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Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

plaintextaccounting.org

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Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#21

Post by qudat »

It's so funny to see this post on HN. I recently took the plunge and got rid of Mint for Beancount. I probably spent 10 hours getting things set up. So far I really like being in full control of the "database" via a composition of files. Even a database feels too heavy-handed for my personal accounts. It was a lot of fun to learn accounting terminology and methodologies like the double-entry accounting.

The most annoying part of the process is being required to download CSV files from each of my bank/cc/investment accounts.

I thought about building some APIs to be able to download this data automatically but some of my banks do not have publicly available APIs. That's hilarious to me because something like Mint or Plaid can get API access to my bank transactions but I, the owner the of the accounts, cannot.

Not only that, but you can only download CSVs for the last 2 years. Mint/Plaid can get the entire account history.

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#22

Post by Infernal »

qudat wrote: post #21

It's so funny to see this post on HN. I recently took the plunge and got rid of Mint for Beancount. I probably spent 10 hours getting things set up. So far I really like being in full control of the "database" via a composition of files. Even a database feels too heavy-handed for my personal accounts. It was a lot of fun to learn accounting terminology and methodologies like the double-entry accounting. The most anno…

Plaid does not get API access to your bank account. Plaid logs into the same interface you do and scrapes the data. It’s why account import in things like Mint, YNAB etc are so flaky.

EDIT: It seems Plaid has negotiated API access with some institutions at this point, but historically has primarily relied on screen scraping.

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#23

Post by minikomi »

hardtoreason wrote: post #8

I've used the ledger-likes extensively, and they have two major problems: (1) One of the hard problems in personal finance is data capture and input validation. Programs like QuickBooks and Xero don't just hide the GL because they're being mean, they're doing it because even experienced bookkeepers make mistakes on the general ledger all the time. "Since it's a text file it's easy to read" solves exactly the wrong pr…

Termux on the phone with custom ledger focused org capture templates has worked well for me

Now I just use a simple discord bot to capture, which is synced to a private git repository

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#24

Post by prog5 »

Slightly off topic, but I finally broke down and paid for YNAB this year and it has literally changed my life. It doesn't feel like accounting anymore, it feels like playing monopoly. Use QB for biz, and tried mint for years, both feel like work. YNAB not only tracks historical categories but makes it fun to plan future expenses.

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#25

Post by gandhi00 »

prog5 wrote: post #24

Slightly off topic, but I finally broke down and paid for YNAB this year and it has literally changed my life. It doesn't feel like accounting anymore, it feels like playing monopoly. Use QB for biz, and tried mint for years, both feel like work. YNAB not only tracks historical categories but makes it fun to plan future expenses.

YNAB is amazing. Couldn't agree more, it changed my life

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#26

Post by dang »

Past related threads:

Plain Text Accounting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745615 - Jan 2021 (200 comments)

Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11164330 - Feb 2016 (26 comments)

Edit: I've changed the submitted URL of the current thread from https://plaintextaccounting.org/#plain-text-accounting-apps to the home page, which gives more information. See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#27

Post by boulos »

qudat wrote: post #21

It's so funny to see this post on HN. I recently took the plunge and got rid of Mint for Beancount. I probably spent 10 hours getting things set up. So far I really like being in full control of the "database" via a composition of files. Even a database feels too heavy-handed for my personal accounts. It was a lot of fun to learn accounting terminology and methodologies like the double-entry accounting. The most anno…

If you're based in the US, I would recommend ofxtools [1]. Anytime an institution supports "Download in Quicken", they have an OFX endpoint that you can find via ofxhome.

[1] https://github.com/csingley/ofxtools

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#28

Post by croo »

jolmg wrote: post #10
hardtoreason wrote: post #8

I've used the ledger-likes extensively, and they have two major problems: (1) One of the hard problems in personal finance is data capture and input validation. Programs like QuickBooks and Xero don't just hide the GL because they're being mean, they're doing it because even experienced bookkeepers make mistakes on the general ledger all the time. "Since it's a text file it's easy to read" solves exactly the wrong pr…

> One of the hard problems in personal finance is data capture With hledger and vim, I typically search and copy a previous similar transaction, then search and copy similar items. I have a keybinding to change the date, so like 3\d changes the date of the transaction I copied to 3 days ago. Overall, being proficient in vim, capture takes very few keystrokes. Since the files are plain text, I can easily e.g. list all…

This is already after the data capture part. The hard part is to remember every little transaction I had until I have vim at my hand. The only solution seems to be working more or less is to take out my phone and type it as soon as the transaction happened. And I won't try to use vim on phone ever again..

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#29

Post by VoidWhisperer »

minikomi wrote: post #23
hardtoreason wrote: post #8

I've used the ledger-likes extensively, and they have two major problems: (1) One of the hard problems in personal finance is data capture and input validation. Programs like QuickBooks and Xero don't just hide the GL because they're being mean, they're doing it because even experienced bookkeepers make mistakes on the general ledger all the time. "Since it's a text file it's easy to read" solves exactly the wrong pr…

Termux on the phone with custom ledger focused org capture templates has worked well for me Now I just use a simple discord bot to capture, which is synced to a private git repository

Is your bot that does this open sourced? This seems very interesting
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