Paisa

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 827 words

The price of admission for Paisa is a text file of double-entry transactions, and if you are not willing to write one, stop reading and go to Actual Budget. If you are, Paisa is the most polished web interface that exists over a Ledger, hledger or Beancount journal: net worth over time, cash flow, budgets, goals, retirement projections and investment returns, all computed from a file you own and can version in git. It runs as a single binary or one container, uses under 256 MB, and stores nothing you cannot read with cat.

The journal is the source of truth, not the app

Plain-text accounting works like this: every transaction is a few lines in a text file, moving money between named accounts, and the books must balance.

2026/09/01 Salary
    Assets:Checking            4200.00 USD
    Income:Salary

2026/09/03 Groceries
    Expenses:Food:Groceries      86.40 USD
    Assets:Checking

Paisa reads that file (called main.ledger in the default project) through the ledger, hledger or beancount command-line tool you choose in paisa.yaml, then builds every chart from the result. It does not own the data. You can edit the journal in the built-in editor, in vim, or with an import script, and Paisa shows the change on reload. The consequence is that every Paisa feature is also a query you could run yourself, which is the appeal for the kind of person who runs it, and the wall for everyone else. If the words "double-entry" do not already mean something to you, budget a weekend with the hledger documentation before deciding.

Install: one binary, port 7500

docker run -d --name paisa -p 7500:7500 -v ./paisa:/root/Documents/paisa ananthakumaran/paisa

The image ships with ledger, hledger and beancount already inside, so the config's ledger_cli setting is the only choice to make. On bare metal it is a single downloaded binary and paisa serve in a folder containing paisa.yaml. There is no database and no user system, so the container has no login screen: bind the port to localhost and put it behind an auth proxy or a VPN, because your complete financial history is behind that URL. Backups are the folder, which is small enough to keep in a private git repository, and that is what most users do.

Where it beats everything else: the long view

The dashboards are the reason to run Paisa rather than bare hledger. Net worth is broken into asset classes with interest-rate calculations per account, so you see the real annualised return on each investment, not just its balance. The retirement page projects savings against a target withdrawal rate. Goals let you attach a savings target and date to an account and watch the trajectory. Budgets are per-category monthly envelopes computed from the journal, and the cash flow sankey shows where salary went. The project started with an Indian user base, so it has first-class support for things like mutual fund NAV lookups and tax-advantaged retirement accounts there, alongside generic commodity price fetching that works for any ticker you can name a price source for.

Getting transactions in is a template job

Paisa has an import screen that takes a CSV or bank statement, and you write a Handlebars template that maps columns to ledger lines. The first template for each bank takes an hour; after that, importing a month is ten minutes of reviewing categorisation. There is no bank connection, no Plaid, no automatic sync, and no plan for one. That is the difference from the tools people are leaving Mint for and the main reason a household with two people and six accounts often bounces off plain-text accounting entirely: the discipline of entering data is on you.

Fava, Actual and Firefly III as the alternatives

Within the finance category, Fava is the closest sibling: the standard web UI for Beancount, more of an accounting workbench than a dashboard, with less visual polish and more querying power. Run Fava if you want to interrogate the books; run Paisa if you want to look at them. Actual Budget is the safer pick for zero-based budgeting with a proper app and bank sync, and Firefly III is the larger project for people who want a conventional multi-account manager with rules and a database. Neither will let you keep your data in a text file, and that is the whole axis.

What I'd do

Paisa in Docker on the home server, journal kept in a private git repository with the config, bank CSVs imported monthly with one template per account, hledger as the engine because its error messages are the kindest of the three. Behind Tailscale, never exposed. And I would only recommend that setup to someone who already enjoys the idea of it; for everyone else, Actual Budget, and no regrets.