envelope budgeting, if I’m not wrong. All the accounts in this kind of budgeting should be involved in the budget, to be money that is to be assigned. “Give every dollar a job” kind of style. Money in investment accounts is for the most part saving for savings sake. But I guess people can assign that kind of money as well, e.g. “this is money that I’m investing to be able to buy a house in 5 years”. I’m not an expert on this so you could look up how YNAB does it, or if Actual has any docs on this.
Nope, which honestly annoys me but is pretty par for the course. That said, when it comes to budgeting, I mostly care about where money is going and care less about the “whole financial picture.” If I need to estimate what retirement looks like, I want more than a simple budgeting tool.
I personally use Fidelity for investment tracking. My main “checking” is their Cash Management Account, my “savings” is a brokerage account (invested in t-bills and money market funds), and I can link all of my other accounts and it pulls in specific investments and shows a consolidated view. It’s awesome because it shows all kinds of stuff, like morningstar-style factor weights, sector exposure, etc. It’s not self-hosted, but I trust them with my banking anyway, so it’s not like I’m opening myself up to some new exploit (oh, and Fidelity also has proper MFA; Symantic VIP, which kinda sucks, but it’s way better than any other financial institution).
I used to track this stuff via a Google spreadsheet (couldn’t find a way to get stock quotes in LibreOffice), but this seems to be good enough for me.
As others said, both Firefly III and Actual Budget do not support stocks. I wish they did, but I guess I’ll have to stick with GnuCash + Metabase for now.
Last night I just used libreoffice calc. Wish I was told this sooner so I could spend my time configuring this and budgeting next week instead
I’ve been using it for almost a year now and it works great. I used to just use a spread sheet to track my bills paychecks and due dates but this made it much nicer
The man who originally invented this tech is a really good guy, can’t recommend it enough!
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!
I wish they would of pursued a business plan. I feel like we need some software for small business that isn’t run by a huge company ready to screw you over.
Maybe they could of sold support and training.
If one doesn’t want to self-host it one can always go through a service like PikaPods who do in fact have a revenue sharing deal with Actual Budget. And either way, Actual Budget isn’t really an accounting tool for businesses, or did I misunderstand you?
