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10 years of personal finances in plain text files

sgoel.dev

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Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#31

Post by draven »

I started to use PTA several times already, and I always have an issue with the granularity of transactions. For example when I go to the local supermarket, do I track food and hygiene products separately ? Some supermarkets give the subtotal for different categories, some don´t. It could be useful to see where the money goes.

I'm about to start out again and I chose not to track different categories individually, knowing that I can still add sub-accounts to distinguish between them later (even if I can´t recover the information for older transactions.)

Now I just need to investigate how to track gains/losses on the ETFs I own but that's common enough that there should be information out there on how to do it.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#32

Post by wongarsu »

xtiansimon wrote: post #28

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 wor…

If you just want to ingest varied data into a consistent format, qwen2.5vl:7b works well (in my use cases better than qwen3vl). The ollama version is quantized, perfectly adequate, and runs on normal consumer hardware (even more so if you don't care about speeds that feel interactive)

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#33

Post by rplnt »

zaphirplane wrote: post #24
OJFord wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you mean wire and tool manufacturers? Electrician is mostly a user. Or to avoid flawed analogies - should books on Windows, Office, ... be only limited to a small subset of Microsoft employees? I'd assume the book is for users, what does it matter if the author contributed to the project?

And that's still ignoring that evangelism is also a valuable contribution.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#34

Post by quietsegfault »

JulianWasTaken wrote: post #17
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 have my electricity bills tracking into a KWH commodity. It has been... effectively useless :D.

I struggle with tracking the actual cost of my energy usage between changing electric rates, the various solar costs, SRECs, different loans and credits and incentives to be able to make an intelligent decision on what the benefit or cost is of cutting an appliance or adding something new. It’s a lot.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#36

Post by commandersaki »

skwee357 wrote: post #5

I have 14 years of personal (and 2 years of sole proprietorship) finance data in beancount. I tried all the available personal finance apps there are, from cloud/online offerings to offline apps. Eventually, I settled on beancount because it is the most versatile file format. In addition to tracking finances, I can track stocks, unvested RSU grants, vacation hours, and even personal training I have paid for but yet t…

Do you manage your beancount files in version control? Or just keep free floating files around?

I'm intrigued by this and now thinking I should start doing it. Just start with a clean slate for 2026 and see how I go.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#37

Post by mtlynch »

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://…

Aside from the fact that writing a book about Beancount is a positive contribution, the author maintains a list of Beancount resources[0] and has written several beancount plugins.[1, 2, 3, 4] I have personally benefited from his contributions to the Beancount ecosystem.

Can you point to some of your contributions to this project?

[0] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/awesome-beancount

[1] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-n26

[2] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-ing

[3] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-dkb

[4] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-commerzbank

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#38

Post by mtlynch »

+1 to OP's book, which is the best beginner guide I've found for understanding Beancount / plaintext accounting.

I was also confused about double-entry accounting for most of my life until I read the article, "Accounting for Computer Scientists"[0] by Martin Kleppman (author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications). It explains double entry accounting in a surprisingly accessible way by putting it in terms of graph theory. I don't even like graph theory that much or consider myself competent in it, but Kleppman's explanation was extremely effective.

[0] https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu...

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#39

Post by mbork_pl »

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…

Besides being a mathematician and a programmer, I have a degree in finance and banking, so I learned double-entry accounting pretty early. As a mathematician, I appreciate the beauty of this very clever, very general and very abstract system. As a geek, I've been using ledger-cli with Emacs for a decade now, and Gnucash earlier.

Re: learning curve, it's not that difficult. Shameless plug: I wrote a textbook (actually, a textbooklet, if that is a word;-)) about the basics of DEA, focused on personal finance and using ledger-cli: https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#40

Post by lostlogin »

quietsegfault wrote: post #34
JulianWasTaken wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my electricity bills tracking into a KWH commodity. It has been... effectively useless :D.

I struggle with tracking the actual cost of my energy usage between changing electric rates, the various solar costs, SRECs, different loans and credits and incentives to be able to make an intelligent decision on what the benefit or cost is of cutting an appliance or adding something new. It’s a lot.

It is a lot.

And when it’s fragile even when working. The cost per unit changes with limited notice in various ways (line rate, unit cost, time period that various rates occur, the day, ‘free’ power bonuses etc).

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