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tinosar
Author here. I'm a certified accountant. I ran my own finances in a double-entry Excel/VBA system for years because the off-the-shelf options forced a choice I didn't like: GnuCash (correct, but heavy enough that even I dreaded the daily entry) or the app-store budgeting apps (pleasant, single-entry, cloud-hosted, usually wanting a bank login).

So I built a local-first double-entry desktop app — a plain local database file on your own machine, no telemetry, no aggregator. Happy to talk about the local-first trade-offs (no auto bank sync is the price), or why I went one-time-purchase instead of subscription. Not here to pitch — genuinely interested in how others in this crowd handle their own books.

black6
> Accounts you can create inline as you go. Scheduled and automatic movements that just happen.

Things Gnucash does.

throwaway_7274
LLM-written drivel. Painful to read, and (weak) evidence that the project is equally sloppy. The “author” evidently does not respect their readers.
huijzer
Is there use for this for individuals? Or is this like advanced note taking apps: you feel productive but are just busy talking about the things you need to do instead of doing the things you need to do
dgrin91
Honestly my biggest pain point with all personal accounting systems was that there was no easy, free way to automatically pull my transaction data from all my accounts into a single, local file that I can play with as I want. I really don't want to go to all my accounts every month and click download.

There still isn't, but I did recently find simplefin(https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/). Its not great (e.g. quota of only ~25 requests per day), but its good enough and the price was cheap enough that I just bit the bullet. It also paired well with Actual budget, and now I have a personal accounting system that I am reasonably happy with.

I also found teller.io, which is frankly a better dev experience (and good free tier!), but they don't support all the banks I'm on and somehow simplefin does.

lostdog
"a real balance sheet, assets against liabilities, not a spending feed dressed up with colours"

Ugh. Just write your own damn post already

tga
If you continue developing this, I recommend completely scrapping the UI and finding a person or AI who can create something usable. What you're showing there is really that bad -- if you consider it acceptable, and expect to be able to sell it, then you really need to partner up with someone who knows what they're doing.
tga
To be clear: as a prototype, it's more than fine. As long as the UI isn't the innovation, make it real first and experiment with it as much as you can. Show it to users, see whether they understand it and see the value. As a domain expert, making your ideas real in any way will make it easier to bring others on board who can create a pleasant experience.

The UI you're showing now looks more like a bag of controls thrown on a page by a backend engineer in 2006 and less like a B2C product in 2026. Various boxes all over the place, weird colors, misalignment, inconsistent spacing, confusing what does what, a random calculator(?) in the middle of the screen, unclear abbreviated labels. It needs so much work that a full rethink might be in order.