GNU cash :)
Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#42I use ledger, along with a couple scripts I've wired up (if I hit Win-Shift-B I get a desktop notification with my current balances).
I actually appreciate the manual nature of it -- knowing I'll have to go to the ledger and enter something after making a purchase has cut down on stupid purchases.
The only thing I'm missing is a nice GUI summary with some pie charts. There's a couple on GitHub but they either aren't up to date or I can't get them to work like I expect. But I haven't looked too hard -- would appreciate a pointer if there is one.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is basically offloading the record keeping to the bank. However, in an environment where the cash transaction is king, using this method has little value.
People still use cash? I don’t think I’ve made a cash purchase in the last 5 years.
I live in Germany and cash is still the preferred here. My small town near Cologne only started to adopt credit card about 6 years ago. When we arrive, the only shop that would take credit card was the petrol stations franchises.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#44Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is basically offloading the record keeping to the bank. However, in an environment where the cash transaction is king, using this method has little value.
People still use cash? I don’t think I’ve made a cash purchase in the last 5 years.
People actually trust banking institutions with their complete purchase histories and spending habits?
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#46After years of trying to find something that works for me I've finally found a stack that works. The big issue I had was that I wanted something that could import my bank statements. I found one of this issues here was that the bank transactions had no id's so I couldn't tag the duplicates. Then I found most banks allow you to export to ofx. This has ids and it has the balance at the end of the statement. So I could…
> Then I found most banks allow you to export to ofx. This has ids and it has the balance at the end of the statement. Watch out with that. Unless you verify the output format yourself for a few months, don't trust the exported ofx files. I haven't seen one bug-free yet, but I've found: wrong values if memo contains numbers, bad date format (minutes used for month), missing IDs, duplicated IDs, IDs generated with eve…
Thanks for the warning.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
People still use cash? I don’t think I’ve made a cash purchase in the last 5 years.
People actually trust banking institutions with their complete purchase histories and spending habits?
Yes but maybe I’m lacking enough knowledge to be afraid of that. What can they do with that information?
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
People still use cash? I don’t think I’ve made a cash purchase in the last 5 years.
I live in Germany and cash is still the preferred here. My small town near Cologne only started to adopt credit card about 6 years ago. When we arrive, the only shop that would take credit card was the petrol stations franchises.
Wow. Here in New Zealand we switched over to EFTPOS ( debit cards ) around 20 years ago. I was still in school when cash was becoming rare. Mid 30s now so cash seems odd to me.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
People actually trust banking institutions with their complete purchase histories and spending habits?
Yes but maybe I’m lacking enough knowledge to be afraid of that. What can they do with that information?
Here is one very obvious use case.
Our spending habits are clearly shown. They could sell that information to marketers.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#50Default notes app: 22/06 -0.2 morning -3 Jack +2 John tires -1.5 ? Then I parse it (perl) to standard accounting software, guessing analytics from these comments. No specialized app worked conveniently enough for me than just typing the event on new line.
mind to share the setup?
I wouldn’t mind, but it is only parsed into [[date, amount, comment]+] and then processed by 1c enterprise integrated into our company (we are russians). All the analytics magic/ui happens there, but I’m not sure if it is extractable or disclosable, since it’s mostly a data-driven process specific to us. Pointing to 1c distribution also counts as warez, so...