Subaccounting
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010Introducing…
A simple personal accounting system that I wrote over the holidays. It’s user-friendly, web-based, fast (AJAX), and free to download. Here’s how it works…
First you browse to the homepage and upload your bank account’s transaction CSV… Subaccounting will try to figure out the CSV columns itself
Then you browse into the bank account…
And here you make subaccounts and subtransactions within that account. A subaccount is a way of breaking up a bank account into areas for your savings, food, clothes, rent, etc. Each subaccount has it’s own balance so you can see whether you’ve spent too much on food.
Here’s how you add a new subaccount…
Type the name…
And then you add what’s called a subtransaction. A subtransaction is simply moving money between subaccounts (Eg, from savings to health).
So basically you describe your bank transactions by using subtransactions. In the following screenshot a purchase at Sweet Momma’s Kitchen comes out of the food subaccount, so we make a subtransaction for that amount.
Notice how in the following screenshot the red ‘equals’ sign went away because we resolved this transaction.
You can then browse to the food subaccount and see how you’re doing… not good it seems.
Important bits
- It supports backups and restorations via an XML export. Back up your data regularly.
- It only officially handles Kiwibank transactions although other banks will probably work. Use the CSV export and Subaccounting will try and determine the columns itself.
- It has no built-in security so be sure to secure the webserver directory yourself
- It’s released under the GPLv3.
- It may never be updated again.
