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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

#61

Post by awpeofia »

draven wrote: post #31

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…

Right, don't let decision paralysis prevent tracking.

I just put "Groceries" account based on the total that gets charged to my card. If there's a substantial item that doesn't fall into groceries then I can split that out on a case-by-case basis (e.g. I go to Costco and buy both a bunch of cereal and a dehumidifier).

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#62

Post by JulianWasTaken »

bronco21016 wrote: post #57

I was really into this idea a few years ago. Even started logging. 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…

I went the "build a few PDF statement parsers" route.

Some I wrote by hand using PyMuPDF, some I coerced Claude into writing (again using PyMuPDF) by uploading a sample bill (I'd never put my own data into an LLM but it's nice being able to find a sample bill, gets it close enough to correct that I can do the remaining bits if there are variations in bills over time).

Overall it's effort (and yes certainly a bunch effort for manually downloading transactions). The financial industry is very behind on this stuff clearly. I'm not sure in a few years whether I'll still think it's worth the effort I put in, which has gone down over the past few months as I automate things, but until it stops being fun I'll keep going.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#63

Post by eviks »

> Imagine one account for categorizing supermarket spending, one for tracking your income, one for your Netflix subscription, and so on.

Why would you go that unintuitive route instead of simply having a category "Supermarket" (with your most common supermarkets autocategorized by name) and payee "Netflix"?

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#64

Post by tantalor »

eviks wrote: post #63

> Imagine one account for categorizing supermarket spending, one for tracking your income, one for your Netflix subscription, and so on. Why would you go that unintuitive route instead of simply having a category "Supermarket" (with your most common supermarkets autocategorized by name) and payee "Netflix"?

What's the difference

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#65

Post by olsondv »

bravura wrote: post #35

What's the startup time for using beancount if I've never done it before? I just spent a few hours using LLMs (aider, specifically) to reconcile my books for the past year. Worked great, but was slightly fiddly.

Depends on how many different financial systems you need to import from. It took me a weekend to set up the importers alone between checking, savings, investments, mortgage, pay slips, and all the credit cards. Some don’t have csv output so had to do pdf to text conversion. There are examples in beancount but each bank was different for me.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#67

Post by elric »

My less obsessive personal finance workflow: I have a spreadsheet. I update it by hand once a month, and have been doing so for ~20 years. Takes about 5 minutes. I only track the categories I care about. Those have varied a bit over time, but have always included staples like power, heating, water, ISP, rent/mortgage, insurance, savings, etc. I don't track things like groceries or restaurants or anything else that I consider to be part of "living life".

Two main goals: track how my expenses evolve over time, and stay on top of how much money I need to reserve for the coming year to pay those bills. Anything that's leftover is spending money. Which I dutifully spend.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#69

Post by kayo_20211030 »

I don't want to cause a scene, but if you're not running your own business, why would you do this? There are commercial services out there that take next to no time every month.

Anathema?

Yes, I know the data live in a data-center/cloud. But, don't the content of all those statements, payments and bills live there too. Yes, I know the service might go away tomorrow. But, couldn't one find the new-new service and import it all again from the banks, cc companies, utility companies etc.?

I like text accounting. It's useful. It has a niche. But, is this the best use of your time every month?

Tastes differ, but 30-45 minutes a month to hand-key data (or write the scripts that avoid that) isn't my taste.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#70

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

A lot of people in this thread comingling "plain text" with "double entry".

Beancount is both, but you can do either one or the other or both. In particular, you DONT need to learn double entry to do plain text accounting. Of course, you SHOULD learn double entry accounting because it's a great tool for organizing knowledge.

Whether plain text is beneficial for accounting is less clear cut in my mind. I think plain text is backlash against the over-reliance on "services", "clouds", and "lock in", but I think it's misguided. If you're concerned with someone locking you in, it's perfectly concievable to do double entry accounting which lives only on your computer and manipulated with software that is under your control (read: free software).

So in summary, my opinon is:

- accounting: important

- double entry: important

- avoid clouds and ventor lock in: important

- avoid proprietary file formats: important

- plain text: unimportant

(I use GnuCash. It's not without its flaws, but it's great if you agree with the above views)

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