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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

#141

Post by djhworld »

stackghost wrote: post #127
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 the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already) This. Accounting seems easy if you already know accounting. Learning accounting is difficult because the literature is dense, contradictory, and it's not helped by the fact that most accountants don't even seem to understand it at a fundamental level, they've merely memorized false-but-workable idea…

ehhhhhhh I don't think you need to go as far as reading dense accounting literature, I never have and I've been maintaining a beancount files for 7+ years.

I just followed the documentation in here https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... - it gives you the general principles to follow and you can just pick it up from there.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#142

Post by dorgo »

dfee wrote: post #134

I never found efficiency. For five months I imported and categorized my transactions - from payroll through food. I definitely had reports being generated (using hledger) but the amount of time I invested and the ROI wasn’t there. Had it been 5m a week, maybe I could’ve done it. But it was 3h/wk - finding transactions, transcoding them with scripts I was maintaining, and breaking down the costs with my wife to unders…

have a "Costco purchases" sub-category for "groceries". If you ever feel differently, just move it to "home". Your system has to support this though. I did multiple re-organisations in the last 10+ years.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#143

Post by fittingopposite »

dfee wrote: post #134

I never found efficiency. For five months I imported and categorized my transactions - from payroll through food. I definitely had reports being generated (using hledger) but the amount of time I invested and the ROI wasn’t there. Had it been 5m a week, maybe I could’ve done it. But it was 3h/wk - finding transactions, transcoding them with scripts I was maintaining, and breaking down the costs with my wife to unders…

Yes. Also wondering about the ROI. What do you gain by this?

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#144

Post by croisillon »

nightski wrote: post #130
binarin wrote: post #54

I've tried to track personal finances several times, but it only started to work when I've discovered the idea (from https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger ) that you need to treat the whole PTA story more like a project compilation: - 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 scr…

Why is the parent teacher association involved in personal finances?

haha :) https://plaintextaccounting.org/

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#145

Post by wxre »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #133
ryandrake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't seem to ween myself off of reliance on Quicken. I really want to, and I hate that I am tied to Intuit software. I hate that every transaction I've made since 2000 is stored in a proprietary binary blob. But I can't find an alternative that has cracked the killer feature: Syncing with each of my online accounts. I like to track every expense and every transfer down to the penny, and then update from the bank's…

Have you tried [0] Tiller Finance? [0] https://tiller.com/

I've used tiller for several years. Handles all the connections to pull data, but all the data is completely accessible within a spreadsheet on my own storage.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#146

Post by rapidfl »

dfee wrote: post #134

I never found efficiency. For five months I imported and categorized my transactions - from payroll through food. I definitely had reports being generated (using hledger) but the amount of time I invested and the ROI wasn’t there. Had it been 5m a week, maybe I could’ve done it. But it was 3h/wk - finding transactions, transcoding them with scripts I was maintaining, and breaking down the costs with my wife to unders…

The hard part has been to import all the accounts and to categorize the transactions on the 1-2 cards and 1-2 checking accounts that get used a lot. However doing hledger motivated me to simplify things. Either delete cards and accounts. Or barely use them so I can update them once or twice a year. And helps to reduce the number of categories.

I have not made updates for all of 2025 after 3 or 4 years of hledger. ROI diminished once the itch to zero everything wears off and since I have somewhat steady state expenses.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#147

Post by stackghost »

djhworld wrote: post #141
stackghost wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already) This. Accounting seems easy if you already know accounting. Learning accounting is difficult because the literature is dense, contradictory, and it's not helped by the fact that most accountants don't even seem to understand it at a fundamental level, they've merely memorized false-but-workable idea…

ehhhhhhh I don't think you need to go as far as reading dense accounting literature, I never have and I've been maintaining a beancount files for 7+ years. I just followed the documentation in here https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... - it gives you the general principles to follow and you can just pick it up from there.

The point I was trying to make is that "Debits increase assets" isn't some esoteric technique; it's a fundamental aspect of double-entry that you'd need to know, but it's also counterintuitive and most of the literature out there is full of bullshit explanations that do nothing to help people understand.

The link you posted is similarly full of bullshit, written by someone who demonstrably does not understand the double entry system (they even say so in the text).

But I'm the sort of person who finds it very grating to have to do something without understanding why I'm doing it. If that's not you then party on.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#148

Post by masterj »

astura wrote: post #136
chrisweekly wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mint's value to me was destroyed long before 2024; its originally-reliable backend was swapped out for a third-party one (plaid?) and half my accounts couldn't sync -- making it useless. YMMV, but IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this space...

> IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this space... Monarch is just horribly overpriced. I'm not opposed to paying for a SaaS or anything, but Monarch is much too expensive for what it is. Empower (used to be called Personal Capital) is free and what I use instead of Mint. In fairness, the only thing that I really ever used Mint for was to see my net worth and account balances.

I dunno. Insights from Monarch have easily saved me many times the annual cost. Other tools could as well of course, but the ease-of-use makes it easy to maintain

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#149

Post by bregma »

ryandrake wrote: post #100
bregma wrote: post #76

I started decades ago using Quicken. Then had to re-enter all my data when a new version came out and support for the old version was EOLed. So I switched to GNU Cash and re-entered everything again. Then there were migration issues with GNU Cash. Finally I discovered PTA. I chose hledger (because of possible performance issues with beancount). I learned double-entry bookkeeping (it's pretty simple, honestly). I writ…

I can't seem to ween myself off of reliance on Quicken. I really want to, and I hate that I am tied to Intuit software. I hate that every transaction I've made since 2000 is stored in a proprietary binary blob. But I can't find an alternative that has cracked the killer feature: Syncing with each of my online accounts. I like to track every expense and every transfer down to the penny, and then update from the bank's…

Problem solved for me because no banks in my country provide an API for anyone or anything to download transactions directly. Not even Quicken. Banks here are stable. The only change they tolerate is increasing their fat quarterly dividends, although there has been talk in the smoky back rooms of government about passing legislation to force them kicking and screaming into the present.

On the other hand, downloading a PDF or a CSV from time to time isn't that much of a hassle. I have Python scripts to parse the PDF and output hledger text, and hledger itself reads the CSV files and autocategorizes the transactions (I had to supply the categorization rules, naturally). You don't have to import anything, it's plain text. You don't have to copy/paste anything.

If there were APIs to download transactions, it would be as simple as

    curl $BANKURL | hledger print --rules-file bank.csv.rules - >>bank.journal
or something. Of course, you don't get the colourful eye candy of Quicken.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#150

Post by nonethewiser »

mtlynch wrote: post #38

+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…

What did you find hard to understand about double entry accounting? Seems pretty straightforward. Every transaction affects at least two accounts, and the total debits must equal the total credits. I can't imagine how introducing graph theory simplifies it, although I trust there are interesting insights none-the-less.
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