Hello everyone.

Currently me and my GF have our finances organized in a Google sheet file (hosted on Google drive), being that file integrated with a Google form.

What we do is having on our cellphones a shortcut to the form, where we input all our expenses, they are directly and automatically registered in the sheet, and on another tab we’ve built some sort of dashboard based on all the values the form registers.

So given this context, is there any option or group of options that are open source, and that achieve this same purpose / scenario?

If possible everything acessible on a cloud or at least onlinez so we don’t lose this flexibility and accessibility on our cellphones.

Thanks in advance

    •  Erunn   ( @Erunn@lemdro.id ) OP
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      710 months ago

      Hmm I’ve found some comments over the internet about it, but I must confess self-hosting is not yet for me, since I’m a newbie still :(

      Any other alternative or guide you can recommend ?

      Thanks in advance again

      • If you want some cloud syncing but also want privacy, then you will have to self-host, or pay someone to do it for you. There are some free tier Nextcloud accounts, but quite limited in storage. Disroot is one of them. If you do end up self-hosting, there are really good budgeting stacks out there:

        https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/money-budgeting–management.html

        My partner and I use Actual budget, and I can recommend it.

        For any of these services, you don’t even have to have a server running 24/7 if you don’t add transactions live. If you do it once a day, just boot up the Docker container, store your stuff, and go about your day. But if you want constant access, you’d have to leave the server running all the time, and to access from the public network, then I recommend Tailscale.

      • I used to host my own nextcloud instance. It takes a bit of effort to setup and requires some maintenance. As far as self hosting goes I would grade it as easy to do. So if you like a Dropbox style option and want to try it out, you should.

        But honestly I’m here to steer you towards syncthing if you go the file sync + libreoffice (or whatever) path. Once I found out about it I switched, and am happy I did.

  • You could just use Libreoffice/Colabora Office App and sync however. If you want it encrypted then it would need to be an e2e service. Syncthing, Proton Drive, Treaserit, or just Cypomator in front of Drive.

  • Cryptpad.fr offers spreadsheets and up to 1gb free storage, and if i recall right theyre using foss. Im unsure about the dashboard youve mentioned, but id hazard a guess that you can perform automatic calculations based upon cells in the spreadsheet, to for example sum all expenses.

  • Mmmh, it’s difficult. I personally would look into hosted Nextcloud services that have an office suite enabled.

    We used https://windcloud.de/produkte/managed-nextcloud (German company / website)

    a while ago but only for (large amounts) of data storage, not sure if they do office.

    Also I’m unsure about Nextcloud’s encryption, this says it’s encrypted during transport (https 🤷‍♀️ which I would close the tab immediately if they didn’t do that) and that their disks are encrypted locally. I think what they’re saying is that they’re not using Nextcloud’s encryption feature, not sure if that’s good or bad since it might be that it’s terrible …