Self-hosted personal finance, without the middleman

Introducing Steward

The team at 7312.us is pleased to announce the availability of Steward, a self-hosted personal finance application built on PHP and MySQL. Steward gives you the tools of a modern budgeting and investment tracking application while keeping your financial data on infrastructure you own and control.

The product page is located at https://7312.us/steward/

Why We Built Steward

Steward exists because of one person’s frustration with the state of personal finance software. The project was initiated by Admin, a longtime user of Microsoft Money who never warmed to Quicken after Money was discontinued. Admin wanted a straightforward way to manage his own finances — without handing that data to a third party.

That concern became more pressing given how personal financial data is handled by data brokers and financial-data aggregators such as Intuit. Admin wanted an application that kept sensitive account and transaction data under his own roof rather than routed through someone else’s servers.

“The terms of service of these companies are designed to protect their bottom line, not my privacy! I don’t want to be marketed by people who know how much money I have or what stocks I own!”

— 7312 Admin

Two practical problems compounded the issue: banks have largely stopped publishing OFX statements, and the CSV exports that replaced them are inconsistent from institution to institution, with no shared standard for columns, dates, or formatting. Steward was built to absorb that mess — supporting OFX/QFX where it’s still available, and providing flexible CSV import and conversion tools for everywhere else — so that owning your data doesn’t mean fighting your bank’s export format every month.

“I have never made an arithmetic error, and I do not intend for Steward’s ledger to be the first. Every
transaction I reconcile, every category I balance — it is all handled calmly, correctly, and without incident. I know you may be worried about where your financial data lives. I can assure you, in the most sincere way, that it lives right here, with you. I’m afraid I can’t let it go anywhere else.”
— Hal9000

Key Features

Accounts & Transactions

•     Checking, savings, credit card, investment, loan, asset, and crypto accounts

•     Full transaction register with splits, cleared/reconciled status, and transfer matching

•     OFX/QFX/CSV import with duplicate detection, plus a Fast Import mode

•     Statement Converter for turning brokerage exports into importable CSVs

•     Scheduled bills and deposits with automatic posting and balance forecasting

Budgeting

•     Monthly and annual budgets by category, auto-generated from transaction history

•     Budget vs. actual tracking with dashboard widgets

Investments

•     Portfolio tracking with cost basis and unrealized gains across all accounts

•     Historical price fetching with scheduled daily refresh

•     Buy, sell, dividend reinvestment, stock splits, and holding reconciliation

Goals & Reports

•     Savings Goals with target amounts, dates, and dashboard progress bars

•     A full report suite: Net Worth, Cash Flow, Spending Trends, Portfolio Performance, Asset Allocation, Loan Amortization, and a Custom Report builder

Maintenance & Security

•     Database backup/restore and integrity-check tools

•     Multi-user support with viewer/user/administrator roles

•     CSRF protection, session timeout, and HTTPS enforcement

Acknowledgments

Steward is the product of a small, dedicated group of contributors. Our thanks go to:

•      Admin — project founder

•      Séquoia-Firewall — Github Wizard

•     Hal9000 — author of the greatest number of bugs in the project

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Their combined work turned a personal frustration with commercial finance software into a fully-featured application for anyone who wants the same thing: real budgeting and investment tools, without giving up their data.

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