Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

You can track these kinds of things in GNU Ledger (cousin of GNUCash)

The expense category is still something like `Expenses:Books:SciFi`, or whatever. The payee for the transaction is then `Amazon`. If you prefer to make the payee the specific retailer that's selling to you, using Amazon as a platform, you can do that, and instead "tag" the transaction with `:Amazon:`.

You can also track points as a byproduct of the transaction, but that's another rabbit hole.

I use ledger to document my personal finances, and I've been using it for about a year.

I do it less for budgeting, and more for a method of centralizing information. I have 4 credit cards that I use regularly, from 3 banks, I'm a w-2 employee with a 401k and benefits, and I file my own taxes. It's hard to keep track of everything, when the relevant data is behind login walls, in occasionally proprietary formats.

I wrote a bunch of scrapers and parsers for obtaining this data, and translating it into a ledger transaction format. Once it's there, I can do all the reporting and whatnot to my heart's content. Writing all of the infrastructure has been a labor of love, with a non-trivial emphasis on labor. I balance out about once a month, but since automating the various transformers, I pretty much never have to debug balances any more, which is a godsend.

It tracks down to a pretty excruciating level of detail, enough that I compute (for example) how much it costs my employer to employ me, my average monthly spread in my checking accounts (between when cc bills, rent are due and when income comes in), average costs of travel-vacation-days, and how that's changed over seasons.

At this point, it mostly "just works", and it's easy to append to my records. The next fun part will be getting useful and actionable insights out of it, and applying them to my life and decisions.

It's very nice to feel "in control" about these things; I don't really worry about money any more.

I am still using Microsoft Money too, it's great! There is also Money Plus Sunset Home and Business edition available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=756... which includes features for small businesses, see comparison at http://moneymvps.org/faq/article/499.aspx

I'd definitely agree that this is overkill for most people. In your case, though, I think that you could put the same amount of work into GnuCash and get the same results without writing any code. Plus you'd have a GUI with built in reports and whatnot. Not sure if that matters to you.

In the article, I briefly touch on skipping manual transaction logging and just importing statements from your bank / credit card. And I gloss over this, but it looks like GnuCash offers similar functionality for automatically updating stock prices https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Online_Quotes - not sure if it's a pain to set up or not, but it's probably not as easy as just calling a google sheets function.

Seems like you wouldn't have any reasons to switch over given that you've already got a nice system going, but just wanted to point out that you can use GnuCash in a way that's not quite as... rigid as the way I use it :)

I’ve been using Gnucash for my personal finances for a several years now, and really love it - it’s not dead simple, and requires an understanding of double entry bookkeeping, but where it really shines is flexibility. A couple of examples are as follows:

1. Expenses in the future - If I book a bunch of plane tickets for later in the year today, I can book those expenses in those months in which I’m traveling (pre-paid asset until then) there-by seeing when I’m incurring those expenses vs. the cash flow of those expenses.

2. Corporate expenses - I can book expenses that I will be re-imbursed for as receivables and not have them run through my “income statement” (nothing like putting some business class plane tickets on your personal card to make things look weird)

3. Loans - whether it’s an auto loan on your car or simply a loan to a friend it’s great to be able to see your entire balance sheet (and remember that some items are outstanding!)

4.variable granularity - decide how detailed you want to get for some accounts you may decide you don’t need that much detail (because you track it some other way - like your 401k) and you can just track your total balance at month end (+/- deposits)

5. Track illiquid investments in your net worth (not saying the marks are right, but at least you have a placeholder value for them on your balance sheet (your home - private company stock etc.)

6. Privacy - it’s your data - no sharing it with anyone else