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10 years of personal finances in plain text files

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Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#21

Post by avdwio »

djhworld wrote: post #14

I've been beancount'ing for years now As we've crossed into the new year I've switched to a similar directory setup as the OP with 1 file per year. Previously I just had one file that was from 2022 which ended up being like 2 million lines of text, which was starting to bog down the emacs plugin. What I appreciate the most about this approach to personal finances is it just tracks everything. Investments, pensions, R…

I'm curious about this as I've thought about building personal software to manage my data (such as finances) via LLM, however I'm apprehensive about actually supplying that data to the LLM to help build the tool. Is this what you're doing? Now that I think about it, I could probably 'anonymise' the data with a local model...

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#23

Post by djhworld »

avdwio wrote: post #21
djhworld wrote: post #14

I've been beancount'ing for years now As we've crossed into the new year I've switched to a similar directory setup as the OP with 1 file per year. Previously I just had one file that was from 2022 which ended up being like 2 million lines of text, which was starting to bog down the emacs plugin. What I appreciate the most about this approach to personal finances is it just tracks everything. Investments, pensions, R…

I'm curious about this as I've thought about building personal software to manage my data (such as finances) via LLM, however I'm apprehensive about actually supplying that data to the LLM to help build the tool. Is this what you're doing? Now that I think about it, I could probably 'anonymise' the data with a local model...

Nah not exposing the data to the LLM, just building the tools to help me manage the data, usually python scripts

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#24

Post by zaphirplane »

OJFord wrote: post #10
zahlman wrote: post #2

This seems to be, in effect, advertising for a book about how to use the underlying FOSS software to do this. I would be okay with that as a monetization model, except that the book author despite being a self-described FOSS dev doesn't seem to have anything to do with the project ( https://github.com/beancount/beancount/graphs/contributors ). Ah, not quite true. The author fixed a typo in a docstring once ( https://…

And only... what, Italians, can write books on the Romans?

That’s a bad analogy because the qualification is being born in a region not acquiring knowledge thru working. an equivalent would be only electrician can write a book on wiring.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#25

Post by ob2 »

I can get all my historic accounting records into any of the PTA tools, but then I'm stuck without standard processes for creating invoices, doing deposits, writing off bad debts, depreciation, loan repayments, recurring payments, etc. etc.

All those require standard entries and processes, which I've yet to find, which means that now I need to become an accountant and write these standard tools.

None of which generates any income and only creates more work for myself.

I absolutely hate my current accounting software, but this is not (yet) a viable option as far as I can tell.

Happy to learn I'm wrong.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#27

Post by zahlman »

veltas wrote: post #4
zahlman wrote: post #2

This seems to be, in effect, advertising for a book about how to use the underlying FOSS software to do this. I would be okay with that as a monetization model, except that the book author despite being a self-described FOSS dev doesn't seem to have anything to do with the project ( https://github.com/beancount/beancount/graphs/contributors ). Ah, not quite true. The author fixed a typo in a docstring once ( https://…

If you look at their personal profile they've made a lot of content with activity and collaboration outside of the main beancount repo, related to beancount. They definitely meet the criteria for 'FOSS dev' in that it's FOSS, too.

Thanks. I was not denying the author FOSS creds generally, just expecting actual involvement. It seems this is someone who cares about the project (and I do like the sound of the project).

I'm just, you know, pretty sensitive to HN submissions trying to sell me something.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#28

Post by xtiansimon »

Very good for a budget. And as a text file, they rot just about the same speed as the media.

But what about basic Cost Of Goods Eaten?

I have fading thermal tapes in boxes with grocery store purchases. They get scanned once a year into large PDFs: grocery, home goods, repairs (large purchases are kept separately for easier finding).

I’m considering if a personal AI subscription to manage the data interrogation is worth the cost (not excited about the $20/mo cost. NPR should get the next $5 of my monthly).

Now here’s the funny part. The data sits in a box all year or in PDFs for years, and gets little attention. What janky home server AI could I spin up to perform as bad as me (but no worse)? Maybe move the data in those text files and PDFs into SQLite?

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#29

Post by djhworld »

thomascountz wrote: post #18

I began with PTA recently. I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already) and then you need to decide between ledger-cli, hledger, or beancount, with the differentiators being on the margins and with some promise of being able to switch later. The choice really comes down to which tool has the documentation/community that makes the most sense to…

I think there's definitely something in it around there's a huge learning curve.

Double entry book keeping isn't that difficult but that's easy to say once you've been doing it a while

I've been doing PTA since around 2018 and there's definitely lessons I've learned along the way along with plenty of mistakes.

I think the main benefit for me is just the system gives you a complete picture of your finances. The commercial services you can pay for just give you a view into a certain slice (e.g. open banking in UK/Europe to see your current account(s)) - I think mint.com did something similar in the US but it never came over here, I don't know if it still exists. Maybe that's enough for most people, but for me I want everything, investments, liabilities, assets etc. None of these commercial offerings have that because it's so complex and niche, e.g. your open banking provider won't tell you how your pension is doing.

It's also just nice to have the provenance of transactions, e.g. if you receive some shares from work, and you sell the shares and the money ends up in your bank account - the incoming transaction will just be the net proceeds but it won't tell you if you paid any tax prior to that - PTA gives you a more of a complete picture that tracks the whole chain of events that led up that transaction into your bank happening. Overkill for most people? Probably.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#30

Post by accountofthaha »

Thanks for showing this! I personally have a 4 years old Money Manager EX (MMEX) database, but I am always looking forward to something new, yet nothing for me have worked as good as MMEX. This looks good enough, albeit I need a GUI for this, and the comments might already put me into the right direction.

I am already used to logging everything manually, so importing isn't needed for me. Also I think having some 'manual labor' in this regard can help with becoming more 'in tune with your finances', to actually learn what is going on, instead of having an app that you check once a month.

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