[HN Gopher] One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Mult...
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One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency
Household
Author : ayi
Score : 116 points
Date : 2026-01-02 10:25 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lalitm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lalitm.com)
| nubg wrote:
| Can somebody explain to me the advantage of double-entry
| bookkeeping? Is it basically just a "checksum" so it's easier to
| notice when something is off?
| Etheryte wrote:
| Yes, it makes it both really simple to spot mistakes and also
| allows you to easily audit the whole thing after the fact. In
| corporate contexts it's a straightforward way to make sure your
| bookies are also honest, just have an external firm look
| through the whole thing every now and then.
| phil-martin wrote:
| I must have read half a dozen intro-to-accounting books, and it
| never ever clicked for me. I understood the concepts, the
| benefits, but it just felt 'wrong'.
|
| It wasn't wrong of course, there is so much history, ingenuity
| and the invention of double entry accounting, but I just
| couldn't get my brain to understand it.
|
| The way the concepts settled in my head was: double entry
| accounting is just an excellent way of modelling a graph with
| nodes and edges. Accounts are nodes, transfers are edges. Every
| edge has a source and a destination.
|
| For a paper ledger, each column is graph node, and each row is
| a graph edge.
|
| That was enough for me to be able to learn the rest of the
| things I needed for interacting with the accounting world.
|
| But I also realised that that description really only helps a
| very small part of the population. :D It makes things so much
| worse for most people.
|
| "Hey could you help me understanding this accounting thing?"
|
| "Sure, but first thing is, let's learn graph theory! You know
| who Dijkstra right?"
|
| Whole buckets of nope.
|
| But thats a digression from your actual question - whats the
| point?
|
| It presents a rigid set of rules of recording transfers,
| everything has to have a from account and to account (i.e. a
| graph edge), every row must add up to zero.
|
| Because of that, it makes it easy to spot any mistakes in data
| entry. If any of your rows dont add up to zero - then you've
| made a mistake.
| RedNifre wrote:
| Here is my explanation for "software people who understand
| databases". The structure of the explanation will be as
| follows: 1. Explain how you would do simple
| accounting with a database 2. Point out which indices
| you'd create for performance 3. Show how the "double
| entry" part of double entry accounting is about the indices
|
| 1. The way you'd do accounting in a database is with two
| tables: One table for accounts (e.g. your checking account, or
| the supermarket account, which you don't own) and another table
| for transactions. The transactions move an amount of money from
| one account to another, e.g. from your checking account to the
| supermarket account. Or if you use it for budgeting, you might
| split your checking account into a groceries account, a rent
| account etc. (think "categories").
|
| 2. For performance, you would create indices based on the
| accounts in the transaction table, so you could easily check
| what's going on e.g. in your groceries account or how much you
| spent at the supermarket.
|
| 3. Double entry accounting was formalized in the 15th century,
| way before computers became a thing, but bound paper books were
| already somewhat affordable. The way you'd do accounting is
| like this: During the business day, you would write down your
| transactions as they happen, into a scrapbook, similar to the
| transactions table mentioned above. At the end of the day,
| you'd do the "double entry" part, which means you take your
| "index" books where each book is about one account and you
| transcribe each transaction from your scrap book into the two
| books of the two accounts that are mentioned in the
| transaction, e.g. if you spent $10 from your groceries account
| into the supermarket account, you'd double enter that
| transaction both into your "groceries" book and into your
| "supermarket" book. Then, when you want to check on how much
| you spent at the supermarket in a particular month, you could
| easily look it up in the supermarket book (this would be very
| tedious when using the scrap book). These account centered
| books are like the indices in the database mentioned above.
|
| So the double entry part is about clever index building for
| making it easier and faster to understand what's going on in
| your accounting system.
| thehours wrote:
| How are investments modeled in this system? e.g I buy $100 of
| an index fund which can fluctuate in value.
| phil-martin wrote:
| Accounts (in the accounting sense) are unitless, and refer
| to whatever meaning we ascribe to them, so we can transfer
| value from $ to shares, or USD to GBP or whatever.
|
| Lalit describes this I think really well in his article
|
| https://lalitm.com/post/one-number-i-
| trust/#chapter-4-invest...
| rmunn wrote:
| Not an accountant, so if I get it wrong someone please
| correct me. But index fund shares are an asset: something
| you own. So is your car, your house (if you own it), and
| your computer. When you buy an asset, you paid a certain
| price for it. When you sell it, you pay a different price.
| Until you sell it, though, you don't actually have the
| money, so it hardly matters what its value is _until you
| sell it_. If you buy $100 of an index fund and a year later
| it has grown by 10%, you don 't actually _have_ $110 yet
| until you sell it. So you just track that you have a
| certain number of shares of the fund. Let 's say each share
| sells for exactly $20 when you bought them, so you have
| exactly 5 shares. Later the share price is $22, but you
| don't have $110 yet, you still have exactly 5 shares. When
| you sell them, _then_ you 'll have $110.
|
| So you record two entries:
|
| January 1st, 2025: -$100 checking account
| +5 shares VFINX at $20 ea
|
| January 1st, 2026: -5 shares VFINX at $22
| ea +$110 checking account
|
| At this point you have "realized" ("made real") $10 of
| profit from this asset. You bought it for $100 and sold it
| for $110, so the IRS wants you to pay taxes on the $10
| profit you made. (This is capital gains tax). Until you
| sold them, some people would consider you to have $10
| profit in "unrealized capital gains", but you _did not
| actually have that profit until you sold the shares_. This
| is important to remember, because if you start counting on
| that $10 profit but then the share price drops because the
| economy took a hit, suddenly you don 't have $110 worth of
| shares, you have $90 worth of shares, and you'll make a
| loss if you sell them now. (This is one of the reasons why
| only the economically illiterate would propose a tax on
| "unrealized capital gains": that means taxing people for
| income they have _not actually received_ , but merely
| _could theoretically_ receive. Which is both immoral and
| stupid.)
|
| Hope this explanation helps a little. And as I said, if I
| got something wrong, please correct me and explain how I
| was wrong; I'm not an accountant. I understand the basic
| principles, but it's entirely possible I was off on some
| detail or other.
| rmunn wrote:
| I feel I should also mention one more thing. The fact
| that you don't have the money _until you sell the shares_
| is also why "net worth" can be a highly misleading
| concept. (All numbers in the following example are
| fictional and made up on the spot, BTW). Billionaire Gill
| Bates, whose net worth is reported to be $20 billion,
| does not actually _have_ 20 billion dollars. He has $5
| million (million, not billion) of actual dollars in his
| bank account(s), but the rest of his net worth is in
| assets: he owns 200 million shares of MegaSoft Corp,
| whose share price is currently $100 per share. If
| MegaSoft Corp 's shares suddenly drop in value (say,
| because a hacker group announces that MegaSoft's Doors 12
| OS is full of, well, backdoors and suddenly nobody wants
| to buy it anymore) and now their shares are selling for
| $90, then Gill Bates's net worth will become 18 billion
| dollars instead of 20 billion. Did he "lose" 2 billion
| dollars in one day? _NO_. He never had those dollars. The
| "net worth" calculation is just the _theoretical_ amount
| of money he could make if he sold all his shares.
|
| And in fact, he could never actually make that amount of
| money by selling all his shares, because if he did put
| 200 million MegaSoft shares on the market, he'd never be
| able to find buyers for all of them at the current share
| price, and he'd be forced to drop his asking price by
| quite a bit before he managed to sell all 200 million
| shares. Not to mention the fact that if he tried to sell
| his entire holdings of MegaSoft Corp, many people would
| wonder what he knows about MegaSoft's long-term
| prospects, and would be afraid to buy those shares,
| driving the share price down even further. Gill Bates
| would be lucky to make $5 billion, let alone his
| theoretical net worth of $20 billion, if he were to
| suddenly sell all his shares. (If he sold them in a
| trickle over the course of ten years, he might well make
| the full $20 billion in the end, but not if he dumped
| them all on the market at once).
|
| This is why (well, it's just one of the many reasons why)
| net worth is misleading. It's a theoretical number, but
| the actual amount of wealth someone has in practice
| entirely depends on market conditions at the moment they
| need the money, as well as how urgently they need it. (If
| the market is low right now, can they afford to wait six
| months for it to recover? Or do they need the money
| tomorrow and have to sell at a lower-than-ideal price?)
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Net worth is the denominator for things that people
| actually want to, which typically don't require
| converting it all to cash at once. For example, pulling
| 4% of your net worth per year is one way to fund a
| retirement. So you won't know if you're ready to retire
| unless you're tracking net worth.
|
| For very rich people like Gill Bates, net worth is going
| to be the denominator for massive loans, tax strategies,
| and corporate maneuvering. Again, none of that will
| require converting the entire net worth to cash all at
| once. That doesn't mean it's not real.
|
| Finance is a complex subject, sure, and it gets more
| complex the bigger the numbers. That doesn't mean it's
| misleading.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| A fancy term of art for all this is "cost-basis
| accounting". Your (double entry) account tracks only the
| cost basis (how much you have spent and when you spent it
| for what commodity) not the current price. Current price
| fluctuates with the market and you can track the price as
| well to build an unrealized gain/loss statement. This
| sort of statement is not an account, it's a report on an
| account. (And yeah, "unrealized" means what it says that
| it isn't real money in your accounts, just money you
| potentially could make if you sold/converted/traded what
| was in your accounts.)
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > (This is one of the reasons why only the economically
| illiterate would propose a tax on "unrealized capital
| gains": that means taxing people for income they have not
| actually received, but merely could theoretically
| receive. Which is both immoral and stupid.)
|
| But your statement misses the important point of
| situations where people use the unrealized gains as
| collateral for a loan which they then use (for example to
| live off of). This in fact effectively "realizing" them
| without paying appropriate taxes on them. As long as
| gains are purely theoretical and not used for any
| transactions they should remain untaxed. As soon as they
| become "active" by being sold, or for example in
| unlocking additional assets by being collateral for a
| loan, they should be taxed.
|
| Same concept as a retirement account. You can sell within
| a retirement account and rightfully don't have to pay
| taxes because you don't really have "access" to the cash.
| It's still "locked" within the account. Only when you
| withdraw to have access to it and make it active/real do
| you pay taxes. But if you take out a large loan
| leveraging that retirement account as collateral (or
| against an unrealized gain) you are not making it active
| and correctly should pay taxes.
| rmunn wrote:
| It's not really a checksum. It can sometimes function as one
| (everything should sum to zero, if it doesn't then you have a
| math error), but since _most_ records you make will just have
| two entries (spent $25 on groceries, remove $25 from checking
| account) the everything-sums-to-zero feature isn 't going to
| catch math mistakes most of the time, because there is no math
| to be done on most entries. Rather, the fact that everything
| sums to zero helps you track things later on.
|
| To explain that, I'll rephrase, in my own words, the restaurant
| example from the article, because that was a good example of
| the concept. Let's say you went to a restaurant with two
| friends and decided to split the $90 bill three ways, but your
| friends didn't have $30 in cash on them at the time. You put
| the whole $90 on your credit card, and your friends paid you
| back $30 each the next week: one on Monday, and one on
| Wednesday.
|
| In single-entry accounting you might have written the following
| transactions: Thursday Jan 1st: $90 restaurant
| (credit card) Monday Jan 5th: $30 repaid from Alice
| (cash) Wednesday Jan 7th: $30 repaid from Bob (cash)
|
| Thing is, there's nothing to link those transactions together.
| If you look at these entries three years later, you'll probably
| be left scratching your head as to why Alice paid you back $30:
| there's no $30 transaction, so the $90 restaurant transaction
| won't jump out at you as the reason why Alice paid you back.
|
| But with double-entry bookkeeping, you'd write that as follows:
|
| Thursday Jan 1st: -$90 restaurant (credit card)
| +$30 my share of the restaurant bill (expenses) +$30
| Alice's share of the restaurant bill (money owed to me)
| +$30 Bob's share of the restaurant bill (money owed to me)
|
| Monday Jan 5th: -$30 Alice's share of the
| restaurant bill (money owed to me) +$30 cash received
| (cash)
|
| Wednesday Jan 7th: -$30 Bob's share of the
| restaurant bill (money owed to me) +$30 cash received
| (cash)
|
| It's not always obvious when you're new to double-entry
| accounting which entries should be positive or negative, but if
| you remember the "must add to zero" rule you'll be more likely
| to get it right. Money flowing _into_ an account is positive,
| money flowing _out_ of an account is negative. For credit
| cards, the money flows "out of" your credit card and into the
| restaurant's ownership, so the sign should be negative. When
| you pay the credit card bill later, the sign will be positive
| on the credit card account (and negative on your checking
| account, thus again adding to zero) because money is flowing
| _out_ of your checking account and _into_ your credit card
| account.
|
| Now, look at that double-entry accounting. When you look at the
| Wednesday Jan 5th entry, and you see that Alice paid you back
| $30, you'll start searching for a $30 transaction earlier, and
| you'll pretty quickly find the January 1st and figure out that
| she owed you $30 because you had paid her share of the
| restaurant bill on the 1st. And even if the amounts don't line
| up (let's say she paid you $20 on Jan 5th and $10 on Jan 12th),
| there's still a "money Alice owes me" category which has a +$30
| entry on the 1st, then -$20 on the 5th and -$10 on the 12th,
| all of which makes it pretty easy to figure out what Alice is
| paying you back for.
|
| So by recording each entry in at least two places (it's not
| always exactly two places, e.g. the January 1st expense is
| recorded in four places total), you get more linkage between
| the items and it becomes a lot easier to see _why_ the money
| was going out or coming in.
| iljya wrote:
| Double-entry accounting models the source and destination of
| funds. If you keep all of your money in one bank account and
| neither owe anyone or have anyone that owes you, then double-
| entry accounting is not necessary because you can record just
| the one side of every transaction - your bank account is the
| other side.
|
| However, if you have more than one account or debts, or
| budgets, then it becomes useful to track both sides of a
| transaction. If you track both sides of a transaction then you
| can easily answer questions like: 1. how much money do I have
| in my investment account? 2. how much debt do I have? 3. how
| much did I spend on recreational social activities?
|
| You can track debts and investments separately, but then you
| are still making two entries just in two places.
|
| I think many people have few enough debts and investment
| account that they track these separately, and the third
| question, budgeting, can be simplified if each vendor is only
| ever considered for a single budget, for example, all your
| flights are part of your vacation budget, and you don't care to
| break out a flight to a career related conference.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| I get that people on here don't like subscriptions, and I
| understand why, but I've been using You Need a Budget for well
| over a decade, and it is probably the last subscription I'd ever
| give up.
|
| The automatic import of expenses is so valuable for my family and
| keeping track of how much we've spent and how much we have left
| for the month.
|
| We used the fixed-cost version for years beyond when it was
| officially supported, and it didn't have the automated import,
| and I don't think I could ever go back to a system that didn't.
| There were always a few days a month, at least, when I wasn't
| exactly sure where we were in our expenses.
| dugite-code wrote:
| For a FOSS alternative: Actual budget isn't dissimilar from
| what YNAB was years ago when it was an on device budgeting
| software
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| +1, I bought YNAB back when you could - old Windows version
| that I would run under WINE. I used that until 2025 when I
| migrated to self-hosted Actual Budget (I run it on fly.io).
| It does everything I need.
| skwee357 wrote:
| I dont mind paying for a personal finance tool, but I feel like
| most of them are made for an average consumer who spends in one
| currency and needs budgeting. I operate in at least 3
| currencies, don't care about budgeting, and need support for
| tracking stocks and automatic currency conversions.
|
| The only tools that were able to provide that were GnuCash and
| PTAs like beancount.
|
| My point is, there is a big segment of people who are not
| served by existing personal finance tools simply because they
| operate in more than 1 currency, or have a slightly more
| complicated setup than envelope budgeting.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| I regularly pay with 3 currencies, and YNAB isn't great for
| that, but it ends up working out because 95% of my spend is
| in just one.
|
| But, you're right, I have no need for tracking stocks, as I
| only check in once a year or so, and I can't imagine YNAB
| would manage that well.
| netsharc wrote:
| Are the currency conversions automatic, do they fetch the
| rate of whatever service you're using? E.g. converting USD to
| EUR on Wise on 28 Dec 2025 surely gets you a different amount
| compared to doing it on Revolut, or paying EUR with your card
| (which is USD-denominated), and on Jan 2 2026 the rates are
| also different..
|
| I was travelling in the Nordics (they had 4 currencies back
| then, and they still do!) and wanted to have some precision
| what cash I exchanged with what rate...
| jjav wrote:
| I also use GnuCash for a moderately complex set of accounts
| with many income sources in multiple currencies. Works pretty
| awesome.
| ajdude wrote:
| I used YNAB since back when they used to just sell the software
| and maintained a subscription for a little while. I will say
| that their approach to budgeting has changed the entire way of
| how I look at money, and even though I have switched to GNU
| Cash, I have essentially replicated the envelope method there
| (it requires four entries per transaction instead of the
| standard two).
|
| For anyone who wants to use this envelope method without paying
| for YNAB, I recommend checking out Buckets, which is another
| software that works similarly.
| ixwt wrote:
| I've been using YNAB 4 (aka YNAB Classic on Android) for some
| time. I got a new phone, and the phone app finally won't run
| on the new phone. YNAB 4 is also quite buggy on my Arch based
| setup (someone maintains a package on AUR using Wine). So I
| think it's finally time to move on, which I think I'm doing
| this year.
|
| My only issue with Buckets is that the YNAB importer doesn't
| take into account that YNAB will take your overspending and
| take it from your next month's income. I have some bad habits
| that means I was really using YNAB as more of a financial
| tracker than an actually budget system. That's my own fault
| though. The envelope in question comes out to $-10k... That's
| all my own fault though. It just means I have to massage it
| into Bucket's system, or start a new budget.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| I assume Buckets does that because YNAB no longer allows
| you to take from next month.
| spiffytech wrote:
| I switched from YNAB to Actual Budget. It's FOSS, and has
| nifty power user features like a DSL for distributing monthly
| funds and cleaning up extra at the end of the month.
| x187463 wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of YNAB. It's a morning routine to log in
| (really, the tab is always up) and reconcile accounts. The
| zero-based budgeting method, while not requiring YNAB, is
| beautifully represented in the software. I'm sure I could use
| some free software to accomplish the basic tasks but having an
| associated app my spouse can review for quick decision making
| is very valuable.
|
| It's made budgeting a tool to accomplish savings, wealth
| growth, and expense smoothing rather than simply a survival
| strategy. When you have to deliberately shift funds out of one
| category to cover another, you really consider the relative
| priorities.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| Another unexpected side effect is that it made me "excited"
| to spend money when I had saved up for it. Before it would be
| a back and forth, "should I buy this? I've wanted it, but I
| could use the money for something else..."
|
| With YNAB, it's been "hell yeah, I saved up for this and now
| I get to buy it."
| phil-martin wrote:
| I really enjoyed reading this, and it is inspirational as it is
| something I have wanted to do for a long time. And as a software
| developer, it really appeals to me.
|
| How do you think it compares time-wise to using existing
| accounting software? Was the time investment worth it to get the
| control and visibility you now have?
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| > How do you think it compares time-wise to using existing
| accounting software?
|
| Author here. I tried various consumer budgeting apps before I
| ended up building my own (and then going to Beancount). The
| main problem with _every_ one of the apps I tried is that they
| don 't handle investments well. 99% of my money is invested and
| having net worth figures which are wildly wrong because the app
| is only tracking bank accounts really annoyed me. That was the
| reason I built my own thing in the first place.
|
| > Was the time investment worth it to get the control and
| visibility you now have?
|
| Absolutely yes. I think it helps me really understand where my
| money is going, how I can make it work harder etc. Even though
| the RE part of FIRE doesn't appeal to me, the FI part does and
| knowing where I stand at all times has been very motivating.
| phil-martin wrote:
| Thank you for taking the time to reply - thank you!
|
| I have question on a more personal front - please feel no
| obligation to reply.
|
| What impact has having such clear visibility into your
| accounts had on your relationship with your wife? It feels
| like it would be a great catalyst for communication, trust
| and building things if shared finances was a key part of the
| relationship.
|
| I think this part was the most inspirational - it takes a lot
| of courage to be that open about finances, even with
| partners, perhaps especially with partners.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| Happy to answer :)
|
| > What impact has having such clear visibility into your
| accounts had on your relationship with your wife?
|
| That's a great question. Thankfully when it comes to
| finances we are very aligned in our habits and goals. So we
| find it very natural to be open because we know that we're
| both going to be aligned.
|
| Where we differ heavily though is how much we are willing
| to really getting onto the nitty gritty details. She really
| likes knowing how our money works but she also has no
| interest in spending so much time and effort on it.
|
| But that works great because I _love_ this stuff. So every
| month or so we have a "finances session" where I sit down
| with her, take her through the books and make sure we're
| both happy with everything.
|
| Obviously this very much depends on the couple whether this
| works but it has for us so far!
| phil-martin wrote:
| I love that, thank you for sharing.
|
| Would you consider a follow up blog post about how you
| structure and approach your monthly finance sessions? I
| understand that it would be well outside of your topics
| of software engineering, performance and open-source, but
| I find that the human component of our industry is often
| missing. An insight into how someone has successfully
| navigated that would be a wonderful read.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| Given the comments on this post and the other Beancount
| one in the frontpage, I definitely think there's enough I
| want to say for at least one if not two followups. Stay
| tuned!
| jjav wrote:
| > The main problem with every one of the apps I tried is that
| they don't handle investments well.
|
| Could you expand what were you looking for with respect to
| investments that was lacking?
|
| I use GnuCash for many investment accounts (in multiple
| currencies) and haven't run into any limitation, it can show
| me the true net worth graph.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| I'm talking about apps similar to Mint and YNAB.
| Specifically I used to use an app called Yolt (which was
| shut down) and then was on an app called Emma for a bit.
|
| I'm sure GnuCash would also work just fine but ultimately
| it's also a full double entry system. I never tried it
| because I came across ledger/hledger/beancount first and,
| being command line tools, they appealed more to my
| sensibilities.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This is neat, but I'm not really convinced this level of
| granularity makes sense for personal finances? Or at least it
| does not for me personally. I find that simply entering all my
| accounts into one big excel once a month more than suffices to
| keep track of everything. Maybe I make a typo here and there but
| it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things cuz I'm
| gonna type a new number next month anyway.
| phil-martin wrote:
| I guess it depends on the complexity of ones personal finances?
| The author had multiple currencies, investments, and who knows
| what else.
|
| I ran a small business for a while, and I would draw a parallel
| to that. Once a family's finances hits the complexities of a
| small business, multiple assets, loans, cars, long term
| savings, investments, I'd say the granularity is worth it. I
| would certainly like to try it out.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I tick all the boxes you listed after having worked in a
| handful of different countries, but personally I don't really
| see the value add. My bank shows an overview in my main
| currency of choice and so do brokerage accounts. Perhaps to
| turn the question around, what value do you get out of it for
| personal finances? I wouldn't really compare to a business
| too closely since understanding all of your input costs down
| to a fine level is much more important there, at least in my
| opinion. The price of flour doesn't matter too much to the
| cent when you buy a bag every now and then, but it matters a
| lot when you're buying in tons.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I like having an archive of PDF statements but the downside is
| that it's usually a tedious manual process to download them.
| There's so many to track - bank accounts, credit cards,
| investments, utilities, doctor bills... Every website is
| different, and they are rarely batch-downloadable. So I tend to
| be a few months behind at any given moment until I get around to
| it.
|
| Anyone found a better way to keep on top of downloading
| statements?
| Macha wrote:
| > The key insight is that bank statement PDFs are almost always
| columnar. Of course, this relies on the PDF having a proper text
| layer; if your bank sends you scanned images, you're out of luck
| (though I've yet to encounter one that does). When you convert
| them to text while preserving the layout, you get something that
| looks like this:
|
| So I decided to try this out with my bank who's export options
| are (one of the mentioned slightly silly multi-line format) XLSX
| or PDF only, and it appears they've done some "encryption"
| (really a simple substitution cipher and an embedded font with
| the characters jumbled up so it renders correctly) to the PDF to
| prevent this. All the marketing text and headers are in the
| pdftotext output fine but the actual data is all accented and
| non-printable characters (also if you copy/paste out).
|
| The substitution cipher does seem stable across a few statements,
| but still seems like less work to work off the XLSX
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| Interesting! You might want to try Tabula in that case.
|
| For that type of "obfuscated" PDFs I've come across, it does
| well, it's just a lot slower to run than pdf2text.
| Macha wrote:
| It appears Tabula also gets the substituted content instead.
|
| What I'm seeing is that for example, POS is substituted to &
| !e on every line in every file, etc. I can see by comparing
| to the rendered PDF for other common text (like my name, the
| local supermarket, etc) that those all seem to be 1:1
| substitutions too.
| netsharc wrote:
| I remember seeing an online shop that did the whole font
| substitution to prevent web-scraping of their prices.. I think
| they even changed the substitution between elements so one
| couldn't just do a single pass replacement and get the original
| data back..
|
| I guess nowadays it's very cheap to run a headless browser,
| screenshot the output, and run it through OCR.. hah, to prevent
| that they'd have to design their webpage as 1 full screen
| Captcha..
| inetknght wrote:
| That's a ridiculously dumb idea on the bank's part.
|
| Print the PDF to an image. Then use OCR. Then import the output
| from that instead.
| Macha wrote:
| > That's a ridiculously dumb idea on the bank's part.
|
| Yes. The local banks here are pretty reliable for jumping on
| every dumb idea that anyone anywhere claims improves
| security.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| My bank outputs different data in the description field for CSV
| and PDF. The PDF statement descriptions are longer and contain
| more information.
| symbogra wrote:
| I used to do this during my first real job and was tracking every
| sandwich I bought, then one of the senior engineers told me to
| stop wasting time with it and make more money, and then I was
| enlightened.
| alexnewman wrote:
| Agreed this style of making money may have made sense when the
| world was more Sane but there's no way to penny pinch yourself
| into a house in 2026
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| 25 years ago when my wife and I were poor grad students we
| had to do this. I tracked everything religiously and she cut
| coupons for the grocery store. We were generally positive
| about $100/month at best. Tracking it allowed us to not go
| negative.
|
| As soon as we got real jobs with a real income, we didn't
| waste time with that. Our philosophy now is to just make sure
| that we spend well under our means and not track. We don't
| penny-pinch, but we still keep some of the grad school "do I
| really need this?" mentality.
|
| Our normal spending is somewhere under 1/2 of our take-home
| (including mortgage), so we just don't worry about it and
| keep saving. It helps that we don't have fancy tastes. It's a
| nice stress free way of saving and we don't have to get
| neurotic about tracking every penny either.
| ghaff wrote:
| It probably worth at some level not totally losing track of
| various subscriptions or routine daily purchases. Won't buy
| you a house but can be a few thousand a year.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| One of the things that the tracking taught me was to be
| allergic to subscriptions. I only have a few where
| significantly more convenient because I know I'll use it.
| Outside of our phones (and the kids don't get phones), we
| have one music service for the family, I'll allow two
| video streaming services and if the kids want to add one,
| they have to pick one to cancel, and I have a coffee
| subscription because the owner lives down the street from
| me and it's fresher than I'd get in the grocery store.
|
| It's a good point about the routine daily purchases, I
| never thought of that. But I live semi-rural so I'm not
| out every day wandering around the city and picking up a
| snack or anything like that. I imagine that could add up.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's about where I am along with a couple bundles plus
| a few computer related subscripts like Backblaze, VPN,
| and Adobe related.
|
| To the other point, a lot of people have a more or less
| daily Starbucks or other breakfast related habit.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Not that a sandwich will make much difference but you have to
| remember that employers like their staff to be indebted, it
| makes them compliant.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| It is not really binary.
|
| I hate budgeting and still save around half my salary.
|
| Though I do realize that this is a different game for some
| people, where some need it more than others.
| miroljub wrote:
| Here's another enlightenment for you:
|
| Tracking expenses doesn't take more than 5-10 minutes per day,
| if you do it daily. With the correct workflow, it shouldn't
| take more than 30 minutes per month. There are even apps that
| would do that for you without any effort, though not so
| perfectly as fine tuned apps.
|
| And now, the enlightenment part: how is expense tracking
| preventing you from making more money than visiting hecker
| news, reddit, social media, listening to the radio, watching
| TV, reading the news, or a million other things? Do you really
| spend all your waking hours earning more money so tracking
| expenses for a few minutes would make you make less?
| ajb wrote:
| This begs the question though, of why individuals still need
| to do this like a 17th century clerk, when it costs their
| counterparties fractions of a man-second. Imagine if their
| was a law which said, every business that takes a credit card
| has to supply the consumer with the data in standard,
| machine-processable format (ie not pdf) via their credit
| account (IE, not making obtaining their email address a
| condition).
| BeetleB wrote:
| And then you get married and have kids and wonder why you have
| trouble paying the bills despite having a household income in
| the top 5%.
|
| Then you discover that you really do need to know how much you
| are spending on sandwiches.
|
| I went through this a bunch of times. Always hoping for an
| obvious smoking gun expense I could just cut. It always was
| many little things adding up.
| mfro wrote:
| I have looked at beancount and a few other double entry systems
| several times over the years. None of the applications I've found
| except for Microsoft My Money (Sunset Deluxe) has felt intuitive
| and not wasted my time. One of my accounts can't be imported via
| csv but other than that it is painless. I recommend it to people
| who just want a quick, free program for simple reporting.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| https://simplifi.quicken.com/
|
| This was the cheapest and easiest way to account for stuff for me
| tantalor wrote:
| You don't need accounting or double-entry bookkeeping to compute
| net worth.
|
| Net worth is easy: assets - liabilities
|
| You get the figures from your financial institutions and counting
| up your cash on hand.
|
| The purpose of double-entry bookkeeping is to track the flow of
| money and to make sure nothing was missed.
|
| But for net worth, you only need the end result, which you don't
| need any computation for.
|
| The only thing that this solves is tracking money in flight,
| because during a transfer it disappears from your view of the
| accounts. There are simpler solutions to this problem than
| tracking absolutely everything.
| bombcar wrote:
| You don't even need to be _precise_ for net worth, whereas
| double-entry accounting needs to be.
|
| For personal finance the problem is almost always very obvious
| ($3,000 on candles) and all the spreadsheets and budgets won't
| change that.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I find there area few things the budgets and spreadsheets
| help with from a personal finance perspective:
|
| - Values vs reality: A $3000 candle budget is fine, but if
| you're spending $10/work-day on candles it might be easier to
| see when that accumulates and you can compare it against your
| longer-term aspirational goals. This is especially true for
| less tangible expenses like subscriptions where it can be
| difficult to see "I'm spending $3000/year on candles I never
| burn" from ground level.
|
| - Planning and decision-making: It's easier to make good life
| decisions (e.g. "should I take $job" or "can I buy $house")
| if you have an accurate accounting of your life expenses.
| mpyne wrote:
| Yeah, before we picked up YNAB more than a decade ago we
| never had issues with $3k of candles disappearing in the
| budget, but we still struggled to save money.
|
| When we started using YNAB and entering our spending into
| it, it was like a hockey-stick diagram on our household net
| worth.
|
| And this isn't even double-entry accounting (which I've
| adopted for my own personal spending). One thing I'll say
| is that the way we use YNAB seems different from most other
| people: we hand-enter every transaction, we don't import it
| afterwards from the bank. Then we reconcile what we thought
| we spent vs. what the bank says we spent.
|
| In this way we have to be a bit more intentional about what
| we're spending money on since there's not some kind of big
| monthly exercise to make the numbers line up and then a
| "we'll try to be better next month". Instead it's more like
| an envelope system where we are tracking budget categories
| as the month goes by.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I used to use YNAB and I think this was its whole point:
| you allocate money in different envelopes (budgets) and
| as the month goes by, you enter your transactions and see
| how your envelopes deplete.
|
| I didn't actually do this that much, I was much more
| interested in where my money was going over longer
| periods (say a year). It was nice enough, but I dropped
| it a few years ago when they had big price increase and
| became more expensive than it was worth to me.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| My wife and I have moved all of our personal, individual
| spending to a dedicated card each. Sure, some stuff still
| makes it into other cards, but the simplicity makes budgeting
| so much easier. Even if we only accurate capture 90% of our
| spending, we close enough to targets that it doesn't matter.
|
| My general rule is a simple system that works well enough is
| better than a complex, but precise system.
|
| We build our budget with this slop in mind, so anything left
| over is bonus.
| thomascountz wrote:
| As being discussed in another thread about plain-text
| accounting[1], what I've found most difficult about these tools
| is the learning curve between "Assets = Liabilities + Equity" and
| the realities of modeling a household economy.
|
| I appreciate the level of detail in this post. I think there's
| often confusion that plaintext == easy/simple. The real takeaway
| is: "if you're going to go through all of the trouble of managing
| your economy, you may as well make sure you control your data and
| own your system."
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463644
| spiffytech wrote:
| I used Ledger for a while, then some other tools. Now I'm on
| Actual Budget, a nice FOSS envelope budget app that can import
| transactions from my bank.
|
| I find value in tracking everything, tracking it by hand, and
| tracking it with precision (our household budget has 68
| categories).
|
| When I've tried easing up in the past (e.g., with Mint's
| lightweight approach) I was left with a budgetary black box where
| I felt like I never had enough information to make big purchasing
| decisions. I knew what I had in the bank account, but I didn't
| know if it was earmarked for anything, or whether the next
| surprise expense was going to wreck my plans. I felt afraid and
| paralyzed.
|
| Earning more didn't make the problem go away. Like the financial
| equivalent of Parkinson's Law, more income just meant more
| spending. I couldn't out-earn unrestrained consumption. I had to
| monitor & manage it.
|
| For peace of mind, I found YNAB's philosophy helpful: one-off
| expenses often repeat predictably on a long-enough time horizon,
| and can be amortized accordingly. If I itemize all predictable
| expenses and save a little each month, I know _everything_ is
| taken care of, and what I really have left over. I never get
| blindsided because several big expenses hit at once.
|
| I know not everyone has these problems. But I like to talk about
| my experiences because people don't all need the same things from
| their finances. It's okay and normal to want control and
| visibility. Budget apps exist because people find them useful,
| not because the whole userbase has failed to reach enlightenment
| and transcend budgeting.
| callumprentice wrote:
| I agree with an earlier post that asserted "net worth = assets -
| liabilities" but I'd like to do better at understanding what that
| really means.
|
| Some are easy like the size of your bank balance. Others are much
| harder.
|
| For example, one asset we have is our home and there are many
| websites out there that tell you how much it's worth but they
| each vary an awful lot and change dramatically - so much so
| sometimes that any savings you've made in the same period are
| eclipsed.
|
| Similarly, the 401k I've been building up for years seems like a
| decent amount but trying to calculate what it's worth after taxes
| and therefore how much you'll have to spend each month seems
| unknowable.
|
| I think the same is true of investment accounts. If we seeded one
| with $500 and it's now worth $250, it's easy to think your net
| worth has risen by $250 but it really hasn't when taxes, fees and
| who knows what else is taken into account.
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