51–60 of 199 posts
My bank has some very limited options to move specific amounts of money on a weekly schedule, but I'm looking for something more powerful then that.
Should I look at like ~Stripe~ Plaid or something? Or are there more pre built tools?
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, kn…
Start easy and see what you want to get out of the data. If you can store the original source (e.g receipts) so that you can later go back and increase the granularity if you find yourself wanting it, that would be ideal.
I'm now considering combining by finances with my partner. It would make a lot of things easier. We'd get paid into a joint account and then pay ourselves into individual "spending accounts" according to our budget. Anyone have any experience with this kind of thing?
- Everything is managed by build system that is able to track dependencies
- Inputs from financial institutions are kept in the repo as is
- Those inputs are converted by your scripts to .csv files that are readable by PTA import engine
- There are rules files that describe how to convert .csv lines to PTA entries
- Generated files are included from per-year PTA journals (and you can put any manual transactions in here also)
The benefit is that you can change any part of this pipeline, and just re-generate the changed parts:
- improve the program that converts to .csv - raw data immediately gets better across the whole repo
- add/customize import rules - better classification is immediately applied to all of the past data
And with this approach you can start small (like, a single month of data from your primary bank), and refine the thing in steps, like adding more historical data or adding more data sources (examples being not only bank statements, but even things like itemized Amazon orders and Paypal slips).
> 30-45 minutes every single month That's 6–9 hours every year! 5 years: 30–45 hours 10 years: 60–90 hours
However, I just cannot bring myself to constantly pull the transactions down manually from multiple banks.
Many suggest automating. How is this working in practice? Are there providers like Plaid you can use? Build web scrapers? Build PDF statement parsers?
I ended up just paying YNAB the $130/year or whatever they’re at now. High wife approval factor and everything just connects. They also have an API. In theory I could just constantly backup YNAB with PTA by pulling down transactions from the API.
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 commer…
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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 commer…
FYI, Mint shutdown as a service in early 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/budgeting-app-mint-is-shutti...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have my electricity bills tracking into a KWH commodity. It has been... effectively useless :D.
I track my propane in an LPG commodity at a fixed price per season. It saved me about $100 once when a transaction wouldn’t balance. I was accidentally partially charged for a short load delivery on one of my tanks at almost double the rate. Even if it seems silly to track at this fidelity in the moment, I wouldn’t have caught this tracking USD alone. Billing mistakes happen and can be costly!
But good to hear the positive story side for this.