Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the system 'kind of break down' when you have a family?
The short answer is that my wife and I have different opinions about how to track data.
My wife and I have separate bank accounts
Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
41–50 of 127 posts
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#42I 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…
I've been using beancount for 3+ years and totally agree, the flexibility of it is the real USP.
I've never used any import tools though, I just enter the transactions manually maybe once or twice a week. It's been fine - especially using beancount-mode for emacs, although admittedly it's just my accounts, it might not scale so well for a family.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#43Any 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 .
I went through the same thing. I used to use hledger. Now I use lunchmoney so my wife can use the tool. TBH I'm thinking about going back to hledger. Don't get me wrong lunchmoney is amazing but it's not as well suited to me. My wife has little interest in looking at the budget so there is not much point.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#44Switched to beancount from ledger a few months ago and I’m really enjoying the strict syntax of beancount. The cool thing though is that I really didn’t lose any of my reporting flows that I had with (h)ledger… I just made scripts that convert the beancount journal on the fly, run whatever I was used to with hledger, and then delete the temporary file. I feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds :)
Did you covert your hledger journal to beancount, or just start anew?
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#45Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the system 'kind of break down' when you have a family?
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 refunded the payment even though it was well past the cancellation window.
I still removed all the payment methods and addresses from our Google Pay account because I couldn't figure out any other way to guarantee that this doesn't happen again.
Frictionless payment flows do not mix well with toddlers.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#47Shameless 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 in text files because there are simply too many of them, so these systems really only scale to personal finance levels (few hundred transactions maybe thousand transactions).
In addition building plugins that can import your whole text file into a sql system so you can query them is redundant. Just have it in a relational database to start with.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#48Any 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 .
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 savings goals.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#49Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the system 'kind of break down' when you have a family?
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…
I understand that concurrent edits to the ledger will become problematic. If this really is a requirement, a distributed ledger solution (cloud based tool) may be needed
Though is the root issue just communication? At some point transactions need:
1. Recorded
2. Categorized (optional, but desirable)
3. Reconciled (This can only happen as often as bank statements are issued)
With multiple spenders, communication (to answer the question "what is this transaction for?!?!") is paramount and fits naturally at the reconciliation step or more frequently if desired.
The workflow described is synchronous, centralized and simple