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Show HN: FinBodhi – Local-first, double-entry app/PWA for your financial journey
We built a local-first, private, multi-currency, double-entry based personal finance app. It will help you track, visualize, and plan your financial journey. Use the `Try demo` button, to try it without an account. Small screens (mobiles) are not supported yet.

By local-first we mean, your data is on your system (we use sqlite over opfs, in browser). For synching across devices, the 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.

Why double-entry? Many personal finance apps operate on single entry model. But it quickly reaches limits with complicated set of transactions (returns on a house, your networth and a lot more). 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

FinBodhi currently supports import, tracking, visualization and planning. There are few built in importers and you can define your own custom importer, apply rules to imports etc. You can slice and dice your transactions, split/merge transactions, associate them with accounts etc. We support cash and non-cache accounts. For non-cache mutual fund and stock accounts in Indian context, we can fetch price for you. For others, there is manual price entry. We also support multi-currency, and you can set price for currency conversions also. You can view reports like Balance Sheet, Cashflow, P&L and much more, and visualize data in various ways. And when you are ready, start planning for your future.

Eventually we would like the app to cover a users complete financial journey. There is a lot more that can be done (like mobile support, budgeting, price fetching, improved imports, ai integration and a lot more), but the current set of features is quite usable. We have written down our manifesto, which guides the overall development: https://finbodhi.com/docs/manifesto/

Please give it a try. All plans are free for now. Reach out to us at discord: https://discord.gg/mQx649P6cy

Just a few days ago, saw Finbodhi from paisa project through Anandakumaran's website. Very interesting and loved Opensource projects with focus on end-to-end encryption coming out of India. My best wishes to you!
  • pdyc
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  • 6 hours ago
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where does it say it is open source?
By what definition is this local first? You use firebase and the client is not open source or at least downloadable. The definition is that i can keep using the app if your company goes out of business, which is not the case.
  • ciju
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  • 4 hours ago
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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 dont see any place for an app like this that is not open source. you can make the sync service payed that gets your bank statements.
You could use a code escrow service.
The page explaining double entry accounting is worth an HN post on its own
Is there a github repo for this? Free to use isn't the same as source-freely-available...
  • ciju
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  • 6 hours ago
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Sorry, we are not open-source. Also, it's free to use till beta :) although there would be a free plan even after that. We don't plan to open source it till we have enough momentum to support ourselves with the project. This is for profit project. Your data is yours but the software is ours, till the revenue supports us. After which we do plan to open-source it.
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  • 5 hours ago
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1. Is there any plans for native mobile apps?

2. Which data sources (banks, UPI wallets, etc.) are supported as import source?

  • ciju
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  • 5 hours ago
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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.

  • pdyc
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  • 6 hours ago
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its not working on firefox. are you using official sqlite, sql.js or wa-sqlite wasm? as there are three different variants with differing support for storage. Also if opfs is not avilable do u have a fallback?
  • ciju
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  • 6 hours ago
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Are you trying it in private mode? We found an issue there. Normal mode should work. We will fix the issue with private mode in a future release.
  • pdyc
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  • 6 hours ago
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yes i was trying in private mode.
  • ciju
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  • 5 hours ago
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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.
Congrats dude on the release!
i love Local First products! let me check out.