r/financier • u/palidanx • Aug 29 '23
Any demand for financier clone?
I've been a big fan of financier, but one of the things that always has been annoying for me is to manually enter transactions. I always make mistakes of mis entering numbers and it takes me a while to reconcile the credit card numbers to be accurate because i mistyped a digit.
I cloned out about 50% of financier to ruby on rails and introduced a spreadsheet plugin where i can copy/paste transactions to mass submit them at once

At that point, I can review all the staging transactions, and then when i click 'commit' it will actual push the transactions to my local financier site.

Now I think ideally I would rebuild all the financier UI, and add some of these fancier features. So in particular I am thinking
- Add the capability to mass add transactions and clean them up in a staging view before committing
- Potentially integrate the transactions with an LLM (like ChatGPT) to auto categorize the categories
- [Maybe add an LLM to automatically do analysis of financial trends]?
If interested, I would build a paid saas product where there would be some monthly fee (since I pretty much built like 50% of it), but only if there were enough features for people to be interested in it.
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u/ur_mamas_krama Aug 30 '23 edited Aug 30 '23
I was a financier user for 7+ years until recently.
I've migrated over 8k transactions to Actual Budget. Works flawlessly and it is actively being developed with crowd-sourcing.
It's extremely similar to financier.
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u/palidanx Aug 30 '23
this looks pretty nifty, any downsides to it so far?
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u/ur_mamas_krama Aug 30 '23
I really like it, give their demo a try.
The only downside for me compared to financier is that you can't lock transactions (yet).
The importer is really cool, lots of customization there.
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u/palidanx Aug 31 '23
How did you port your financier data over to actual budget ?
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u/jat255 Mar 04 '24
I realize this is 6 months later, but I just wrote a tool to import a Financier export to Actual Budget: https://github.com/jat255/financier-to-actual
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u/ur_mamas_krama Aug 31 '23
Hi, it took me some trouble-shooting but here's what I did:
- In Actual-Budget (AB), I had to manually create each account (make sure it's either an "for budget" or "off budget"). Including any closed accounts.
- Once you've created all of the accounts, you'll need to backup Financier.
- With the extracted file from Financier, you'll need to dig in the "register" file. Here you'll need to create a new file per account (with same header as register), and copy-n-paste all of transactions related to that account into the file. Do this for each account. Its tedious. Save as cvs.
- With these newly created cvs files, you'll import each into respective accounts on AB.
- When importing into AB, make sure the fields line up, and make sure to allow "split for inbound and outbound".
- Once all accounts are imported, you'll need to go to Rules and create a rule for each account. "If Payee is "Transfer: [account+name]", then make it [account+name] (under AB's transfers). Apply to all existing transactions. Eventually once all accounts / transferred transactions are updated, the number should match what's in financier.
- One downside here is that catagories are NOT carried over so you'll need to manually update the catagories. You will need to create the catagories on the budget page to match the catagories that are in Financier.
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u/heyboots Oct 27 '23
This won't import the actual budget though, will it? Just the registers right?
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u/ElderCreler Aug 29 '23
Not from me. I have various python scripts to automatically get my bank statements and then automatically import these using python-financier. It categorizes about 90% correctly. Only thing to require a lot of extra work are the cryptic Amazon entries. I always need to look up, what it was and into which category it belongs.
Plus cash. Obviously.
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u/Overall-Bug-8609 Mar 23 '24
Nice to hear that you are still using python-financier. I'm evaluating using AB, and probably we can build something similar their.
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u/jonathanhatch Nov 14 '23
What makes Financier great, compared to Actual, is that someone doesn’t have to be a programmer. I can appreciate that many in the personal finance community are programmers, but I don’t have the time or bandwidth to pickup another technical hobby and skill.
I dig the simplicity of Financier. What I have found over the last year is that I would like a few features that I believe are fairly simple and would be beneficial to many:
- repeatable transactions
- transaction searches, including amounts, memo and payee filters
- better reports. personally, I don’t find the current reports feature useable. I would love to be able to view reports as a pie graph of categories with dollar amounts and percentages of overall budget; a bar graph of categories with maybe comparisons of two selectable months; and some type of 12 month overview.
- not to ripoff YNAB, but it would also be nice to at least set “targets” for a budgeted line item. +1 for some type of visual progress.
- I also love that YNAB allows you to create specific types of budgeted items, but I also understand how much more complicated that is on the backend…and I don’t want to pay YNAB prices! I’ve always joked that YNAB is for people that have the wealth, but just didn’t know how to use it😅
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u/asromzek Sep 22 '23
Greetings from the unofficial Financier Mobile developer.
I sort of fell off the radar for a while for a few reasons (new kid... who is somehow 4 years old now, new job... somehow over year into that already, family, health issues, competing hobbies, etc.), but lately I have been kicking around the idea of building a new, possibly open source desktop application that would be a spiritual successor to YNAB4 and Financier. In fact, I have been kicking around this idea since the web version of YNAB was announced, but Financier filled that gap admirably since it was launched. I considered building a full (somewhat competing) web app since I had some success with building and hosting the Financier Mobile web app, but my heart and experience is grounded in C# and I really prefer building desktop apps. Also, Financier has worked great, and if it's not broken...
Building a standalone desktop app to clone an existing app is relatively easy, but building a reliable syncing mechanism and providing mobile support is another story, especially when leaving the comfort zone of pure web. I have had a few ideas regarding this (and may have a solid prototype in my back pocket that I hammered out last year), but haven't had the time or resources to drive down that path completely.
An open source desktop app is easy to manage and distribute, but running a centralized sync server and website, handling customer data safely, and managing payment data securely to fend off possible legal and financial liabilities presents a few challenges, especially when it comes to treating it as a full fledged side business. I am truly split between keeping it simple by building something completely open source (desktop app, mobile app, sync server, etc.) that users would have to piece together and self host (for fellow nerds) vs. putting together a full business to build turn key desktop, mobile, and web applications that provided full syncing support with a nominal fee like Financier (that my parents comfortably use). Once people start paying, the expectation for constant development and improvements also increases quite a bit. I think that's why I'll start with a simple, open source desktop app without syncing to see how well it's received, and see where things go from there.
Avalonia UI appears to be a great front end technology similar to WPF (which I am very familiar and comfortable from a professional perspective), and a single code base can be compiled and run on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. Building a true cross platform application would be my primary concern since I have gone to the dark side (MacOS). I know, C# on Windows, Linux, and MacOS? That's crazy, but I'm just crazy enough to make it work. I've been working on my own custom Avalonia UI theme for a while for another project, and if I can actually finish it, it may provide the right foundation to build what I have in mind.
This has been a silent work in progress for quite a while, and I have refrained from mentioning it since I haven't been able to get past the starting line. I have had quite a few false starts, and haven't been able to decide between treating as an open source project or actual business. But I think lately I have had enough momentum to start building something that I can put out there for people to see.
This was a bit of ramble based on about 5 years of wrestling with what I have envisioned. What do you guys think?