Open-source zero-based budgeting (ZBB) for your desktop — give every dollar a job.
A fast, local-first zero-based budget in a native desktop app: assign every unit of money to a category until Ready to Assign hits zero, then watch your envelopes through the month. Underneath it's real double-entry accounting, so your budget, balances and net worth are all derived from one journal and can never drift out of balance. Your data lives in a single file you own — no cloud, no account, no tracking — and can be protected with strong password encryption, so even the file on disk is unreadable without your passphrase.
📖 Read the documentation · 🌐 Website
- 🎯 Zero-based budgeting — the heart of the app. Every month, give each category a job until Ready to Assign reaches zero. Track Assigned · Activity · Available per category, with envelope balances that roll forward and overspending shown in red. One-tap quick-budget suggestions (last month's assigned/spent, 3-month average) and Auto-Assign to copy a month's plan.
- 💰 A Ready-to-Assign that's honest — it's a single pool drawn from your real on-budget account balances (assets net of credit-card debt), so money assigned to any month — even a future one — draws it down, and you can never assign money you don't have.
- 💳 Credit cards done right — spending on a card depletes its envelope and nets against the budget, so it's budget-neutral the way a good ZBB tool should be. Mark investments or a mortgage as off-budget so they count toward net worth but not assignable cash.
- 🔒 Locked history — past months are view-only; you budget the current month and beyond, and a budget you've already lived through can't be rewritten.
- 📒 Real double-entry accounting under the hood — every transaction is balanced postings that sum to zero, so your budget, balances and net worth are derived from one journal and can never go inconsistent.
- 💵 Proper money handling — amounts are stored as integer minor units (cents), with per-currency formatting for Rp · $ · € · £ (no floating-point money, ever).
- 🏦 Accounts & net worth — asset & liability cards, a net-worth overview, and a per-account register with running balance.
- 🧾 Transactions — a clean, date-grouped journal with a familiar Income / Expense / Transfer entry form, live filters and search, plus a bulk-select mode to recategorize many entries at once.
- 💳 Debts — every kind — track BNPL/installment plans, amortizing loans (APR with a proper principal-vs-interest split per payment, extra payments that shorten the term or lower the payment), revolving credit (attach your existing card account, credit limit & utilization, minimum payments, a monthly statement review that proposes the interest charge for you to confirm), and informal IOUs (a balance, an optional due date, pay any amount). Schedule debts open an off-budget Liability account and become their own budget envelope; card payments are budget-neutral transfers so envelopes never double-count. An overview dashboard shows total owed, weighted average APR and the projected debt-free date, and a snowball vs. avalanche comparison shows where extra money pays off fastest.
- 📊 Analytics — KPIs, income-vs-expenses, net-worth-over-time and spending-by-category charts — all derived from the journal, so they never drift from your transactions.
- 🔐 Password encryption (optional) — protect a document with a passphrase and the
.financyfile is encrypted at rest with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and an Argon2id-derived key, and is tamper-evident. Your data is only ever decrypted in memory, never persisted to disk in plaintext. A forgotten passphrase is unrecoverable — there's no backdoor. - 💾 Local-first persistence — each document is a single
.financySQLite file you own. Unencrypted files are always auto-saved (ACID writes — no save button, no lost work); encrypted files use manual save (Cmd/Ctrl-S) with an unsaved-changes prompt when you close — the trade-off that keeps plaintext off your disk. - ⚡ Quick start — first-run setup lets you load demo data (a complete worked budget) or start from scratch with your chosen currency and an optional password.
- 🛡️ Safe by design — atomic writes, append-only schema migrations, and an automatic
.bakbefore any file upgrade.
| Accounts & net worth | Analytics |
|---|---|
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| Transactions | First-run setup |
|---|---|
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A touch-first UI built from the same codebase (see MOBILE.md for status and what's not ported yet).
| Home | Transactions | Budget |
|---|---|---|
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| Account detail | Debts | Debt detail |
|---|---|---|
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Grab the .deb or .rpm for the latest release from the
Releases page:
# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install ./Financy-vX.Y.Z-linux-amd64.deb
# Fedora / RHEL / openSUSE
sudo dnf install ./Financy-vX.Y.Z-linux-x86_64.rpmThis installs the financy command, a desktop launcher, and registers the
.financy file type so you can double-click documents to open them.
- Go 1.25+
- A C toolchain + OpenGL/X11 dev headers (Fyne requirement). On Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install gcc pkg-config libgl1-mesa-dev xorg-dev
go run . # or: make runmake build # produces ./financy with the version stamped inOn first launch you'll be greeted with a setup dialog — pick Load demo data (USD)
to explore, or Start from scratch and choose your currency. Then choose where to
save your .financy file.
- Budget the month — open 💰 Budget, then click a category to assign money (with quick-budget suggestions) until Ready to Assign is zero. Navigate months with ◀ ▶, Auto-Assign to copy last month, and + Add Category to grow your plan.
- Add a transaction — the toolbar
+, or the Add Transaction button. Choose Income / Expense / Transfer; the app writes the correct double-entry postings for you, and the spending flows straight into your budget's Activity. - Track a debt — open 💳 Debts and pick the kind: a BNPL/installment plan, an amortizing loan (enter principal + APR and either the term or the payment — the other is computed, with a live payoff preview), a credit card / line of credit, or an informal IOU. Pay installments from the Debts screen or via Add Transaction ▸ Pay debt, record card payments and extra loan payments from the debt's page, and compare snowball vs. avalanche under Strategies.
- Open an account's register — click an account card. Right-click a card (or use the ⋮ button) for New Transaction · View Register · Edit · Delete.
- Filter the journal — by month, type, account, or free-text search.
- See your trends — the 📊 Analytics screen shows KPIs and charts over This month / Last 3 / 6 / 12 / Year to date; hover any month for a tooltip.
- Manage categories & currency — the ⚙ Preferences dialog (Configuration · Categories · Data Summary).
- Files —
File ▸ New / Open / Open Recent / Save a Copy / Close.
- Each document is a self-contained SQLite database with a
.financyextension — move it, back it up, or drop it in a cloud folder (while the app is closed). - It's always saved as you work (ACID writes). There is no "Save" button.
- Save a Copy snapshots the document elsewhere; opening an older file makes a
.bakbefore migrating it to the current schema.
⚠️ SQLite isn't built for two machines editing the same file at once — don't open the same.financyfrom multiple devices simultaneously.
main.go entry point (embeds the icon, calls ui.Run)
internal/
core/ domain model · double-entry Store · SQLite · formatting (no UI deps)
ui/
style/ palette + theme
component/ reusable widgets (cards, table, rows, app bar, tooltips, charts)
view/ screens (Budget, Accounts, Transactions, Debts, Recurring, Analytics) + Preferences + forms
(root) app shell, controller, toolbar, File menu, document manager
The core package has zero UI dependencies and holds all the accounting logic, so it's
independently testable — that's where new logic and tests belong.
make check # build + vet + test (run before committing)
make test # tests only
make run # run the app
make run-dev # run with an isolated dev profile + database (won't touch your real data)
make shot # regenerate screenshots (into /tmp/financy-shots)make run-dev repoints $XDG_CONFIG_HOME at ./.devdata/config (gitignored) so dev
gets its own prefs.json, recent-files list, and .financy database — your real
~/.config/financy is never read or written. First run shows the setup wizard; save the
dev document inside ./.devdata/ and it reopens next time. (Linux/BSD only — macOS
doesn't honour XDG_CONFIG_HOME.)
Two rules that protect user data:
- Migrations are append-only — add a new entry to
migrationsininternal/core/db.go; never edit an existing one. - Money stays integer minor units — never introduce floats for money.
make release VERSION=0.2.0 # stamps version, verifies, builds
git commit -am "Release v0.2.0"
git tag v0.2.0 && git push --tagsPushing a v* tag triggers CI to package Linux / Windows / macOS bundles and attach
them to the GitHub Release. See RELEASING.md for the full guide.
- Go — application language
- Fyne — cross-platform native GUI
- modernc.org/sqlite — pure-Go SQLite (no cgo for the DB)
Financy's core is feature-complete and the project is working toward a stable
v1.0. The supported install target for 1.0 is Linux (.deb / .rpm);
Windows and macOS ship too, but unsigned first (you'll see the usual
"unidentified developer" prompt), with code-signing/notarization coming after 1.0.
The rest of the v1.0 work is locking down the .financy file format plus a
docs/accessibility/hardening pass. After 1.0 the goal is to grow Financy into an
all-in-one finance app. The first priority is 💳 in-depth debt
management (interest/APR, amortization schedules, snowball vs. avalanche payoff
strategies and payoff projections), followed by a full 📈 investment tracker
(holdings, cost basis, gains and allocation, built on the same double-entry
journal). Other candidates include budget goals/targets, multi-currency,
an OFX/QFX-aware importer, signed installers, and an opt-in, self-hosted
end-to-end-encrypted sync (never a Financy cloud account).
See ROADMAP.md for the full plan, and CHANGELOG.md for what's already shipped.
Financy is free and open-source, built and maintained in my spare time. If it helps you give every dollar a job, please consider sponsoring on GitHub — it directly funds continued development and is hugely appreciated. A ⭐ on the repo helps too!
Released under the MIT License.