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Dinero: Manage my finances

I have built my own personal finance system like Mint/YNAB. I call it [dinero](https://github.com/danielfrg/dinero) (money in spanish). I use it to manage my personal and business finances.

It’s a set of simple scripts that use Plaid to get data from my banks Postgres to store the data and NocoDB to visualize it. I also use Metabase visualize the data and a couple of Jupyter Notebooks with extra analysis I run sporadically.

I have indexed all the data since 2012 (the year I moved to the US) and the data matches perfectly to my current bank statements in all my accounts.

  • I did a backfill parsing PDFs in 2019 when I started using dinero.

Screenshots

Main view: All transactions of the year

View: A single account grouped by Category

|200

View: Filter by one month and group by account: |200

Categories

I created those myself based on my needs. dinero uses simple rules to match transactions and tag them accordingly, not much else is needed.

Categories are broad and general, I don’t any. Subcategories are more open to be added.

  • Income
    • Salary
    • 401k
    • Interest
  • Living Expenses
    • Housing
    • Groceries
    • Food (going out)
    • Transportation
    • Phone
    • Internet
    • Electricity
    • Home (related purchases, reparation)
    • Health
    • Tax
  • Other Expenses (non-recurrent things that are for my own good)
    • Services
    • Education
    • Software
    • Hardware
    • Hobbies
  • Non-Essentials
    • Shopping (in general)
    • YouTube Premium
    • Netflix
    • Amazon Prime
    • Games
    • Entertainment (other)
    • Clothing
    • Gifts
    • Other (general social activities usually go here)

FAQ

Why?

This is not original, I initially got this idea from yyx990803/build-your-own-mint. I just adapted it to my own needs.

Dashboard tools like paisa are very interesting but a bit too complex for my needs. I just need a quick overview to see I am not spending too much and peace of mind when I do my taxes.

Why NocoDB?

Most personal finance system use Google Sheets but I find a system like Airtable to be superior. Initially I used Airtable but I got to the point where I needed to pay so I decided to self-host. NocoDB lacks features but works great.

Why not a service?

I used Mint for years. It was the closest thing to a service I liked. The web UI was terrible but mostly usable. What’s not fine is that Intuit had access to all my data.

I tried to use other services like YNAB but found them way too complicated.

All I needed was to automate getting data from multiple banks accounts and credit cards into a simple format that I can use to group by some simple categories I defined manually and to easily get a picture of my spending.