Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
plaintextaccounting.org
Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
1–10 of 123 posts
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#2I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#3I've wanted to explore this so that I've got records of all my transactions which I can feed to generative AI when it eventually becomes capable enough.
E.g. "Using my financial records, help me set a budget which allows me to do XYZ within ABC bounds."
I wonder if anyone else has done this yet?
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#4I'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.
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#5I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).
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.
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#6Straight domain:
* 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022005
* 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420797
* 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11164330
Various other mentions of the concept:
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#7I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).
I wish banks weren't actively sabotaging data export. I wrote some scripts for this in the past, reverse engineered the login with OCR, cleaned up the invalid entries, but... It's just too much effort to maintain this. Once the mobile confirmation started being required, I just gave up.
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#8I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).
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, effectively squashing transactions into monthly and yearly budget summary transaction. Saved a ton of space with little loss of granularity.
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#9I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).
I wish banks weren't actively sabotaging data export. I wrote some scripts for this in the past, reverse engineered the login with OCR, cleaned up the invalid entries, but... It's just too much effort to maintain this. Once the mobile confirmation started being required, I just gave up.
I use beancount and I use ofxget for some accounts and then keep a CSV archive for the rest and wrote some scripts to sync them into beancount when a new file shows up. It's annoying to download everything and keep it organized, but it gives me better piece of mind than all the other SaSS accounting systems
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#10I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).
If you're willing to hold your nose a little bit, Plaid[0] might be worth looking into. They have (had?) a testing tier which is more than enough for personal uses (100 linked accounts).
[0]: https://plaid.com/