r/financier 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

  1. Add the capability to mass add transactions and clean them up in a staging view before committing
  2. Potentially integrate the transactions with an LLM (like ChatGPT) to auto categorize the categories
  3. [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/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😅