https://finbodhi.com — Helps you track, understand, and plan your personal finances — with a double-entry accounting. You own your financial data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit. Supports multiple-accounts (track as a family or even as an advisor), multi-currency, a custom sheet/calculator to operate on your accounts (calculate taxes etc) and much more.
Most recently, we added support for benchmarking and us stocks, etfs etc.
Benchmarking is an interesting topic. I am not sure why but most personal finance tools are quite bad at this. Our benchmarking tool allows you to understand how your underlying portfolio is doing, vs how your timing decisions are fairing. Portfolio comparison is done with NAV chart (nav calculation is same as what mutual funds use). And value chart in comparison with nav chart, helps you understand if your timing decisions are helping.
NOTE: you can try demo without signup, but it doesn't work in Firefox Incognito mode.
Location: Bangalore, India
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: TypeScript/JavaScript, React, Elixir, Terraform. Can pickup tech (have touched zig, clojure, go, python, ruby)
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ciju-cherian/
Email: ping@ciju.in
Github: https://github.com/ciju
I am looking for short term consulting work only.
I am building https://finbodhi.com, a local-first pwa, double-entry accounting based personal finance app. As consultant, I have setup infrastructure (prod/staging) for an AI startup, using terraform, and helping with concurrency issues in python code, etc. For another client, I had replaced there gcp infra located in US, to Mumbai, while also migrating the infra to terraform, with a few min downtime. I often work with TypeScript. And some occasional Elixir. Also interested in visualizations (e.g https://ciju.in/writings/population-census-2011-a-visualizat..., https://ciju.in/writings/understanding-financial-functions-e...). I was working as Engineering Manager till few years back. Before that I was running a consulting company (https://activesphere.com/). Comfortable picking up technologies. Would love to be involved in exploration projects, visualizations or complex domains where essence of the problem needs to be understood to build software around it. Or else would prefer projects with active users.
It's just a convention to be able to capture the flow of money. Roughly, money comes in via Income, stays in Asset, goes to Expense (there is also Liability and Equity). Let's consider a home, as an asset. You could have got it with your own money (`Asset:Bank -> Asset:House`), or by taking a loan (`Liability:Home Loan -> Asset:House`). Both have very different implications. If you are just tracking current value of home, it won't capture the whole picture. E.g. if you want to sell the house, the price is going to be different in both cases.
Double entry is just a way to track the flow of money from these different categories of account. Once you have that, you can do a lot over it, generate all kinds of report that companies can use to understand their operations (and to share with investors).
There are even attempts to go beyond with triple-entry account, etc. I think the way to look at it is, companies need a way to understand and report the flow of money, the current state etc. Double entry helps with that. And they way it helps, it to keep track of both where money came from and where it went.
https://finbodhi.com — It helps you track, understand, and plan your personal finances — with a double-entry accounting. You own your financial data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit. Supports multiple-accounts (track as a family or even as an advisor), multi-currency, a custom sheet/calculator to operate on your accounts (calculate taxes etc) and much more.
Soon, we will have benchmarking capability. You would be able to compare your networth growth with inflation, compare your investment returns with benchmark etc. We would support both nav and value based benchmark. The topic is interesting in itself, and somehow, not emphasized/available in most tools.
Asset price fetching and benchmarking works best for Indian markets. We would like to build better support for international assets and benchmarks, but haven't figured how to get the data.
NOTE: you can try demo without signup, but it doesn't work in Firefox Incognito mode.
We have been building https://finbodhi.com/ a local-first browser app (PWA) for personal finance, based on double-entry accounting.
FinBodhi uses double entry so complicated set of transactions and accounts can be modeled (which happen often enough in users financial journey). We wrote about double-entry here: https://finbodhi.com/docs/understanding-double-entry
We do use online services like firebase for auth, and some service to fetch commodity prices etc. But all your financial data is on your system (we use sqlite over opfs, in browser). For synching across devices, that data is encrypted with your key before it leaves your device. You can backup the data locally (if you are using chrome) and/or to your dropbox. It's designed so that we (the people building it) can't access your data.
There are many more features, like multi-currency, visualizations, a sheet to use your data to do complex calculations like taxes, planning for your future etc.
Feel free to try it out with the demo account (no sign-in required). Note: app doesn't work in Firefox private mode.
Import is done locally. No 3rd party is involved. We have build custom importer. e.g you can import a csv and map it's columns to what we need internally. We also allow some logic in importer. E.g. to figure if a row is credit or debit. etc. It should be feasible to import most csv statements. PDFs and Excels should also work, except for some complicated cases where a transaction is spread across multiple rows.
There are a few custom importers also, for indian context.
It's local-first in the sense that all your financial data is local (synched across your devices), and backed up to your dropbox. Firebase is for auth (e.g. for us to know who you are, manage subscription etc). None of your financial data is kept there. We don't have a decent way to set up and track subscription without that central piece (firebase).
In other words, when the company goes down, there are two concerns:
1st whether you will have access to your data. Yes, and no one else has access to it.
2nd whether you will be able to use the app. We plan to open-source the app when/before that happens. This part, you have to trust us. We don't see an easy way out of this, yet.
I understand your hesitation. But there are already user using it on a regular basis, who care about privacy but trust us to have the auth centralized. It's not for everyone, but it's what we plan to do, at least for near future.
1. No current plans for native mobile app. We plan to make the web app somewhat usable on mobile, soon. Eventually, yes we would like to have a native app also.
2. We have few banks supported (HDFC, ICICI). We have custom importer also, where you can define how to map a file to the fields we use. Note that import is manual. E.g. we don't scrape your bank etc. You export statement (like hdfc pdf statement, or zerodha transactions csv) and import it into the software.
To answer rest of your question, we are using official sqlite (via evolu). We don't have a fallback for opfs. But opfs seems to supported in most browser. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...
Although, seems like the private mode in Firefox is related to opfs, so we might not be able to solve it. But again, most users won't use the app in private mode.
Most recently, we added support for benchmarking and us stocks, etfs etc.
Benchmarking is an interesting topic. I am not sure why but most personal finance tools are quite bad at this. Our benchmarking tool allows you to understand how your underlying portfolio is doing, vs how your timing decisions are fairing. Portfolio comparison is done with NAV chart (nav calculation is same as what mutual funds use). And value chart in comparison with nav chart, helps you understand if your timing decisions are helping.
NOTE: you can try demo without signup, but it doesn't work in Firefox Incognito mode.
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