
Show HN: HoneyMoney – 100% more Bees than any other personal finance software - iabdulin
https://HoneyMoney.io
======
reacharavindh
As nice as the tool and the insights it provides, the pain point is manually
entering all the transactions. It is 2018, and we still dont have a easy way
of exporting our transactions from the bank in a standard way. Every bank
wants to use their own way of exporting it.

I was seriously considering using Plaid API[1] to build an app that would
download my transactions automatically, categorise it, and prompt me to only
verify entries it classified with low-confidence. But, Plaid API at the time
did not support all my bank accounts, which made the effort moot.

Another concern of mine is exporting such personal data to a 3rd party.
Ideally, an open source tool that strictly runs on my laptop would be the
best!

[1] - [https://plaid.com](https://plaid.com)

~~~
TrickyRick
In Europe the PSD2 regulations are just about to come into effect which means
that all banks will have to provide a public API. You can also use an
aggregation service like Tink
([https://business.tink.se](https://business.tink.se))

~~~
nojvek
I really like Europe. Why is a cluster of countries functioning better than a
single country?

~~~
njarboe
You might ask some Greeks how they think it is functioning and you might
change your view a bit.

------
chvid
This is great copy writing / presentation. The non slick design comes across
as being personal, cheerful and nerdy. I think it works very well for what you
are trying to sell.

~~~
hfourm
This is what I came to find. It was so refreshing to see some charming
imperfections that make the design so much more personal, feeling old school
while still maintaining a modern flow to the page.

~~~
iabdulin
Thank you!

------
josefresco
I use Mint but generally, am not trilled with it.

1\. I have a hard time managing my bank account AND my main credit card. Mint
seems to think me paying off my credit card bill is another expense, however
Mint already tracked the CC charges so basically Mint thinks I run a massive
loss every month (yes I've tried fixing this, multiple times)

2\. Other than reviewing your newest transactions, and the occasional useful
bill/fee reminder, I don't find much use for the app in regards to financial
planning or analysis.

3\. I don't like how Mint is basically used to slurp up my data, and sell me
credit cards - it's obvious now how little they care about making it truly
useful. The app has been in existence for years and barely nudges forward
besides new UI.

The thought of manually tracking my expenses however is too much work. I find
it hard enough launching the Mint app regularly to allow it to download my
latest transactions.

~~~
toasterlovin
Check out You Need A Budget.

~~~
quaffapint
YNAB is great except when tracking existing credit card debt and new debt. I
found it a real pain to figure out what my monthly payments should be. It's
doable, I just found it not straight forward at all. That and trying to figure
out what a 'month' is - different payments coming in at different times for
purchases from different times, I kept finding myself trying to override and
do manual catch ups. I finally just stopped using it.

------
Flimm
I used to love YNAB, but once I started needing real support for multiple
currencies, I had to stop using it. I haven't found a daily driver replacement
since, and I've tried around 10 apps. I even started writing my own, although
it's not done. Does HoneyMoney support multiple currencies?

~~~
iabdulin
Yep. All the currencies you want. Even bitcoin. It will even take into account
your default currency when displaying it's symbol. For example, for me
Canadian dollar is simply "$", but US dollar is "US$". For US it will be the
other way around: "$" for USD and "CA$" for CAD.

~~~
TomK32
like they once said about gender: currency is a text field.

------
ff_
Oh wow this is super cool. IME the hardest part of using this kind of
accounting software is to keep using it over time, because entering
transactions is super boring, and it's hard to build the habit.

Right now, since all my expenses come from one bank account, I export the data
from the bank and use a bunch of excel sheets to keep track of stuff, but of
course is a quite limited system.

I was wondering if HoneyMoney has some kind of import system? In this way I
could just dump the exports in there like once a month.

~~~
tibu
You can get used to it quite quickly and it is really useful. By adding your
expenses right after the purchase you're all the time up-to-date with your
budget. You know where you're with your plans, whether they need any
modifications or not. I restarted using YNAB this January after a 2 years long
pause and now I have again money at the end of the month. :>

~~~
FuckOffNeemo
I've been using YNAB for years too, similar experiences, until I consistently
manually added the transactions I found my accounts got worse and worse during
reconcilable and my budget forecasts were ruined consequently.

Now I'm checking the accounts almost daily when adding purchases manually,
it's been consistently accurate for months.

------
FuckOffNeemo
YNAB4's desktop software has been my GOTO buggering (budgeting... I'll leave
the typo in for laughs...) suite for years. Unfortunate it is no longer sold
and they opted for a subscription model but it can still be found via
nefarious methods.

I'll give this a look over and see how it works. Personally I like YNAB's
process of allowing manual transactions to be added but supporting other file
exports from banks like .OFX files to allow you to easily reconcile your
accounts and transactions. Though it's unfortunate that only their
subscription model supports live feeds from your bands.

All the same, I'll give your product a crack and see how it goes.

PS. I enjoy how your websites presented though depending on your intended
market audience, I feel it may be just a little too jovial?

~~~
iabdulin
Thank you.

Too jovial?

The app itself has fewer bees per square pixel than promo website. Check out
the demo: [https://demo.honeymoney.io](https://demo.honeymoney.io)

~~~
FuckOffNeemo
Eh, I'm a grouch. It's so happy, carefree, cute and just straight up adorable
I found it to be unprofessional. But. Everyone here likes it for the larger
part. That's how I frame the website, you could almost disregard my opinion.

It's clear to see that the happy, carefree and cute design is what you were
going for and you've nailed it! :)

------
pwenzel
I have tried so many apps to get my financial shit together, but I always end
up returning to my Google Spreadsheet-based system. One worksheet for each pay
period. No tracking of transactions. Just columns for who's owed what and how
much I'll have left after everyone is paid.

Things aren't always perfect, but I have a groove and that's what matters.

~~~
TomK32
Anything you are missing from the spreadsheets? I started like you myself and
it just wasn't good enough to make projections and fit those transactions that
happen every three months for my austrian health/pension.

------
newscracker
There's no privacy policy on this site (I did a custom Google search on the
site to check if I'd somehow missed it). So my serious question is why anyone
should trust this platform even for a trial. It's 2018, and it's unforgivable
for a site, especially one that stores financial information, not to have a
clear privacy policy and commitment.

@Ildar, if you see this comment, this is the first thing you should address
before anything else (and also state how any policy you put affects past data
collected).

~~~
smadam9
If you don't want your financial information shared with anyone, don't put it
on the internet. Even with a strong privacy policy, do think anyone can
guarantee that your data will always remain safe?

~~~
newscracker
I don't put it on the Internet at all. I was just wondering how so many people
were praising the site and its features and how this application has so many
users with nobody even asking the question about a privacy policy or the
developer not thinking about it. Since this is a paid product, a privacy
policy is a set of promises that the vendor makes to you as a customer, and is
part of the contract with you (which you can enforce or claim compensation for
when breached, depending on the jurisdiction).

While nobody can guarantee anything in life, we still expect reasonable
policies and protections to be available. Otherwise why would anyone even
worry or talk about the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Take this unrealistic
example: would you not feel you're being scammed if you bought a flight ticket
but the airline had no policy about baggage loss or delays (essentially
anything that could affect you, the paying customer, negatively)? It's quite
obvious that the airline cannot guarantee that your bags won't get lost or
that there won't be delays in the flight times.

~~~
smadam9
The same principle applies with the airline. If you really don't want to deal
with the hassle of having your bags lost, don't fly. Of course, that takes the
whole mentality to an extreme. It's not often, even with a good privacy
policy, or lost baggage policy, that it offers any true protection. It is more
for peace of mind.

------
spking
Probably the cutest illustrations I've seen on an app marketing site in a long
while. It's refreshing to see some whimsy and personality.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The presentation of information is absolutely excellent too. And you can
instantly see what they mean about a calendar view as a default view, with the
screenshot, it's really nice.

Fairly impressive overall, +1.

~~~
iabdulin
Thank you. Your words make my heart smile.

------
huhtenberg
Not to nitpick:

> _100% more Bees than any other personal finance software_

100% over a zero is still a zero.

~~~
iabdulin
@mingabunga in the comment below explained it better than I can: "It's just a
catchy headline, it doesn't really make sense but is comical/nonsense so it
makes you stop and pay attention to it. I think it's brilliant."

------
TomK32
By coincidence I've started my own accounting software last month using ruby
on rails. Previously I've been using GnuCash and then move to hledger (hard to
beat simple text files) but I've always been missing something that reminds me
to type in new transactions (I really don't like automatic imports). I like
that honeymoney got envelopes, something I was struggling to use with hledger.

Is honeymoney double accounting, I mean internally?

Anyways, keep up the good work, great to see competition in the market for
get-rich-slow-schemes :D

~~~
ocdtrekkie
An self-hosted/open source one floating out there too is Firefly III:
[https://firefly-iii.org/](https://firefly-iii.org/)

I tried to make some sense of an hledger thing with a web interface, and
couldn't wrap my head around what it wanted me to do. :(

~~~
TomK32
Ha, I even tried to contribute some code to hledger's web interface but I
couldn't get the feel for haskell and tbh, the naming of variables in hledger
isn't consistent and made it just harder. Or maybe I'm just spoiled from
Rails.

firefly, thanks for the tip, didn't know that one. But just look and scroll
that screenshot... [https://firefly-
iii.org/static/screenshots/4.7.0/account.png](https://firefly-
iii.org/static/screenshots/4.7.0/account.png) My personal data goes back to
2012 and I'm all set to import that into my own app very soon.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Heh, might already be fixed, Firefly is pretty actively developed, a lot of
devs don't update their screenshots all that often though.

That being said, if you put in the time and effort I think personal software
is amazing: It does what you want it to do, not what someone else wanted it to
do. Development priorities are magically aligned with your needs!

------
BOOSTERHIDROGEN
I already use a ynab this year maybe next year if this can convinced me

~~~
iabdulin
Why? If YNAB works perfectly for you, then no need to change anything.
HoneyMoney is a different beast, you can check comparison here:
[https://honeymoney.io/en/compare](https://honeymoney.io/en/compare)

------
figurant
wow, HM's on HN :) good to see it here. I've been personally using HM for
about 5 yrs now and can say that satisfies all my need. No ocr for receipts,
but hey, who's got that the proper way? As for me I do not need such
detalisation to follow, for a food purchases I just use categories and
subcats.

~~~
iabdulin
It's a small world :)

~~~
figurant
Exactomundo, amigo :)

------
staticelf
Interesting tool.

I would maybe use this tool if it had some kind of api. I want to be able to
have my bot post financial data to my account in HoneyMoney automatically, is
this possible?

I haven't found any info regarding this. If someone with an account know of
such an api I would sign up.

~~~
iabdulin
Web version uses a simple json-based API. Could you contact me via email so I
can tell you more?

------
10dpd
These are the kinds of tools that Open Banking in the UK promised, however
I've as yet been unable to find a simple API reference or tutorial that
outlines a way to get started.

~~~
rahimnathwani
The documentation provided by individual banks seems better than the
documentation on the Open Banking site. For example, here is the documentation
provided by

\- Barclays:
[https://developer.barclays.com/documentation/dc72e132-2951-4...](https://developer.barclays.com/documentation/dc72e132-2951-4378-bc52-38e35b1e3564.bdn)

\- Santander: [https://developer.santander.co.uk/sanuk/external/open-
bankin...](https://developer.santander.co.uk/sanuk/external/open-banking-
account-information)

\- List of others:
[https://openbanking.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DZ/pages/19104...](https://openbanking.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DZ/pages/19104033/ASPSP+Developer+Portals+and+Documentation)

------
Bedon292
Really need a way to import at least a csv of historical data. I know its
pitch is tracking manually makes you more aware, but let me bring in history
to start at least. Then we get more use out of it right away. I have years
upon years of data, and starting from square one seems like a waste of that
data.

Totally love the calendar though, that is a nice way to visualize things.

~~~
iabdulin
There's an import from CSV for historical data. Here's the demo:
[https://demo.honeymoney.io/app/my/import](https://demo.honeymoney.io/app/my/import)

------
jyriand
Is the rounding of planned expenses a feature or a bug? I entered 3.80 euros
as an expense, but in the calendar it shows 4 euros. If I enter 3.30, it shows
3 euros.

~~~
lbrito
Probably because the original software was developed for the Russian market,
and Russian rubles always get rounded.

~~~
iabdulin
Rubles are not rounded. One ruble is divided into 100 kopeks.

------
mcjiggerlog
This looks like a good start but honestly it looks like it needs the help of a
good designer.

For a more polished alternative, check out
[https://www.pocketsmith.com/](https://www.pocketsmith.com/) \- I've been a
customer for a while now and, as far as I can tell, can do everything
HoneyMoney can.

~~~
subsubsub
I disagree. I think the design is straight forward. More important is the copy
on the page which is far superior to pocketsmith. It tells me about what your
product does without having to click around.

~~~
mcjiggerlog
I was referring more to the tools themselves than the landing page.

------
utterly
Given the boring nature of data entry, this is a prime use case for
gamification!

~~~
TomK32
+5 points for you.

------
ouid
so twice as many?

------
Angostura
You apparently either have zero bees, or only have twice as many bees as the
others.

Is this what you _meant_ to say?

~~~
mingabunga
It's just a catchy headline, it doesn't really make sense but is
comical/nonsense so it makes you stop and pay attention to it. I think it's
brilliant.

~~~
Angostura
I just get irked that people continuously misuse 300% increase, etc.

