Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

I love PTA and have been doing it for years, using beancount, fava and emacs.

The main benefit for me is keeping track of everything, including pensions, RSU vests and so on.

I have some scripts that help me connect to banks and translate the transactions into the correct format with some crude rules based categorisation, along with scripts that convert CSV files from investment accounts etc.

It’s a lot of effort at first but I’ve got the system down now to maybe 10-15 minutes work once a week to keep everything updated.

Emacs org mode is useful for this. Its plain text tables have spreadsheet capabilities and you can cross reference other tables, to separate out things.

I’m always using it for spontaneous group accounting, e.g. three guys vacation. Because for group expenses it’s much easier to split the check later in the day or the week. We just accumulate the web of debts and sort it out on demand. It’s very hard to track such chaotic expenses otherwise.

Same for business expenses, I just pay with my card for equipment, services, etc. Later I report it up and get cash/transfer back (doesn’t work for some countries/businesses).

My personal eaten-shitten expenses I know from my bank and experience, there’s no need to account for these.

Every time I’m reminded of plain text accounting, I have either an irresistible urge to immerse myself fully into the process, or feelings of guilt for not staying committed to my previous attempts

You must have financial motivation, not emotional. Once you know that if you give up on accounting, your buddy will happily drink through hundreds of bucks, or your company will get a free hdmi cable, you enter the damn sum without hesitation. Personal accounting doesn’t work because you only can lose analytics, not money.

I've been using ledger (ledger-cli) from the moment I first became self employed (almost twenty years ago). While far from perfect, I'm very happy about it. It's nice that everything is in plain text, which means that I can script things, read everything in VIM, and easily extract data. For one of my two current companies, the ledger file is 2MB of plain text and contains the transactions from 2016 onwards.

While I personally didn't find much value in lots of different "accounts" (categories), it's still been indispensable in keeping track of everything.

Learning double-entry bookkeeping (which tools like ledger use) was really fun (and not that hard in hindsight) and probably a skill that is useful for the rest of my life.

According to this Reddit thread from 10 months ago, some major US banks like Chase won't work even in development mode without production approval, and some people mention obstacles getting approved for OAuth without being a company or otherwise having that level of security posture. (Other people seem to have gotten successfully approved for OAuth.)

I agree this niche needs a better solution than it currently has, although the commercial and regulatory incentives might not be well-aligned to force that. In my family we have important accounts in the US and in the EU (as well as less important accounts in Canada and Mexico), and I don't know of any personal use-friendly solution that lets me pull my data automatically from all of these.

I'd honestly like some nice integration between Plaid and Excel or GSheets to let me track capital gains transactions for my non-euro accounts in the weird way that German tax law requires (over a surprisingly broad range of accounts starting next year at the latest). But nothing turnkey seems to exist right now.