111–120 of 127 posts
Accountant here: Recommend using Beancount with version control on your data so that you can take snapshots at various points in time. The notion behind "accountants don't user erasers" is that like a blockchain, you're creating a trail of evidence. If all of the data is mutable all of the time, its evidentiary value is low (for example, the IRS gives more weight to "contemporary" evidence than to records constructed…
Does anyone know if there's a good app I can use for plaintext accounting on my phone? I'd love to be able to use syncthing to sync the ledger on my PC and phone. It'd really help me stop collecting receipts so I can bulk put them in when I get home.
I switched to beancount after trying several other things (mint, spreadsheets, gnucash), and I like it quite a bit. It's choice to be very strict about things held at cost (like units of stock) is a great differentiation. It's VERY hard to accidentally miss capital gains, or get cost basis wrong on something, or have something not balance. Much harder than even ledger-cli, let alone the other alternatives. It feels a…
> gnucash requires learning some niche scheme stuff; it feels very "tacked on". There is also piecash, which gives a nice Pythonic interface to the SQL files generated by GnuCash: https://pypi.org/project/piecash/
> Note this feature is considered experimental. It works for most of the common use cases but some corner cases have been reported to result in data loss. [1]
Shameless self plug: ive been building a similar open source command line accounting system https://github.com/darcys22/godbledger Its heavily inspired by both ledger and beancount but my biggest issue with them is that text files arnt great for double entry bookkeeping. Having a relational database is the better option which is what GoDBLedger has. After a certain point a business cant keep track of its transactions…
C´mon, you do not like textfiles but you do NOT support PostgreSQL?
You can plot your monthly or yearly spending with Jupyter like this: https://github.com/isabekov/beancount-multiperiod-reports
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Do you find that all of your financial institutions offer reliable OFX/CSV feeds? I'm asking because I've generally come to the conclusion that PDF is the only universal data format that every institution will offer.
OFX is the closest to being universal, although often it is well hidden. CSV feeds are often surprisingly useless for programmatic / feed use, they're often littered with stupid textual headers and footers and lack important columns - they're designed to be opened in excel and looked at by a human, not parsed and ingested.
- debit card: merchant name + date, card number, blank
- alternative card-based payment system: constant (account number?), merchant, constant
- alternative app-based payment system: constant, merchant, user custom reference
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Once you add parallelism to your transaction processing, all manner of untoward things can happen. For example, two parent processes may attempt to execute the same transaction to acquire the same resources at the same time, having failed to exchange messages to ensure their internal household state is fully synchronized. And sometimes child processes will fail to acquire permissions but silently commit transactions…
This week my toddler spent $60 on a 11x14 inch canvas print of himself getting a bottle of ketchup out of the fridge. $20 was for priority shipping to ship it to our former address in a different city. I thought the photos app was a fairly innocuous form of screen time, not realizing that it was so easy to make a purchase! No password confirmation or anything. Fortunately support made a one-time exception and refunde…
Does anyone know if there's a good app I can use for plaintext accounting on my phone? I'd love to be able to use syncthing to sync the ledger on my PC and phone. It'd really help me stop collecting receipts so I can bulk put them in when I get home.
I couple it with Syncthing, and Fava running on a different computer served over the local network.
I would like a phone app to run on the beancount file, but the only apps that purport to do this have <1k downloads and no ratings, so I'm not going to trust them with my financial data
Any married people have advice on how to track finances? I used bean count or ledger when i was single, but the manual system kind of breaks down when you have a family .
It's not perfect but it's the best system I've tried, including YNAB, because I get paid biweekly and YNAB forces you to budget monthly.
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People will disagree with me, but.. don't? I keep track of my expenses by CC and cash account, by the month. I don't care that I spent $5 on a coffee. I do care that for the month of January I stayed within my $X amount, and that for the year I'm on track for my savings goal(s), retirement, etc. So I keep 2 spreadsheets, 1 is monthly, to ensure the bills get paid and the 2nd is my NW that tracks my retirement and sav…
This is what I do as well. Everytime I've looked into the whole personal finances thing, it just turns into a lot of setup work to not usefully change anything about my life, and a significant amount of ongoing work to... Also not change anything.