41–50 of 123 posts
Is there an text editor that is able to autocomplete the categories in hledger format ? It would be great to type Assets:: and then get a list of the possible categories, but I haven't found any editor or extension that does it.
I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).
Use teller.io, it’s super easy to setup imo (compared to Plaid). I use it to sync my chase bank + credit card statements on a gsheet.
First thing that came to mind was org-mode’s tables, which are great. This feels like an Emacs package suite just waiting to happen....
There is ledger-mode and beancount-mode which are both nice (depending on which program you use). I would say the majority of what I do in practice Python scripts to convert statements to ledger; the amount of stuff I do by hand is minimal enough that it would be easy to live without the emacs mode.
On average, it takes about 30-40 minutes per sitting to do a weekly review, and that's mostly checking g what hides behind amazon/ebay/Google payments.
So it's not that bad really
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly my experience but with GnuCash. I used to do it weekly, if you miss one or even two or three weeks it's not too bad, but beyond that the effort required to catch up just snowballs. It's also been about a year since I've imported. I've been meaning to get around to reviving it, and the only way I can imagine doing it is to break it up into smaller chunks, like uploading one month at a time over a few days.
Or just start over on the day (or month) you decide to import. As someone who wrote a budgeting app, historical data > 1 year is a lot less useful than most folks realize. I would say at least 80% of folks never look back further than 6 months. It's not even worthwhile for comparing YoY as your lifestyle, the economy, etc change so much. I ended up adding per-transaction opt-out roll up functionality for this reason,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly my experience but with GnuCash. I used to do it weekly, if you miss one or even two or three weeks it's not too bad, but beyond that the effort required to catch up just snowballs. It's also been about a year since I've imported. I've been meaning to get around to reviving it, and the only way I can imagine doing it is to break it up into smaller chunks, like uploading one month at a time over a few days.
Or just start over on the day (or month) you decide to import. As someone who wrote a budgeting app, historical data > 1 year is a lot less useful than most folks realize. I would say at least 80% of folks never look back further than 6 months. It's not even worthwhile for comparing YoY as your lifestyle, the economy, etc change so much. I ended up adding per-transaction opt-out roll up functionality for this reason,…
> This means that the bank will need to provide you with a SFTP server and credentials to connect to it idk but this does not sound reasonable at all
It's rather hilarious, one of the major banks I had a conversation with back in 2019 (as these new laws were barely getting off the ground in tech implementation) noted that they had a service which allowed you to drop in raw SWIFT messages (interbank commmunication format) into a folder via SFTP to make payments in bulk or download bank statements. It's very real!
I wouldn't be surprised if they have a lot of big firms grandfathered into that, and may be still (unlawfully?) offering it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly my experience but with GnuCash. I used to do it weekly, if you miss one or even two or three weeks it's not too bad, but beyond that the effort required to catch up just snowballs. It's also been about a year since I've imported. I've been meaning to get around to reviving it, and the only way I can imagine doing it is to break it up into smaller chunks, like uploading one month at a time over a few days.
What is the bottleneck in your experience? I have around 100 transactions a month spread across various banks and providers. My experience is this: I spent about a week defining a procedure to export all statements into CSV, converting the CSV into a Gnucash-friendly format where needed with some GPT3-authored PHP scripts. Once a month I do an import into Gnucash and the process takes at most 2 hours.
Classifying transactions is probably the biggest time sink. GnuCash's auto-categorise feature is somewhat helpful but requires a lot of manual intervention and honestly I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what a particular expense related to (often the note on my bank statement is not helpful).
Ultimately, 2 hours per month is probably about what it took me as well. But x12 that's 24 solid hours of importing. And once you go back a few months it probably takes longer because it is more difficult to recall what particular expenses were for.
> This means that the bank will need to provide you with a SFTP server and credentials to connect to it idk but this does not sound reasonable at all
Is there an text editor that is able to autocomplete the categories in hledger format ? It would be great to type Assets:: and then get a list of the possible categories, but I haven't found any editor or extension that does it.
It’s actually the only thing I use emacs for.
I’d appreciate hearing how others have used the various plain text accounting tools for their own use. Are you legitimately using it to inform yourself of your spending habits and taking corrective action? Is it simply for tracking your expenses, revenues, net worth, etc? Or is it simply about the process? I can certainly see the appeal of such an orderly, structured process. Every time I’m reminded of plain text acc…