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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

#151

Post by dfee »

fittingopposite wrote: post #143
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?

For transactions: you spot fraud, mischarges or subs to cancel. Really a watchdog service would be good here. High effort, low return. IMO. (And a bit of tracking around reimbursements)

For savings: helps you keep an eye on where you’re at by forcing you to reconcile.

It’s totally worth it for a low value of invested time. But, it’s not going to be low effort.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#153

Post by dfee »

dorgo wrote: post #142
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.

Maybe the right way to do this is to only track accounts, and no tracking of individual txns?

Importing and tracking 401k contributions and stock dividends across multiple brokerage accounts - and then trying to handle timing differences (money in flight)… oof

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#154

Post by dfee »

rapidfl wrote: post #146
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…

If ROI has diminished (maybe dopamine diminished?) then what keeps you motivated?

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#155

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

the_arun wrote: post #75
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #70

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 t…

I think Accounting needs automation. Because manual tasks are error prone & Accuracy is a P0 requirement for finance.

I think many accountants would laugh at saying accuracy is a requirement. They have full time jobs because the books for any major company are a disaster that are kept together by prayer and duct tape. Accuracy is the ideal, but when you have hundreds of revenue streams, discounts, rebates, deprecation, tax structures, salesmen actively trying to sell out the company, etc keeping the books in order is a tall order.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#156

Post by loufe »

I set up tracking all my bank statements, pay slips, Costco (and other multi-category store) receipts, and other things in Fava (beancount's webui) over the last month. I spent way too much time developing a plugin to help categorizing transactions, making a full api and python scripts as well to let AI make edits for me (dry runs before clearing).

I stumbled upon Maybe (https://github.com/maybe-finance/maybe) and the community fork (https://github.com/we-promise/sure) a couple days ago and almost invested too much time to migrate to it. That project still doesn't have split transactions. A fresh intuitive UI is great but Beancount's format is so simple it's hard to beat.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#157

Post by forty »

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.

You may be able to convert it to CO2 emissions to track your impact :) but for that you'd also need to track how those kWh of electricity were produced ^^

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#158

Post by rapidfl »

dfee wrote: post #154
rapidfl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If ROI has diminished (maybe dopamine diminished?) then what keeps you motivated?

These days, I find it is doable 2-3 times a year. Its a lot of work at one shot but somehow able to catch up so as to review the main spending accounts. The zeroing is what attract me still. I get to see some patterns in my overall spending/categories. And it is side project where there is perceivable concrete progress, so still somewhat easier dopamine.

Simplifying/automating the workflow is a pull. As I type this, I have an idea to stop tracking NW in hledger - it can seem incomplete because money moves from checking to brokerages. That's fine. I only want to see expenses.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#159

Post by bnj »

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?

Sorry if this was a joke, but just in case- PTA = plain text accounting

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#160

Post by forty »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #92
stvltvs wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love/hate GnuCash. I've been using it for years, and it helps a lot. I would pay good money for someone to improve the UI, maybe even separate the accounting engine into a library that could be used by different UIs.

100% on the UI. My main gripe with GnuCash is that it's impossible to do "mass actions" from the UI. On the point of "library" - you know that "GnuCash the app" comes with its lib, and there's python wrappers? I've only ever used these to produce reports (read, reports different from the ones provided by the UI). However I believe it's also possible to do things like inserting transactions via these python wrappers.…

To be able to do mass action, it would be nice if there was an equivalent of gnu cash but using plain text files as a file format, so we could do mass editing of the file using our usual text editor (like emacs) rather than having to learn a new library.

(Just kidding ;))

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