I keep discarding book keeping systems like tissue paper, wondering how on earth anyone makes these things work long term.
Intuit? Jesus, it tied itself in knots after a year.
Zoho? Seems good at first, but if your feeds from your accounts EVER BREAK, that's it. Fixing them again is functionally impossible. You're expect to hand edit to fix any missed transactions, and it's even odds whether reconnecting the feeds will also corrupt the entire history.
I just. I don't get how any of these things stay in business.
All the while, I'm thinking "Quicken worked better than any of these, and you just bought it once forever."
Is there anything like Quicken/etc out there still? Not online, no bank connections, just rules that filter transactions and you import the statements manually. I'm fucking done. This entire industry has rotted over the last decade, and I don't think there's any functional options left. Any online option that works today will stop working by the end of the year because That's The Biz.
@glassbottommeg@danlyke I used to think Quicken had got it all right too. When it was cancelled I started writing a simple alternative but GnuCash got the essentials right before I got too far.
@glassbottommeg I hate to say it but over the years I just came back around to Excel again for financial records. It’s the only thing that doesn’t turn to crap after a couple of years.
A bit of custom scripting via things like ExcelDNA and OFXSharp to grease the wheels and you’ve got a system you control that just works and keeps working exactly how you want
@glassbottommeg I tried a few, definitely GnuCash and some others, none of them worked quite how I wanted. I can’t remember if I tried HomeBank but it was a couple of years ago anyway that I gave up and went back to Excel
https://moneydance.com/ isn't perfect by any means, especially for managing stocks across corporate merges, but it's local to your computer and you can configure it to download or let you enter what you need.
@glassbottommeg Chequebook.com is stable and independent. I moved to it after some years of GnuCash, which was not bad, but lacked good daya sync options.
@glassbottommeg GnuCash is the OG - https://www.gnucash.org/. i used it for a number of years when i was treasurer of a nonprofit. the UX is janky like OpenOffice, it’s like it comes from some parallel universe, but development is stable and ongoing, bugs get fixed, and it’s got tons of features.
@glassbottommeg along with Homebank, there's also GnuCash and KMyMoney, they've both been around a while, I haven't used any of them for a while since my finances are pretty basic and my bank has a decent enough website
@avarisclari I was in fact just looking at Home Bank, hahahaha.
Yeah I think it covers all my needs. Literally all I'm looking for is importing transactions and settings up rules to auto categorize them, so that at the end of the year I know what values to put in the various deduction/write-off categories.
@glassbottommeg As someone who works with quickbooks for their day job though I fully understand the Intuit anger. And from what I saw of Zoho it just looked like "we licensed quickbooks and renamed it"
@avarisclari Zoho fixes a lot of issues with Quickbooks, but they trade it for the most fragile account linking that I've ever seen. When your links break, there's essentially no way of cleanly resolving it. Never seen anything like it.
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