Reckoner: A local, private, financial tracker

Privacy and Security Discussions
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Hi everyone, I’ve been working on a project for quite some time and would like other people to know about it. It is a personal financial tracker I call Reckoner. I still have not released a stable version of Reckoner, but I plan to release the first stable release of it by the end of the year. Instead I have a web demo which will be updated with any changes I am making until the stable release.

What does it do?

It’s in the description, this is a tracker for personal finances. That means the tool is good for tracking, categorizing, and budgeting income and expenses. This does have a couple of unique selling points including, but not limited to:

  • Ability for the user to create custom report views
  • Ability to generate multiple category groups and attach budgets to a category group
  • Data is stored locally and all sensitive data is encrypted (including the database) with the exception of the web app. Web database encryption is not supported with the library I am using.
  • Multiplatform support. Currently linux, web, and Android. Windows is planned in the future and iOS/Mac support will happen when I buy a Mac.
  • Non web platforms support regular export of the database in encrypted or unecrypted form. Also supports import of database file.
  • Device synchronization is accomplished by using a Pocketbase server. User can opt-out of AES rest encryption if desired.

Isn’t this Just Like X App?

Yes and no. There are apps available in the FDroid store which can be used for personal financial tracking. There’s Pro Expense, Finance Manger, and My Expense. However, all of these apps are limited to Android only, have limited configuration for charting data, and don’t have the configuration and customization I am offering.

A lot of the design language for this was inspired by Firefly III, which I have been using until I will switch over to my app. This is a self hosted financial tracker which I would endorse for a self-hosting advocate. However, I had trouble running the app on my phone as there is no official mobile application and I didn’t find an unofficial app which didn’t limit the experience in one way or another. This inspired me to create a full-featured local first financial tracker available for both mobile and desktop.

The closest analogous app is Actual. This originally was a closed source SaaS app which was open-sourced mid my development of Reckoner. It has a similar philosophy, but is less flexible than the app I am building.

That’s Cool, What’s Next?

  1. First, I need to officially release the application and stop changing the database schema. I have a self imposed deadline of EOY.
  2. After officially releasing, I am going to pause development, with the exception of bug fixes, and focus on documenting the application.
  3. After that, it will depend on priorities. I eventually want to add peer-to-peer sync, but had some issues with it that I plan to revisit later. I also want to release a cloud platform which would allow automated downloading of transaction info (using an aggregator) and the ability to synchronize data using the infrastructure with at-rest encryption. This is my personal end goal.

That’s Super Cool and I Want to Help!

That’s awesome! The best way to help me out is to spread the word about this! I am terrible at being social (especially online). Any boosting through any platform you’re a part of would really help spread info about this project!

If you’re interested in helping code the application, please reach out to me. I do have a Codeberg org setup for this, but haven’t moved the code under the org yet.

If you’d like to help translate the app into another language, that’s awesome, but I do have some work until it’s ready to be translated. To speed up coding I did end up hard coding US EN strings in code and need to spend work to move them into localized data. Let me know if you’d be interested in translation and I’ll note that for when I am ready for translations!

Wrapping Up

I know this is a long post. Part of the reason is that I’m actively building the app and don’t have any public documentation for it yet. If you’ve made it to the end of this post, thank you :folded_hands:!

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I personally haven’t found anything better than Paisa, but I’ll bookmark this post for later review and provide some feedback.

It looks nicer and more versatile than MoneyWallet, the first finance app I ever used, but Paisa is it for me at the moment.

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Hello Velten, I am late to the announcement and thank you for the open source app.

May I ask, why Flutter? and the motivation behind the app name? Are you an economist or a banker?

Too many questions but you’ll bear with me, I hope!

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Flutter was chosen after listing out what my goals were and how I would accomplish it with different frameworks. In my case the goal were

  1. Local first data
  2. A single codebase I could use for the platforms I was going to initially target (Linux + Android initially with stretch goal of all platforms)
  3. Better performance

I took a look at technologies liek Xamarin (now .NET MAUI), React Native, and even native platform apps. Ultimately, Flutter had some of the best Linux support outside of building a native app.

The app name was just something I found when looking for different synonyms for financial tracking terms. A Reckoner was a synonym for an accountant, thus the app name.

I am not an economist or banker, I am a software developer. I really started working on this after burning out at my fulltime job, I took a much laxer position and suddenly had a lot of spare energy. I didn’t find any local first FOSS tracker with a goal of enabling device synchronization and aggregator support. Generally the available trackers are either local only or you need to deploy a service on some server to get tracker.

One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of trackers have either gone closed source, like Paisa or just stopped development like MoneyWallet.

Since I wrote this post, I have been regularly publishing release of Reckoner.

Hope that answers your questions!

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Wow, this is very neat! I’ll definitely download and give it a try.

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@velten.dev Are you still developing this? I may want to help code some over the summer.

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Yeah, I actively develop this in my spare time. Take a look at Reckoner/app: Privacy first personal financial tracker - Codeberg.org. Right now I’m focused on add in-app tutorials instead of links to the documentation (currently not up to date). After that I’m planning on changing the synchronization service from Pocketbase to PowerSync and look a deploying an end-to-end encrypted cloud offering for synchronization. I am starting to get requests from people using the app and prioritize addressing those in-between big feature releases.

I have a couple of ideas for smaller enhancements if you want to dip your toes into dev.

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Tragically I don’t know dart, but if I have time to pick it up I can definitely help you out.