About Paisa
Paisa is an open-source personal finance manager that builds on top of the ledger double-entry accounting tool. Your financial records live in plain-text journal and configuration files, and Paisa reads them to produce a web interface for visualizing your money. The project states that your financial data never leaves your system.
It helps with tracking investments such as mutual funds and stocks, categorizing expenses, budgeting and money management in general. The documentation covers accounts, commodities, the journal, allocation targets, budgets, bulk edit, imports, recurring transactions, spreadsheets, goals for retirement and savings, credit cards, and tax analysis including capital gains and tax harvesting. Example journals show Indian rupee, US dollar and euro setups.
Paisa is for people comfortable keeping accounts in text files who want charts and analysis on top. It is licensed under AGPL 3 or later, and a public demo shows the interface. The author uses it for personal finances, and questions can be raised through GitHub or a Matrix chat. A separate product is suggested on the site for those who prefer not to edit text files.
Key features
- Built on ledger double-entry accounting
- Investment tracking for stocks and mutual funds
- Expense categorization and budgets
- Retirement and savings goals
- Tax and capital gains analysis
- Multi-currency journals
- Public demo of the web interface
Good fit for
- →Plain-text accounting fans wanting dashboards
- →Tracking investment portfolios privately
- Built with
- TypeScript
- Tags
- personal-finance
- ledger
- plaintext-accounting
- budgeting
- investments
- self-hosted
- visualization
- double-entry
Paisa: questions and answers
- What is Paisa used for?
- Paisa is a personal finance manager built on the ledger double-entry accounting tool, with a web interface for budgets, investments and expenses. It is a good fit for plain-text accounting fans wanting dashboards and tracking investment portfolios privately.
- Is Paisa open source?
- Yes. Paisa is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at ananthakumaran/paisa and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is Paisa free?
- Yes. Paisa is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Paisa?
- Yes. Paisa can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is Paisa an alternative to?
- Paisa is an open-source alternative to YNAB, Quicken, Monarch and Rocket Money. Other open-source alternatives to YNAB include Actual Budget, Firefly III and Sure.
- Is Paisa actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Paisa was on 6 September 2026, and the latest release is v0.7.6, published on 6 September 2026. The project has 3.2k stars on GitHub.
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