Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash • Hacker News Board

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#41

Post by PascLeRasc » Tue, May 19, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #32

whycombagator wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their homepage line: > Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money. As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better…

I actually hadn't heard about bitwarden (thanks) - I'll check that out. I'm not in YNAB's target market either, but the value they provide is useful even if you're not struggling month to month with finances. You get really good control over your money and a much better understanding of how you're spending it and where. Being really aware of that makes it easier to actually leverage it more because you know exactly w…

Which file export do you use from Apple Card to YNAB? I'm looking at doing the same thing and I'm curious which works best.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#42

Post by cproctor » Tue, May 19, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

My partner and I have been tracking all our spending for the last five years with hledger (ledger reimplemented in haskell) and some custom import and management scripts inspired by "Full-fledged hledger" [1]. More recently we added Plaid [2] for auto-importing from financial accounts. I love having a plain-text history and being able to ask complex queries.

One unexpectedly-sweet benefit is that your spending is a high-granularity record of where you have been and what you have been doing, encoding some signals you might not have thought to write in a diary. Things like "that was when we were saving for our down payment" or "I was going to coffee shops every day trying to finish my dissertation" or "that was when we had a pandemic." I enjoy looking back through our ledger the same way I enjoy going way back in my gmail history.

[1] https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger [2] https://plaid.com/

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#43

Post by ahnick » Tue, May 19, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

john61 wrote: post #22

elric wrote: post #6

"Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools. That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which ca…

Double entry booking is complicated but it pays off to learn if also for personal finance because errors are much less likely than with a spreadheet.

This is commonly stated, but I found it relatively straightforward once I saw the extended accounting equation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_equation) and knew every entry needed a corresponding entry to make the equation balance.

Assets = Liabilities + Equity + (Income - Expenses)

For some reason the (Income - Expenses) part gets left off in many introductory explanations of the accounting equation. I think that leads to a lot of confusion about how to treat Income and Expense accounts in programs like GnuCash for newcomers to double entry accounting.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#44

Post by gen220 » Tue, May 19, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #26

every wrote: post #15

I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level, it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are staggering... [1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html [2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html

I looked in to switching from GnuCash to Ledger about 5 years ago, and found that it would have been too painful to use for manually inputting the thousands of transactions I had because it just didn't have the nice auto-complete and GUI nicities that GnuCash had. I'm a hardcore command-line and keyboard-only power user, so I would have absolutely loved to have made Ledger work for me rather than use the mouse-heavy…

I've been using ledger for a year next month.

As you imagine, the fact that it's text-only has been both a burden and a blessing.

Burdens:

- inserting transactions takes a long time, when you're starting out. will always take a long time if you never "automate"

- it's easy to make little mistakes and not catch it until the next time you compile or make a report.

blessings:

- git, sed, grep, awk all "work as advertised"

- you can automate the boring things, as they get more boring, and you can learn a lot along the way

at this stage, I have a combination of awk and python scripts (maybe 500 lines total, but a lot of it is regex) that convert my financial institutions' transaction export csvs into ledger transactions. I pretty much copy paste that into specific ledger files. The next step that I'm currently automating takes a concatenated `git diff` and interactively categorizes expenses/splits/assigns to the correct ledger file.

I also blew a ton of time (maybe 40 hours) on scraping those csvs from bank websites, workday, and fidelity (basically, a puppeteer script for logging in, downloading all the files available). Getting past google auth for workday was hard. But learning these things has been fun.

With all this automation, I spend maybe 20 minutes every weekend importing things over from the banks. I'd do it every month, but I'm still a control freak with it.

Doing this has been super fun! And it also has yielded a lot of insight into my finances. Above all, it gives me a feeling of "control" over my finances like no other. Itemizing deductions takes an hour, just as a throwaway example.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#45

Post by nicolaslem » Tue, May 19, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

spodek wrote: post #9

I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here: > If you’re happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less than a certain amount each month, that’s great! You don’t need GnuCash. I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or wha…

Before I started using GnuCash I had no clue how much I spent monthly. I was fine with the fact that the my savings account seemed to grow over time.

Then one day I got mad at a random fee from my bank after realizing how much they charged me over the years. I closed my account at this bank, decided that I will be more careful with my spendings and started tracking everything with GnuCash.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#46

Post by swimfar » Tue, May 19, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

spodek wrote: post #9

I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here: > If you’re happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less than a certain amount each month, that’s great! You don’t need GnuCash. I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or wha…

I tracked every single expenditure in GnuCash for a year, mostly out of curiosity. But in general I don't worry too much about budgeting because I'm naturally a bit frugal. However, I do a yearly summary of assets in order to track long-term/retirement trajectory. I can also use that to get a single number showing me how much I spend each year.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#47

Post by mattbillenstein » Tue, May 19, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

This all seems too complex for most people. I use Google Sheets, I import a year-to-date csv from my bank and credit card every month, categorize each transaction, then use QUERY to aggregate expenses by category. This data I feed into a rough budgeting sheet which I use for expense trimming. This monthly maintenance takes maybe 30 minutes.

And I have another sheet to compute net worth - retirement and brokerage accounts hold funds for which I can get a price using the GOOGLEFINANCE function, so the numbers change over time and I know pretty much down to the penny what my net worth is after I sorta manually enter in a couple bank balances.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#48

Post by komali2 » Tue, May 19, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

It's kinda fun to idly scroll through gnu's list of free software

https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU

As far as I can tell, everything there was made simply because somebody out there thought it's important for a Free version of said software to exist. That's pretty cool. There's gnucash of course, but also a gnutrition calorie/macro/micro tracker, a flight simulator, some sort of comic saving software... the list goes on. Fun!

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#49

Post by NicoJuicy » Tue, May 19, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

mattbillenstein wrote: post #47

This all seems too complex for most people. I use Google Sheets, I import a year-to-date csv from my bank and credit card every month, categorize each transaction, then use QUERY to aggregate expenses by category. This data I feed into a rough budgeting sheet which I use for expense trimming. This monthly maintenance takes maybe 30 minutes. And I have another sheet to compute net worth - retirement and brokerage acco…

Do you have a similar public sheet as example?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#50

Post by gen220 » Tue, May 19, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

every wrote: post #15

I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level, it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are staggering... [1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html [2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html

I strongly recommend people give ledger a try, especially if you're a UNIX-nerd who gets a lot of use out of sed/grep/awk.

It's totally changed the way I think about finance, for my person and for businesses. It also means I can have very informed conversations with accountants! :)

Double-entry accounting as a domain is super interesting, and Ledger's intersection of that domain with UNIX hackery is a joy to experience.