Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

plaintextaccounting.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 123 posts

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#71

Post by phito »

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've been tinkering with that the last few days. My main issue is that most of my bank statement descriptions are really bad. It's often impossible to know what the transaction was about just from the description. Local LLMs (9B parameters, I don't have the required hardware for bigger models) don't help at all as they don't know the context around the transaction.

I use Firefly III for my finances management, and in the end it is just much better to setup "dumb" rules that look for keywords in the description/IBAN numbers etc. I have about 30 of them and they cover 90% of my transactions.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#72

Post by po »

Plain text accounting is cool but I think one of the biggest barriers for people is downloading bank data into a standard format.

The banks are never going to embrace much more than CSV or excel files... the various data aggregation platforms (yodlee, plaid, etc...) are not open source or hobbyist friendly.

Back in ancient times there was a company called Wesabe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesabe) that wrote software that did bank syncing on your desktop. Mint.com basically put them out of business but I still think about that approach. I think it could work for open source.

Has anyone else?

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#73

Post by toyg »

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…

Working on calendar software is boring, so the big players likely give it to interns and new recruits. Office suites are so last century.

I don't think things will improve unless we find a way to shame big companies in paying attention and playing nice to each other, like it was done for HTML standards (pre-Google's monopolization).

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#74

Post by razakel »

po wrote: post #72

Plain text accounting is cool but I think one of the biggest barriers for people is downloading bank data into a standard format. The banks are never going to embrace much more than CSV or excel files... the various data aggregation platforms (yodlee, plaid, etc...) are not open source or hobbyist friendly. Back in ancient times there was a company called Wesabe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesabe ) that wrote sof…

The UK has Open Banking, a standardised API for accessing banking data:

https://www.openbanking.org.uk/

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#75

Post by mauvehaus »

po wrote: post #72

Plain text accounting is cool but I think one of the biggest barriers for people is downloading bank data into a standard format. The banks are never going to embrace much more than CSV or excel files... the various data aggregation platforms (yodlee, plaid, etc...) are not open source or hobbyist friendly. Back in ancient times there was a company called Wesabe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesabe ) that wrote sof…

hledger has tooling to transform fairly arbitrary CSV into transactions it understands[0]. I haven't tried it yet, but after spending 4 hours over multiple days helping my SaaS bookkeeping company troubleshoot their bank connection problems[1], you can better believe I'm willing to put a little time in trying this out.

Every damn time I reconcile transactions I end up fighting their system that I can't see the workings of or fix myself. It's getting to the point where the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I'd sooner deal with the CSV myself given a half-way decent set of tools to do so.

[0] https://hledger.org/1.40/hledger.html#csv

[1] No, they weren't willing to refund me any money; this is "typical", in their words.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#76

Post by fallat »

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…

+1 for ledger. It has been the best one I've used. The fact you can script it is f'ing amazing. My taxes have been on-point for 2+ years now since I started using it.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#77

Post by vagab0nd »

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…

When I sold my house, the escrow company mailed me a refund check of about $3000 on the closing. I never got that check. Guess how I found out about it, 5 years later, when I started using ledger-cli?

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#78

Post by tonyarkles »

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…

I'm not using any of these tools yet, although this article popped up at just the right time because Quickbooks and my bank conspired to miss a bunch of transactions that I'm cleaning up now... but that's beside the point.

The strategy I've used for different accounts/categories is to make accounts that match the expense categories that the Canada Revenue Agency wants on my tax return. Early on when I was getting into it I made a bunch of accounts for logical categories (Hosting Expenses, Prototype/Manufacturing Expenses, etc) but then after a few years of trying to map those categories into CRA categories... I just realized I could pre-categorize them appropriately and make my taxes simpler at the end of the year.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#79

Post by steine65 »

wruza wrote: post #55
rpb92 wrote: post #32

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…

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 ba…

I feel like plain text accounting software is overkill for splitting vacation expenses. The Splitwise phone app is very good for this, and shares some of the responsibility.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#80

Post by chriseidhof »

fsiefken wrote: post #68
chriseidhof wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

oh yes, absolutely! I have a system that works well for me. But it's inherent to plain text files that they don't support attachments. It's plain text, after all.
Post reply on HN