Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

feram.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 141 posts

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#61

Post by mjrbrennan »

mikeyjk wrote: post #39
jeremymcanally wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's also non-sensical. A CLI "interface" needs a lot of thought and work behind it, too, unless you want to end up loathed by your users as something like git is.

I don't think it is fair to say that git users loathe it overall. I enjoy using git, is this not a common experience?

I've found a lot of people seem to hate it. I like using it in the command line personally, I find that 99% of the time I am using the same commands day in day out so I don't have to do anything particularly hard using the git CLI.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#62

Post by TeMPOraL »

stevievee wrote: post #5

"Simple - No more confusing debit / credit / asset / liability mumbo jumbo" It is just "mumbo jumbo" to you because accounting/finance is not your area of expertise.

Somebody should write a proper "accounting for regular people" guide, because I too find those terms confusing - and also completely separated for any experience ever that I had with money. And it only gets worse from there, with "accounts receivable" and "accounts payable". Is that an American thing? I try not to fall into the trap of being proud of my own ignorance; but after many hours of reading introductory accounting articles linked by various accounting software sites, I still don't get any of it.

I'd love a cheat-sheet or plain-English example of how to model the following with GAAP: I'm an individual, I have couple bank accounts, get a salary and occasional invoice, I pay for various stuff, I sometimes use cash. I do not own shares in companies. I want to do budgeting, including some sort of "envelopes" or "virtual accounts" so that I can earmark some money for particular use. I tried to build something like that with Ledger CLI several times now, but I always bounce off the confusion about terminology, and not knowing what goes into "Equity", what into "Liabilities", etc., and why does everything expect me to have "accounts payable" and "receivable"...

Knowing what's the proper, idiomatic representation of such financial system would go a long way towards me understanding what the hell all those terms mean.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#64

Post by csomar »

I'm not sure why the OP is getting s%%t from the community. He built a simple application, probably out of love of software development. It is not complete or perfect. It is also probably not the best use of his business time. But we do waste time on other stuff too.

This CLI app could be useful to me for a subset of accounting I do. Yes, it won't be able to track VAT accounts. It won't amortize my expenses. But if I needed that for a critical business I'm running, I'd not use a hobby project.

The CLI is useful. Double Entry bookkeeping is useful but as things scale it gets very confusing even for the best of accountants. This program is simple and can give you a solution if you are looking for very simple bookkeeping.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#65

Post by mathieuh »

madhadron wrote: post #47
mikeyjk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is fair to say that git users loathe it overall. I enjoy using git, is this not a common experience?

I regard the command line as a last resort if I can't do something in SourceTree. After spending time with a quality source control client, any command line interface feels like wading through quicksand.

Maybe I should learn how to use SourceTree, but using an abstraction over git kind of makes me nervous because I don't know what it's doing in the background. I suppose it would be pretty simple to learn what it's doing, but I just prefer knowing exactly what git commands I'm running.

I use the IntelliJ IDE family's visual conflict resolution tool so I guess it wouldn't be a big step to start using SourceTree. Realistically the only git commands I use are add, commit, rebase, push and pull.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#66

Post by cup-of-tea »

billfruit wrote: post #55

After trying to use GNU cash for some time, I got the feeling that a personal accounting app needs to be a web based service, to enable it to be used while on the move/travelling, because I found myself building up a huge backlog of entries to be made in to the system in these situations. After about a month of use, I gave up, since the overhead of jotting down transactions and later entering into the system. I doubt…

I've written a tool that can import data from my various bank accounts and credit cards. It's semi-automatic. Uses machine learning to guess the correct account but I can quickly change it. I then put the finishing touches on by hand.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#67

Post by kungtotte »

chris_wot wrote: post #50
stevievee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not nitpicking at all. All of the things the author said are "mumbo jumbo" are fundamental to keeping proper books. Proper bookkeeping is also regulated so it is not just my opinion.

Agreed. If you haven't spent the time to understand what debits and credits are in a double-entry book keeping system, then you really shouldn't be trying to do accounting.

There's a large use case for simple personal bookkeeping that doesn't require double-entry accounting.

Most people have some fixed recurring bills (insurance, rent, subscriptions, etc.), some variable recurring bills (utilities, etc.), standing payments like savings, and monthly spends like groceries.

For them (myself included) something that lets you simply input recurring expenses and your income and show a running tally is pretty much all that's needed, add some simple transaction tracking and you're there. Basically all you really want is two things:

1) Given $2000 at payday, how much of that is available to spend if $X is going towards known expenses.

2) The day before payday I have $Y left in my account. Where did I spend the $2000-$X?

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#68

Post by kungtotte »

athrun wrote: post #57

I can only speak for me, but modeling financial flows in terms of transactions and not accounts is much more intuitive than the classical alternative. I'm a long time Buxfer user, which also works like this. It's not that I don't understand double entry bookkeeping, I've used GNUCash for a long time before moving away. It is indeed very powerful and flexible, but it always was too much of a chore to maintain and next…

I played around with the buxfer demo a bit, and one thing wasn't really clear to me: is it possible to schedule fixed payments? There was some kind of reminder system, but does it automatically add the transaction or will I have to log in to manually add those transactions?

Simple recurring transactions is like the one feature I really need from a tool like this.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#69

Post by djhworld »

sushisource wrote: post #3

No judgement, but can someone explain to me the use case for this sort of thing? I'd imagine for anything other than the simplest stuff, you're going to start using something a bit more powerful, and for the simple stuff - who with the skills and knowledge of this type of tool really needs to do small time pocketbook budgeting?

I use beancount for personal finances.

I've only recently moved to it in fact, previously used tools like YNAB and so on, but this approach seems to be a bit more flexible, especially around managing investments etc

I think you need to have the mindset for it, I've always reconciled my transactions and like to keep an overview of everything, so people saying it's tedious etc doesn't wash with me, in an odd way I sort of enjoy it

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#70

Post by djhworld »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #66
billfruit wrote: post #55

After trying to use GNU cash for some time, I got the feeling that a personal accounting app needs to be a web based service, to enable it to be used while on the move/travelling, because I found myself building up a huge backlog of entries to be made in to the system in these situations. After about a month of use, I gave up, since the overhead of jotting down transactions and later entering into the system. I doubt…

I've written a tool that can import data from my various bank accounts and credit cards. It's semi-automatic. Uses machine learning to guess the correct account but I can quickly change it. I then put the finishing touches on by hand.

I was thinking of using ML for this approach too but tbh most of my transactions are predictable, just a simple hashmap of Payee->Account works just as well.

Cleaning up the payees is the trickier part.

I guess in cases like Amazon, where you might buy a plethora of things across different accounts, ML might be helpful

Post reply on HN