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Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

plaintextaccounting.org

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Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#61

Post by sulandor »

datavirtue wrote: post #58
evrimoztamur wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely the 'retro' way of doing it, and has been effectively outlawed in Europe with the new banking file and payment standards laws. 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)…

There are far more FTP connections where people download files than there are available APIs at a bank. Plopping CSV files on a SFTP server is dirt cheap compared to an API.

indeed, was talking more from a regular customers perspective

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#62

Post by speleding »

wruza wrote: post #25

Systems that use immediate strict categorization don’t work for some people. At a company I worked at we went with a two-phase approach. A person would write notes (literally iphone notes) in the following format: Apr 5 24 -50 Alice tools -220 Bob home project Apr 2 24 +20 Bob returned loan Note that time goes “up” to avoid scrolling too much on open. Later we loaded it into a script which would parse dates, detect k…

We also don't type in the ledger files directly, but rather than convert it from a free format note we use the comment field of the banking apps, and the comment field of the expense report app (we use Zoho), to indicate what account it should apply to.

Once a quarter I download CSV files from our bank account, credit card and Zoho app, and we have a set of ruby scripts that parse the CSV files into ledger files. They infer the correct accounts from the comment fields. Of course, the script and the ledger output tends to need a few tweaks, but it's >95% automated that way.

As a bonus the scripts also add a few sanity checks to the ledger file, e.g. ensure the balance matches what is downloaded from the bank and entries fall within the current period.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#63

Post by speleding »

candiddevmike wrote: post #4

I'd embrace plain text accounting more if it had a better schema. Ledger's is absolutely atrocious, and it drives my OCD nuts trying to use vim to "write" accounting entries. I think my ideal PTA would be some kind of jsonnet-based system where I can create/call functions to generate journal entries.

ledger can validate that all account names are pre-defined, are formatted in a specific way with regard to decimal and thousands separator, their currency specified and a few more things. (None of these are enforced by default, but for any serious use of ledger you would want to set `--strict` in your .ledgerrc file)

What else would you want ledger to enforce? We actually have a few very specific (to us) rules we enforce, but we do that via a ruby script. That's the power of plain text accounting: you can just whip up a small script to do validation for you.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#64

Post by jasim »

Plain Text Accounting has become significantly easier to do for me on a regular basis, thanks to LLMs. Specifically: importing bank statements into hledger and avoiding manual entry.

I use a JSON file to map bank entries to my hledger accounts. For new transactions without mappings, I run a Python script that generates a prompt for Claude. It lists my hledger accounts and asks for mappings for the new entries.

Claude returns hledger journal entries based on these mappings, which I can quickly review.

Then another script prints out hledger journal entries for that month's bank transactions, all cleanly mapped. It takes me just a few minutes to tweak and finalize.

I can also specify these mapping instructions in plain-language which would've otherwise been a fragile hodgepodge of regexps and conditionals.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#65

Post by viraptor »

Telemakhos wrote: post #56
viraptor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The format exists - OFX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange But even banks that use it make massive mistakes and break the basic assumptions. Unique ID repeating in the same day for example. Or using the minutes in place of the month...

You should see what the major players (especially MS) do to iCalendar. The standard has been around since at least 2009, with the last update in 2016, but none of the major players implements the standard correctly, and most utterly fail on VTODO, I suspect on purpose because to-do lists are actually useful. I can't decide whether the failure to implement iCalendar and OFX standards properly are examples of incompete…

I'll go with incompetence or lack of care. The issues I found were so bizarre/stupid, I would be worried for anyone who thought to make them on purpose.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#66

Post by Spooky23 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #8
NoboruWataya wrote: post #5

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,…

Years ago when I helped people with random computer stuff (circa 2002), I had a client who’d run into trouble with Quicken because they had about 20 years of historical data.

It was so weird to me - they were paying me hundreds of dollars so that they could reference their water bill in 1987. I have my own irrational tendencies like this, of course, but still seemed weird.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#67

Post by chriseidhof »

chriseidhof wrote: post #57

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 p…

In thinking a bit more, I think the biggest pain point for me is one with plain text in general: it supports no attachments. I have my own system to refer to specific files and built a Mac app that lets me drop a file on a transaction, then it copies that file into a specific folder and adds a tag to the transaction. This could be done so much easier if the data would be sqlite, but then you obviously lose the ability to edit it directly in your text editor.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#68

Post by fsiefken »

chriseidhof wrote: post #67
chriseidhof wrote: post #57

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 p…

In thinking a bit more, I think the biggest pain point for me is one with plain text in general: it supports no attachments. I have my own system to refer to specific files and built a Mac app that lets me drop a file on a transaction, then it copies that file into a specific folder and adds a tag to the transaction. This could be done so much easier if the data would be sqlite, but then you obviously lose the abilit…

You can perhaps use local file:// references in the files and open them in a browser, or you can use ledger from within a tool like Obsidian, LogSeq or DevonThink. Perhaps associate attachments in that way?

https://github.com/tgrosinger/ledger-obsidian

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#69

Post by l72 »

Has anyone tried training their own personal machine learning model to take export from their Bank+receipts and auto categorize everything? It seems like it'd be a fairly simple classification model that wouldn't require too much training...

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#70

Post by koevet »

l72 wrote: post #69

Has anyone tried training their own personal machine learning model to take export from their Bank+receipts and auto categorize everything? It seems like it'd be a fairly simple classification model that wouldn't require too much training...

I did, I use beancount plus some ML for automatic transaction categorization. Working on a new version right now that can also integrate with an LLM
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