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PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

plainbudget.com

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Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

#21

Post by MrGilbert »

jgalvez wrote: post #20
MrGilbert wrote: post #14

I read a fair bit of criticism here in the comments. I think I understand where they are coming from. From my point of view, I like the simplicity of the DSL. I also love long-term projects. Great to see that you are working on it since 2018! And I think, from a western perspective, 10 bucks is a fair price to support you. Some observations and bugs I encountered: - A license added to Github: Currently, I don't know…

I'll push a new release with the license — always forget this! Thank you for all your observations. Two things: 1) floats were originally purposefully not allowed, for simplicity, but I might change that and 2) multiple groups with the same name are indeed not allowed, but you raise a good point: it should be possible to reference all groups with a common label if the only difference between them is an attached times…

Great to hear! Maybe, as someone pointed out in another comment, it might make sense to show how you use your tool yourself in a dedicated blog entry, and link that in the readme. People usually learn very well from examples. :)

Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

#23

Post by gullyo »

This is great. Having been in and out of paycheck-to-paycheck living several times, I find that during transitions to stability individual transaction tracking is useful for understanding what’s even happening to you financially. But once you understand that do you really still want to micromanage spreadsheets every day of your life? Would much rather leave my accounting rules on autopilot and base my spending decisions off of a tool like this instead.

Tried out the Mac app snd didn’t encounter any obvious bugs. looking forward seeing some functionality around annual expenses and potentially dating entries to create some sort of anticipated distribution across a date range

Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

#24

Post by mindcrash »

Pity this doesn't follow the PTA (Plain Text Accounting) "standard" but invented its own DSL.

https://plaintextaccounting.org/

Especially because there is a wide range of apps, ranging from CLI to web and even mobile, which can be used for PTA and due to the fact that they acknowledge the same standard are interoperable:

https://plaintextaccounting.org/#software

The most well known ones being

- hledger (https://hledger.org/),

- beancount (https://beancount.github.io/),

and

- ledger (https://ledger-cli.org/)

Important note: All free and open source

Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

#26

Post by jgalvez »

mindcrash wrote: post #24

Pity this doesn't follow the PTA (Plain Text Accounting) "standard" but invented its own DSL. https://plaintextaccounting.org/ Especially because there is a wide range of apps, ranging from CLI to web and even mobile, which can be used for PTA and due to the fact that they acknowledge the same standard are interoperable: https://plaintextaccounting.org/#software The most well known ones being - hledger ( https://hled…

I was just checking it out.

         $2145.00  Assets:Checking
        $-1000.00  Equity:OpeningBalances
          $192.00  Expenses
           $65.00    Food:Groceries
          $127.00    Unknown
        $-1337.00  Income:Salary
  ---------------
               0
Nice, I missed that. I'll consider making it PTA-compatible!

Only issue I have is with the indentation-based subitems.

I'd rather keep it restricted to top-level groups for clarity.

Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

#28

Post by mrngm »

jgalvez wrote: post #26
mindcrash wrote: post #24

Pity this doesn't follow the PTA (Plain Text Accounting) "standard" but invented its own DSL. https://plaintextaccounting.org/ Especially because there is a wide range of apps, ranging from CLI to web and even mobile, which can be used for PTA and due to the fact that they acknowledge the same standard are interoperable: https://plaintextaccounting.org/#software The most well known ones being - hledger ( https://hled…

I was just checking it out. $2145.00 Assets:Checking $-1000.00 Equity:OpeningBalances $192.00 Expenses $65.00 Food:Groceries $127.00 Unknown $-1337.00 Income:Salary --------------- 0 Nice, I missed that. I'll consider making it PTA-compatible! Only issue I have is with the indentation-based subitems. I'd rather keep it restricted to top-level groups for clarity.

PTA is more or less a collection of formats. Beancount, for example, uses a colon-separated account name per transaction line, such as "Income:Work:PrimaryJob:HolidayAllowance" (excluding the quotes). There are a couple of fixed main accounts (such as "Income"), and the user can arbitrarily define subaccounts (in this example "Work:PrimaryJob:HolidayAllowance").

Although I see your point in wanting clarity, if the format supports arbitrary subaccounts, you can use the tool itself to limiting the number of subaccounts to show (e.g. with 1 you would only see the accumulated amount in all accounts in the "Income:Work" hierarchy). This still fits your use case for clarity, but allows other users to expand the budgeting tool to their needs.

Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

#29

Post by mrngm »

em-bee wrote: post #15
jgalvez wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to give 2 cents on the rationale behind this: Most people don't budget at all. Most people live paycheck to paycheck. I have lived paycheck to paycheck for a long time. When your finances are in distress, and you have no planning, the least helpful thing you can do is trying a fully featured app, or even worse, a spreadsheet. It requires a lot of attention to details and they can get overwhelming and conf…

the first level of budgeting is to track your expenses against your income. you look at whether your bank account is growing or not. then you categorize expenses to get an understanding of your spending. only after you have those categories, you can start to budget. you can look at the categories and consider whether you are spending to much on a category or not. if your cash flow is negative you need to find categor…

I'm not sure that level of detail (specifying receipts to the article level) helps you get a grasp of your overall spending, nor do I expect it giving the "right advice". Suppose you buy a lot of healthy fresh fruit and vegetables, would you want that tool to suggest you reduce that spending?

Re: PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

#30

Post by em-bee »

mrngm wrote: post #29
em-bee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the first level of budgeting is to track your expenses against your income. you look at whether your bank account is growing or not. then you categorize expenses to get an understanding of your spending. only after you have those categories, you can start to budget. you can look at the categories and consider whether you are spending to much on a category or not. if your cash flow is negative you need to find categor…

I'm not sure that level of detail (specifying receipts to the article level) helps you get a grasp of your overall spending, nor do I expect it giving the "right advice". Suppose you buy a lot of healthy fresh fruit and vegetables, would you want that tool to suggest you reduce that spending?

the point is to group articles by category. a single visit to a supermarket may contain important and vanity items mixed together. i want to break that out and then categorize accordingly. i do want to know how much i am spending on candy or sugar drinks, or, if you are so inclined, cigarettes or alcohol. toys, gifts, school supplies are all different categories that are worth tracking. if you go shopping at places like target or walmart you'll get all of that mixed up on a single receipt.

fruits and vegetables don't need their own category. they could be grouped into food but candy bars or soda are not food.

i don't want the tool to suggest anything, but i want the numbers so i can draw my own conclusions.

entering data by article is easier than categorizing on the spot. i could just scan the receipt and let the tool work out the categories (once i assigned a category to an item, the tool can do it for any repeat appearance)

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