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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

#191

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

cortesoft wrote: post #165
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two points here. First, automation is a new orthogonal dimension. You can have automation with or without plain text. Second, your emphasis on "automation" leads me to believe that perhaps you misunderstand what accounting is. Accounting is not just taking a list of transactions and recording them (database, file etc). That is called bookkeeping . Yes, accounting is also amenable to automation, but much less so than…

> This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other than the accountant's mental model of the entity he's doing the accounting for. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. It isn’t impossible (for most use cases) to embed that mental model into your automation tools. You the correct that it means you can’t have purely general purpose automation that will do all accounting work for every entity, but you could cer…

> but you could certainly create automation rules that cover everything (or nearly everything) for some particular entity.

The fact that accountants still exist should tell you that you're mistaken.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#192

Post by mcgrath_sh »

JulianWasTaken wrote: post #190
mcgrath_sh wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do this? I am just getting into hledger and am curious about tracking this kind of stuff to see how much we would really save with a different electric supplier.

In my case (with beancount) an example transaction looks like: 2025-12-04 * "CON ED OF NY CECONY 251203~ Tran: ACHDW" Assets:Schwab:Checking -72.33 USD Expenses:Utilities:Electric:Supply:Rate 143.00 KWH @@ 18.06 USD ; Supply 143.00 kWh @12.629¢/kWh Expenses:Utilities:Electric:Supply:Fees 0.68 USD ; Supply Merchant Function Charge Expenses:Taxes:Other 0.45 USD ; Supply GRT & other tax surcharges Expenses:Taxes:Sales 0…

Thanks! This gives me a base to start from.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#193

Post by 61j3t »

I have tried it and it looks great, it will be my 2026 record. Tho I had created smth to help me with it. An LLM pipeline where I just describe what transaction I did and then the LLM that has access to my accounts creates the well formatted transaction that I can after approve to be added

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#194

Post by svat »

mtlynch wrote: post #170
nonethewiser wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What did you find hard to understand about double entry accounting? I didn't understand the point of the two entries. My prior experience with bookkeeping was that I imported my bank statements into some tool and categorized each transaction. So, if I bought a cookie for $5, I'd mark that transaction as "food," and that felt intuitive to me. I didn't understand why it would become two transactions where one is food…

Thank you. IMO a couple of good motivating examples (as I said a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497843) are:

• Bank accounts and cash. If you're tracking a single number, do you track a cash withdrawal (and then ignore purchases with cash), or do you ignore cash withdrawals (and track cash purchases)? With double-entry accounting, you just track withdrawals as money flowing (Bank account) -> (Cash), and purchases as (Cash) -> (Stuff) or whatever you want to call it; both are equally cleanly represented.

• Bank accounts and credit-card (or other loan) repayments. Similar thing: if you were to use a single number, do you change it when you make a purchase with a credit card (and ignore tracking paying your credit card bill) or do you change it when you pay your credit card bill (and ignore purchases with your card)? With double-entry accounting you just treat them as money flowing (Bank account) -> (Credit card) and (Credit card) -> (Expenses). And your bank account statements and credit card statements will both make sense in isolation, if you have this complete picture.

(Personally I found https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... even more useful for the basic idea than https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu... but both are interesting.)

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#195

Post by nonethewiser »

mtlynch wrote: post #170
nonethewiser wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What did you find hard to understand about double entry accounting? I didn't understand the point of the two entries. My prior experience with bookkeeping was that I imported my bank statements into some tool and categorized each transaction. So, if I bought a cookie for $5, I'd mark that transaction as "food," and that felt intuitive to me. I didn't understand why it would become two transactions where one is food…

>The "ah-ha" moment from Kleppman's post was seeing how it's not just about creating two entries but about defining flows between accounts. The graphs helped because they show how balances increase or decrease as you traverse the nodes.

Thank you for clarifying. That makes sense. Graph's do more directly depict the transition with edges. Whereas that part is kind of just implicit in double entry accounting.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#196

Post by [deleted] »

kaynyn wrote: post #176
loufe wrote: post #156

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…

I started writing code using LLM for this purpose and then stumbled upon ‘sure’. I did use ‘maybe’ couple of years ago and it had few issues and I never bothered. Last couple of days, I tried and moved few of my accounts to ‘sure’, so far it is not bad. There are few UI/UX issues and the entire investments working in silo and not viable on your main page. But the good thing is, developers are actively working on fixi…

[deleted]

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#197

Post by nymanjon »

mbork_pl wrote: post #175
sxg wrote: post #56

This sounds super cool and useful to me, but how does this work with a partner who's non-technical? Managing personal finances is something that we do together and having a nice clean UI that makes sense to her is important. Is there a way to achieve that with beancount? Currently we're using YNAB, which is mostly great although sometimes unstable and limited in ways.

My wife is non-technical and doesn't know anything about bookkeeping. Every-ish day I ask her for receipts and enter them into our ledger-cli file. She mostly uses her debit card, so it's usually easy not to miss too much. (I use cash exclusively, so it's more of a conscious effort for me.) Every month I send her a monthly report via email.

I created a little app that tracks the cash spending that I can export with a CSV file. You can host it yourself. I had no idea that my wife was using so much cash!

https://github.com/jon49/cash

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#198

Post by nymanjon »

I created this app to help me track cash transactions that I can then export as a CSV file and then import into my PTA. It works well. It can work offline. I built it to be progressively enhanced. So, no JS needed but, if you don't mind JS being used, then it will have better features and even work offline, saving any transactions for when you are online again.

https://github.com/jon49/cash

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#199

Post by mbork_pl »

nymanjon wrote: post #197
mbork_pl wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is non-technical and doesn't know anything about bookkeeping. Every-ish day I ask her for receipts and enter them into our ledger-cli file. She mostly uses her debit card, so it's usually easy not to miss too much. (I use cash exclusively, so it's more of a conscious effort for me.) Every month I send her a monthly report via email.

I created a little app that tracks the cash spending that I can export with a CSV file. You can host it yourself. I had no idea that my wife was using so much cash! https://github.com/jon49/cash

Thanks, that looks very neat! I love apps like this, situated software created to scratch someone's itch.
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