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10 years of personal finances in plain text files

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Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#91

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

the_arun wrote: post #75
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #70

A lot of people in this thread comingling "plain text" with "double entry". Beancount is both, but you can do either one or the other or both. In particular, you DONT need to learn double entry to do plain text accounting. Of course, you SHOULD learn double entry accounting because it's a great tool for organizing knowledge. Whether plain text is beneficial for accounting is less clear cut in my mind. I think plain t…

I think Accounting needs automation. Because manual tasks are error prone & Accuracy is a P0 requirement for finance.

Two points here.

First, automation is a new orthogonal dimension. You can have automation with or without plain text.

Second, your emphasis on "automation" leads me to believe that perhaps you misunderstand what accounting is. Accounting is not just taking a list of transactions and recording them (database, file etc). That is called bookkeeping. Yes, accounting is also amenable to automation, but much less so than bookkeeping. Although, you could argue that when applied to the life of a normal individual, accounting and bookkeeping are almost indistinguishable. You have income, you have costs, and you have a mortgage - pretty straightforward. My point is in general you cannot entirely automate accounting. The reason for that is that accounting isn't just processing bytes, but instead requires the understanding of the underlying economics associated with the transactions. This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other than the accountant's mental model of the entity he's doing the accounting for.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't disagree with you that accounting could use more automation. Everything could use more automation. But for something it's more straightforward than others.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#92

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

stvltvs wrote: post #90
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #70

A lot of people in this thread comingling "plain text" with "double entry". Beancount is both, but you can do either one or the other or both. In particular, you DONT need to learn double entry to do plain text accounting. Of course, you SHOULD learn double entry accounting because it's a great tool for organizing knowledge. Whether plain text is beneficial for accounting is less clear cut in my mind. I think plain t…

I love/hate GnuCash. I've been using it for years, and it helps a lot. I would pay good money for someone to improve the UI, maybe even separate the accounting engine into a library that could be used by different UIs.

100% on the UI. My main gripe with GnuCash is that it's impossible to do "mass actions" from the UI.

On the point of "library" - you know that "GnuCash the app" comes with its lib, and there's python wrappers? I've only ever used these to produce reports (read, reports different from the ones provided by the UI). However I believe it's also possible to do things like inserting transactions via these python wrappers.

Another example of something which is possible via the python wrappers is labels. GnuCash doesn't support labels, but it supports adding general text to each transaction and to each leg of each transaction. So you can e.g. use hashtags in the text, and then consume transactions into python and aggregate on these hashtags, making them effectively labels.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#93

Post by mpol »

Way too complicated for me :)

I just have 1 text file with monthly data. Each month is on a separate line, with only 5 columns (expanded below).

  1.date   2.saldo  3.savings  4.delta  5.special income / outcome (heading line)
  1 31 january 2026
  2 500
  3 2500
  4 -80
  5 dinner -50, concert - 30, sales +80, trousers -80, etcetera
Where the date is the last day of the month that I need to make (the next day there is income, for me it's 19th, not 31th). Saldo is my bank account that day. Savings are, well, savings in a separate account. delta is the sum of special income and outcome. row 5 is all special income and expenses. Groceries are not listed, I need them every month anyway.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#94

Post by distances »

stvltvs wrote: post #88
distances wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same, except I track even a bit less. I track monthly all account balances, salary/income, paid taxes, transfers to investment accounts, rent/mortgage, and health insurance. This is enough to map investment performance, financial position, and necessary living costs. Mostly everything else is "a life lived" expense and I don't see a need to do any finer tracking there.

It's highly dependent on your personal situation. If you have plenty of income, tracking grocery expenses might be a waste of time, like tracking how much air you breathe. If your income is barely meeting your expenses (or worse), the grocery budget is one of the few places you can make meaningful decisions that will lower your costs. And there's a tricky middle ground where it feels like you have enough income, but…

Yes, very true. It might be useful to start with overtracking to see where the money actually goes.

I didn't track anything until about 5 years ago as my mental model was "track all purchases", and I wasn't willing to do that. Someone had to point out that higher level tracking can be quite useful too, and this is what I found to work well for me. That's why I bring this up in related topics: it's not an all-or-nothing choice.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#95

Post by stvltvs »

coliveira wrote: post #80
thomascountz wrote: post #18

I began with PTA recently. I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already) and then you need to decide between ledger-cli, hledger, or beancount, with the differentiators being on the margins and with some promise of being able to switch later. The choice really comes down to which tool has the documentation/community that makes the most sense to…

If you're running a business, double entry BK is essential. If you're doing personal finances it is completely overkill. I think the perfect tool is just excel or any similar spreadsheet, and track what matters for you. I usually add numbers weekly to my spreadsheet.

Double-entry bookkeeping is a transformational way of thinking about money. There's a reason it took over the world. Even if I just tracked expenses in a spreadsheet, it would help that I know double-entry.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#96

Post by mkozlows »

elric wrote: post #67

My less obsessive personal finance workflow: I have a spreadsheet. I update it by hand once a month, and have been doing so for ~20 years. Takes about 5 minutes. I only track the categories I care about. Those have varied a bit over time, but have always included staples like power, heating, water, ISP, rent/mortgage, insurance, savings, etc. I don't track things like groceries or restaurants or anything else that I…

If you want a bit more automation on your spreadsheet, check out Tiller. They provide the integrations with your banks to automatically download your transactions into a spreadsheet (support Sheets or Excel), as well as some handy templates that you can use for budgeting/dashboarding/whatever. But fundamentally, just pulling data into a spreadsheet so that you can use it however you want.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#97

Post by stvltvs »

sxg wrote: post #56

This sounds super cool and useful to me, but how does this work with a partner who's non-technical? Managing personal finances is something that we do together and having a nice clean UI that makes sense to her is important. Is there a way to achieve that with beancount? Currently we're using YNAB, which is mostly great although sometimes unstable and limited in ways.

I haven't used this GUI, but this was the comment below yours.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464042

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#98

Post by coliveira »

stvltvs wrote: post #95
coliveira wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're running a business, double entry BK is essential. If you're doing personal finances it is completely overkill. I think the perfect tool is just excel or any similar spreadsheet, and track what matters for you. I usually add numbers weekly to my spreadsheet.

Double-entry bookkeeping is a transformational way of thinking about money. There's a reason it took over the world. Even if I just tracked expenses in a spreadsheet, it would help that I know double-entry.

The concept of DE BK is simple, yet powerful. The difficult part is to track every penny. For personal finances that doesn't make much sense, but for a business it's essential.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#99

Post by binarin »

olsondv wrote: post #72
binarin wrote: post #54

I've tried to track personal finances several times, but it only started to work when I've discovered the idea (from https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger ) that you need to treat the whole PTA story more like a project compilation: - Everything is managed by build system that is able to track dependencies - Inputs from financial institutions are kept in the repo as is - Those inputs are converted by your scr…

The mortgage payments always confused me and that link has a good explanation of how it works. Have you used that code base in your own system or just the principles? I don’t know Haskell so not sure how much I can/need to modify.

Yes, I'm using parts of this codebase. But Haskell is only being used as a build tool, so you can replace it with anything that you're comfortable with, like make, bazel, ...

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#100

Post by ryandrake »

bregma wrote: post #76

I started decades ago using Quicken. Then had to re-enter all my data when a new version came out and support for the old version was EOLed. So I switched to GNU Cash and re-entered everything again. Then there were migration issues with GNU Cash. Finally I discovered PTA. I chose hledger (because of possible performance issues with beancount). I learned double-entry bookkeeping (it's pretty simple, honestly). I writ…

I can't seem to ween myself off of reliance on Quicken. I really want to, and I hate that I am tied to Intuit software. I hate that every transaction I've made since 2000 is stored in a proprietary binary blob.

But I can't find an alternative that has cracked the killer feature: Syncing with each of my online accounts. I like to track every expense and every transfer down to the penny, and then update from the bank's online connection to confirm each of them. I do this daily so I can catch any fraud or mistakes. I have 27 accounts tracked, and I'm simply not going to log in to each of them using their janky web sites, download CSVs, and import them manually into personal finance software. It's just not going to happen. Quicken's support for this is far and away the best out there.

Doing this all in plaintext and copy/pasting from downloaded CSVs every day seems like an absolute nightmare.

Unfortunately, the trend seems to be banks turning down their public-facing OFX services, and instead moving to the model where Intuit is the middleman and you need to tether yourself to them, who in turn channel your requests to the banks. So it's been getting even more and more difficult to escape from Quicken.

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