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.

If you're in the EU you can do bank syncing for free with GoCardless integration. If you're in the US you need to go with SimpleFIN which costs a small sum and is in a more experimental phase than the GoCardless integration I think. Either way, GoCardless has been working great for me. Actually far better than YNAB which didn't even support my bank. It's literally just set up and forget.

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.

For me personally, it was easier to just write a few python scripts to parse the CSV files from my banks.

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.

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.

You need a time budgeter

This is the comment that's going to make me try it. I love my spreadsheet, so I'll have to see if this does everything that my spreadsheet does.

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.

I didn't see a docker image

https://actualbudget.org/docs/install/docker

https://github.com/actualbudget/actual-server/blob/master/docker-compose.yml

The self-contained electron app works better for most people I think.

You can self host it so you can access it over the web, or you can choose to run it entirely locally. It's pretty nifty, and I've elected to using it for the second option.

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

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.