[HN Gopher] 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
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10 years of personal finances in plain text files
Author : wrxd
Score : 397 points
Date : 2026-01-02 11:07 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sgoel.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (sgoel.dev)
| zahlman wrote:
| This seems to be, in effect, advertising for a book about how to
| use the underlying FOSS software to do this.
|
| I would be okay with that as a monetization model, except that
| the book author despite being a self-described FOSS dev doesn't
| seem to have anything to do with the project
| (https://github.com/beancount/beancount/graphs/contributors).
|
| Ah, not quite true. The author fixed a typo in a docstring once (
| https://github.com/beancount/beancount/commit/8584763b618f76...).
| veltas wrote:
| If you look at their personal profile they've made a lot of
| content with activity and collaboration outside of the main
| beancount repo, related to beancount. They definitely meet the
| criteria for 'FOSS dev' in that it's FOSS, too.
| zahlman wrote:
| Thanks. I was not denying the author FOSS creds generally,
| just expecting actual involvement. It seems this is someone
| who cares about the project (and I do like the sound of the
| project).
|
| I'm just, you know, pretty sensitive to HN submissions trying
| to sell me something.
| OJFord wrote:
| And only... what, Italians, can write books on the Romans?
| zaphirplane wrote:
| That's a bad analogy because the qualification is being born
| in a region not acquiring knowledge thru working. an
| equivalent would be only electrician can write a book on
| wiring.
| rplnt wrote:
| Do you mean wire and tool manufacturers? Electrician is
| mostly a user. Or to avoid flawed analogies - should books
| on Windows, Office, ... be only limited to a small subset
| of Microsoft employees? I'd assume the book is for users,
| what does it matter if the author contributed to the
| project?
|
| And that's still ignoring that evangelism is also a
| valuable contribution.
| fragmede wrote:
| Oh no, someone might make some money off work they did that was
| related to work a different somebody did! What a travesty!
| Somebody stop him!
|
| I know money is the root of all evil and all that, but a total
| aversion to it isn't a very healthy way of interfacing with it
| at all.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Aside from the fact that writing a book about Beancount _is_ a
| positive contribution, the author maintains a list of Beancount
| resources[0] and has written several beancount plugins.[1, 2,
| 3, 4] I have personally benefited from his contributions to the
| Beancount ecosystem.
|
| Can you point to some of your contributions to this project?
|
| [0] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/awesome-beancount
|
| [1] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-n26
|
| [2] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-ing
|
| [3] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-dkb
|
| [4] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-commerzbank
| yanis_t wrote:
| Plain text files are appreciated.
|
| I started storing all my notes (500+ by today) in markdown files
| locally. It's easy to search and navigate with grep and ag/rg.
| It's easy to edit in Vim or your favorite editor. It's easy to
| append all sorts of informations. I add some flags and properties
| in metadata, like last_reviewed, some tags, etc.
|
| The versioning and sync is solved by git + a private github repo.
| skwee357 wrote:
| I have 14 years of personal (and 2 years of sole proprietorship)
| finance data in beancount. I tried all the available personal
| finance apps there are, from cloud/online offerings to offline
| apps. Eventually, I settled on beancount because it is the most
| versatile file format. In addition to tracking finances, I can
| track stocks, unvested RSU grants, vacation hours, and even
| personal training I have paid for but yet to use.
|
| It's cumbersome at times, and I do miss the (G)UI of entering
| transactions, but with (neo)vim I got used to it and I breeze
| trough my finances in 15-20 minutes once a week.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| it's good (even novel) if you're a dev or are used to working
| with this kind of interface.
|
| But for the vast majority of people (even including devs), this
| will not be ideal at all and most people don't really care
| about it being in text files.
|
| What I'm trying to say is that its designed for a very specific
| niche userbase and I doubt most people will have the same
| experience as you described after trying every single personal
| finance app to settle on this.
| commandersaki wrote:
| Do you manage your beancount files in version control? Or just
| keep free floating files around?
|
| I'm intrigued by this and now thinking I should start doing it.
| Just start with a clean slate for 2026 and see how I go.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| How US centric is the software? I've found that a lot of these
| accounting/finance type programs have very prescriptive ideas
| and expected usage of it that doesn't really seem to even
| remotely match the type of exported data I get from my UK bank
| account.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| The core software itself is completely agnostic to currency
| or country. Otoh the importer ecosystem is somewhat US
| focused but a) you can easily write importers yourself b) I
| just published importers for a bunch of UK institutions (e.g.
| HSBC, Barclays, AJ Bell) - see the other post hanging around
| the HN frontpage :)
| jayfx wrote:
| > 30-45 minutes every single month
|
| That's 6-9 hours every year!
|
| 5 years: 30-45 hours
|
| 10 years: 60-90 hours
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| wow, a whole workday a year! People spend more time arguing on
| the internet in topics of no impact to their lives each year.
| jayfx wrote:
| I'd still consider that toil (repetitive, manual, automatable
| work).
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| the beauty of beancount (and other plain text accounting
| ledgers) is the ability to automate them. I also have to go
| over my accounts in my bank app's automatic categorization
| and revise them every month, as some transactions get
| mislabeled.
| fragmede wrote:
| Yeah ok but tabs really are better than spaces!
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Arguing is fun though
| tkfoss wrote:
| How many hours a year do you spend to make the money? How many
| hours is ok to spend then managing that money?
| jotaen wrote:
| Not sure what you are insinuating, but 30-45 minutes per month
| to stay on top on your finances doesn't sound particularly
| crazy to me.
| djhworld wrote:
| I've been beancount'ing for years now
|
| As we've crossed into the new year I've switched to a similar
| directory setup as the OP with 1 file per year. Previously I just
| had one file that was from 2022 which ended up being like 2
| million lines of text, which was starting to bog down the emacs
| plugin.
|
| What I appreciate the most about this approach to personal
| finances is it just tracks everything. Investments, pensions,
| RSUs, bank accounts. You could even go as far as accounting for
| any resource that's modellable, e.g. energy usage in kwh vs.
| bills. I probably wouldn't go that far though :D
|
| Also you can build a bunch of tooling around it too, with the
| advent of LLMs my toolset for beancount management has expanded
| quite significantly. Most recently I got claude to rewrite my
| transaction rules engine
| https://djharper.dev/post/2025/08/19/using-llms-to-turn-scri...
| into something nicer with a UI. This would have taken days to
| build in the before times, and I probably would not have bothered
| because it's overkill for 1 user (me)
| JulianWasTaken wrote:
| I have my electricity bills tracking into a KWH commodity. It
| has been... effectively useless :D.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| I struggle with tracking the actual cost of my energy usage
| between changing electric rates, the various solar costs,
| SRECs, different loans and credits and incentives to be able
| to make an intelligent decision on what the benefit or cost
| is of cutting an appliance or adding something new. It's a
| lot.
| lostlogin wrote:
| It is a lot.
|
| And when it's fragile even when working. The cost per unit
| changes with limited notice in various ways (line rate,
| unit cost, time period that various rates occur, the day,
| 'free' power bonuses etc).
| teeray wrote:
| I track my propane in an LPG commodity at a fixed price per
| season. It saved me about $100 once when a transaction
| wouldn't balance. I was accidentally partially charged for a
| short load delivery on one of my tanks at almost double the
| rate. Even if it seems silly to track at this fidelity in the
| moment, I wouldn't have caught this tracking USD alone.
| Billing mistakes happen and can be costly!
| JulianWasTaken wrote:
| Nice! That sounds really useful; in my case the KWH usage
| (and price/KWH) I pull directly out of the ConEd bill, so
| my only chance to notice those sorts of things would be
| post hoc looking back in time for big jumps in rate or
| usage I think.
|
| But good to hear the positive story side for this.
| forty wrote:
| You may be able to convert it to CO2 emissions to track your
| impact :) but for that you'd also need to track how those kWh
| of electricity were produced ^^
| avdwio wrote:
| I'm curious about this as I've thought about building personal
| software to manage my data (such as finances) via LLM, however
| I'm apprehensive about actually supplying that data to the LLM
| to help build the tool. Is this what you're doing? Now that I
| think about it, I could probably 'anonymise' the data with a
| local model...
| djhworld wrote:
| Nah not exposing the data to the LLM, just building the tools
| to help me manage the data, usually python scripts
| rambambram wrote:
| Just go for it in your favorite programming language, it's a
| nice exercise and in the meantime you can learn about (double
| entry) bookkeeping.
|
| I did that for myself and it took me at most three months of
| parttime working on it, resulting in a bespoke solution. No
| need to keep paying some SaaS or fiddling around in Excel.
| One still needs to learn the bookkeeping system though, but
| that's true for all options. A SaaS is not magically make
| that go away.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Having all transactions in bank accounts makes it trivial to
| regularly export statements and parse them into financial
| insights.
|
| I made a tool that parses transactions (of my specific bank) into
| categories based on tx description and a GUI to analyze them in
| different time frames.
|
| Highly recommend.
| JulianWasTaken wrote:
| beancount is definitely fun. I also jumped on this bandwagon in
| 2025 and it's been a great archaeology experiment of digging
| through old emails and trying to find as much data as I can about
| what the heck this random checking transaction is from 2012.
|
| I think a nice thing about beancount is that given how simple it
| is you can almost even ignore whole parts of it. In my case I
| chose to write my own importing tooling essentially without
| learning at all about the built-in one:
| https://github.com/Julian/alubia. I had no intention to make that
| approachable for lots of users not named me (in fact none of my
| actual importers are present) but it's been very fun to watch my
| ledger get more and more accurate.
| thomascountz wrote:
| 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 you at the
| time.
|
| Then, there's the import workflow: which "accounts" should you
| start with? How much history do you pull in? How do you set up an
| automatic importer? Hledger has a DSL. Beancount uses Python.
| Either way, an OP says, much of your time is spent manually
| editing text.
|
| And finally, then what? Can I make a budget now? Will this thing
| do my taxes? Am I more financially responsible? How do I explain
| this to my spouse? My pension is kind of like a commodity, but I
| don't know what the unit price is, and I don't sell units, but
| what's a virtual PnL and what if I only have a quarterly PDF!?
|
| It may sound like I'm ranting, but I have found that realizing I
| don't know the answers to these questions (or even that they
| exist) is the true benefit of PTA.
|
| Every year, I'm asked if I want a different pension investment
| mix or if I want to change my car insurance. Or, I might wonder
| if I'm getting a good deal on my internet plan or if a new job
| offer's total comp is actually better. Am I "on track" for
| "retirement," how long until I have enough for a new roof, am I
| keeping up with inflation, did I spend too much on gifts this
| year?
|
| There's immense privilege in not really needing to know the
| answers to these questions; getting them "wrong" won't really
| hurt you. But, being familiar with the routine minutiae of your
| economy by way of counting every cent, is rewarding,
| enlightening, and empowering--even if it's also finicky and
| brittle sometimes.
|
| I may have to try beancount again. OP's importers look
| promisingly robust compared to my hledger scripts.
| djhworld wrote:
| I think there's definitely something in it around there's a
| huge learning curve.
|
| Double entry book keeping isn't that difficult but that's easy
| to say once you've been doing it a while
|
| I've been doing PTA since around 2018 and there's definitely
| lessons I've learned along the way along with plenty of
| mistakes.
|
| I think the main benefit for me is just the system gives you a
| complete picture of your finances. The commercial services you
| can pay for just give you a view into a certain slice (e.g.
| open banking in UK/Europe to see your current account(s)) - I
| think mint.com did something similar in the US but it never
| came over here, I don't know if it still exists. Maybe that's
| enough for most people, but for me I want everything,
| investments, liabilities, assets etc. None of these commercial
| offerings have that because it's so complex and niche, e.g.
| your open banking provider won't tell you how your pension is
| doing.
|
| It's also just nice to have the provenance of transactions,
| e.g. if you receive some shares from work, and you sell the
| shares and the money ends up in your bank account - the
| incoming transaction will just be the net proceeds but it won't
| tell you if you paid any tax prior to that - PTA gives you a
| more of a complete picture that tracks the whole chain of
| events that led up that transaction into your bank happening.
| Overkill for most people? Probably.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| FYI, Mint shutdown as a service in early 2024.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/budgeting-app-mint-is-
| shutti...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Mint's value to me was destroyed long before 2024; its
| originally-reliable backend was swapped out for a third-
| party one (plaid?) and half my accounts couldn't sync --
| making it useless. YMMV, but IME Monarch seems like the
| current best option in this space...
| phoenixy1 wrote:
| I work at Plaid, so this got me curious about who their
| provider was -- per Wikipedia, Mint used Intuit's
| internal account aggregation tools from ~2010-2024. It's
| possible that Mint swapped out to some other third party
| provider and Wikipedia doesn't know about it, but based
| on both internal and external records, I'm pretty sure it
| wasn't Plaid. (Intuit's Credit Karma, which was marketed
| to Mint customers as a replacement after Mint shut down,
| _does_ use Plaid.)
| astura wrote:
| > IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this
| space...
|
| Monarch is just horribly overpriced. I'm not opposed to
| paying for a SaaS or anything, but Monarch is much too
| expensive for what it is. Empower (used to be called
| Personal Capital) is free and what I use instead of Mint.
| In fairness, the only thing that I really ever used Mint
| for was to see my net worth and account balances.
| masterj wrote:
| I dunno. Insights from Monarch have easily saved me many
| times the annual cost. Other tools could as well of
| course, but the ease-of-use makes it easy to maintain
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I have no experience w/ PTA, but was a Mint user for a couple
| years before it got killed, and recently discovered Monarch
| which has similar features. But just this week I got set up
| w/ eMoney thanks to a friend who works in wealth management.
| It provides a centralized dashboard (like Monarch), but also
| the ability to run forecasts / projections, which will be
| helpful as things have gotten more complicated for us as a
| couple (running two S-Corps, paying for daughters' college
| tuitions, etc).
| Bluecobra wrote:
| As an ex-Mint user, Monarch has been a very useful and I
| feel I spend way less time monkeying around trying to
| recategorize transactions. I really like the budget
| rollover feature, it really helps smooth out things like
| yearly insurance renewals. My only fear is if they start
| getting greedy and jack up the yearly subscription fee. I
| feel like around $100/year is just about right.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| Besides being a mathematician and a programmer, I have a degree
| in finance and banking, so I learned double-entry accounting
| pretty early. As a mathematician, I appreciate the beauty of
| this very clever, very general and very abstract system. As a
| geek, I've been using ledger-cli with Emacs for a decade now,
| and Gnucash earlier.
|
| Re: learning curve, it's not that difficult. Shameless plug: I
| wrote a textbook (actually, a textbooklet, if that is a
| word;-)) about the basics of DEA, focused on personal finance
| and using ledger-cli: https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-
| in-ledger/
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| stvltvs wrote:
| 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.
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| stackghost wrote:
| >I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to
| learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already)
|
| This. Accounting seems easy if you already know accounting.
| Learning accounting is difficult because the literature is
| dense, contradictory, and it's not helped by the fact that most
| accountants don't even seem to understand it at a fundamental
| level, they've merely memorized false-but-workable ideas like
| "debits increase assets because debit means left", or the silly
| idea about viewing it from the perspective of a bank.
|
| Even accounting profs are surprisingly bad at at this, at least
| in my experience.
| djhworld wrote:
| ehhhhhhh I don't think you need to go as far as reading dense
| accounting literature, I never have and I've been maintaining
| a beancount files for 7+ years.
|
| I just followed the documentation in here https://beancount.g
| ithub.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... - it gives you
| the general principles to follow and you can just pick it up
| from there.
| stackghost wrote:
| The point I was trying to make is that "Debits increase
| assets" isn't some esoteric technique; it's a fundamental
| aspect of double-entry that you'd need to know, but it's
| also counterintuitive and most of the literature out there
| is full of bullshit explanations that do nothing to help
| people understand.
|
| The link you posted is similarly full of bullshit, written
| by someone who demonstrably does not understand the double
| entry system (they even say so in the text).
|
| But I'm the sort of person who finds it very grating to
| have to do something without understanding _why_ I 'm doing
| it. If that's not you then party on.
| skobes wrote:
| Shoutout to fava, the beancount GUI frontend:
|
| https://beancount.github.io/fava/
|
| I really like its big picture view of the accounts, the search /
| query interface, and live editing of transactions.
| leobg wrote:
| In case the author reads this: Your imprint is incomplete. The
| legal address is missing. And the blog is missing an imprint
| altogether.
| ob2 wrote:
| I can get all my historic accounting records into any of the PTA
| tools, but then I'm stuck without standard processes for creating
| invoices, doing deposits, writing off bad debts, depreciation,
| loan repayments, recurring payments, etc. etc.
|
| All those require standard entries and processes, which I've yet
| to find, which means that now I need to become an accountant and
| write these standard tools.
|
| None of which generates any income and only creates more work for
| myself.
|
| I absolutely hate my current accounting software, but this is not
| (yet) a viable option as far as I can tell.
|
| Happy to learn I'm wrong.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| Very good for a budget. And as a text file, they rot just about
| the same speed as the media.
|
| But what about basic Cost Of Goods Eaten?
|
| I have fading thermal tapes in boxes with grocery store
| purchases. They get scanned once a year into large PDFs: grocery,
| home goods, repairs (large purchases are kept separately for
| easier finding).
|
| I'm considering if a personal AI subscription to manage the data
| interrogation is worth the cost (not excited about the $20/mo
| cost. NPR should get the next $5 of my monthly).
|
| Now here's the funny part. The data sits in a box all year or in
| PDFs for years, and gets little attention. What janky home server
| AI could I spin up to perform as bad as me (but no worse)? Maybe
| move the data in those text files and PDFs into SQLite?
| wongarsu wrote:
| If you just want to ingest varied data into a consistent
| format, qwen2.5vl:7b works well (in my use cases better than
| qwen3vl). The ollama version is quantized, perfectly adequate,
| and runs on normal consumer hardware (even more so if you don't
| care about speeds that feel interactive)
| mrngm wrote:
| paperless-ngx and their built-in OCR might help here for the
| data transformation.
| accountofthaha wrote:
| Thanks for showing this! I personally have a 4 years old Money
| Manager EX (MMEX) database, but I am always looking forward to
| something new, yet nothing for me have worked as good as MMEX.
| This looks good enough, albeit I need a GUI for this, and the
| comments might already put me into the right direction.
|
| I am already used to logging everything manually, so importing
| isn't needed for me. Also I think having some 'manual labor' in
| this regard can help with becoming more 'in tune with your
| finances', to actually learn what is going on, instead of having
| an app that you check once a month.
| draven wrote:
| I started to use PTA several times already, and I always have an
| issue with the granularity of transactions. For example when I go
| to the local supermarket, do I track food and hygiene products
| separately ? Some supermarkets give the subtotal for different
| categories, some don't. It could be useful to see where the money
| goes.
|
| I'm about to start out again and I chose not to track different
| categories individually, knowing that I can still add sub-
| accounts to distinguish between them later (even if I can't
| recover the information for older transactions.)
|
| Now I just need to investigate how to track gains/losses on the
| ETFs I own but that's common enough that there should be
| information out there on how to do it.
| floodle wrote:
| It's about the value to you versus the effort you put in. For
| me the granularity you are talking about is too much effort.
| All my supermarket shops go in one big category "groceries and
| household".
|
| Start easy and see what you want to get out of the data. If you
| can store the original source (e.g receipts) so that you can
| later go back and increase the granularity if you find yourself
| wanting it, that would be ideal.
| awpeofia wrote:
| Right, don't let decision paralysis prevent tracking.
|
| I just put "Groceries" account based on the total that gets
| charged to my card. If there's a substantial item that doesn't
| fall into groceries then I can split that out on a case-by-case
| basis (e.g. I go to Costco and buy both a bunch of cereal and a
| dehumidifier).
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| I charge different category items on different receipts which
| means doing several transactions at the store. Thankfully, its
| only 1 time per week. I've gotten pretty quick at it at the
| self checkout.
| bravura wrote:
| What's the startup time for using beancount if I've never done it
| before?
|
| I just spent a few hours using LLMs (aider, specifically) to
| reconcile my books for the past year. Worked great, but was
| slightly fiddly.
| olsondv wrote:
| Depends on how many different financial systems you need to
| import from. It took me a weekend to set up the importers alone
| between checking, savings, investments, mortgage, pay slips,
| and all the credit cards. Some don't have csv output so had to
| do pdf to text conversion. There are examples in beancount but
| each bank was different for me.
| mtlynch wrote:
| +1 to OP's book, which is the best beginner guide I've found for
| understanding Beancount / plaintext accounting.
|
| I was also confused about double-entry accounting for most of my
| life until I read the article, "Accounting for Computer
| Scientists"[0] by Martin Kleppman (author of _Designing Data-
| Intensive Applications_ ). It explains double entry accounting in
| a surprisingly accessible way by putting it in terms of graph
| theory. I don't even like graph theory that much or consider
| myself competent in it, but Kleppman's explanation was extremely
| effective.
|
| [0] https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-
| compu...
| why-o-why wrote:
| "Quicken is a single-entry accounting system, which means that
| amounts can appear out of or disappear into thin air. In a
| double-entry accounting system you can't put amounts in an
| account without taking it out of another account."
|
| This summed it up nicely, from
| https://github.com/mortisj/quicken2beancount
| siddhant wrote:
| Thanks a lot for the shout out, Michael!
| nonethewiser wrote:
| What did you find hard to understand about double entry
| accounting? Seems pretty straightforward. Every transaction
| affects at least two accounts, and the total debits must equal
| the total credits. I can't imagine how introducing graph theory
| simplifies it, although I trust there are interesting insights
| none-the-less.
| youainti wrote:
| I think it explains the "why" of double entry accounting.
| Since it is used to track flows of money, a graph
| representation is a natural representation (just not the only
| one and not necessarily the most useful for day to day
| operations).
| kevinpet wrote:
| That core idea is simple. But the details, such as credit and
| debit having the opposite meaning to casual bank account
| accounting, and the use of a variety of accounts makes things
| not intuitive.
| dueyfinster wrote:
| I'm a big fan of plain text accounting also. Like the author - I
| started 10 years ago (mine from 2015). I use hledger mainly and
| also wrote converters for bank I use (xlsx to csv).
|
| It's crazy to see just how much money I've paid Netflix since
| 2015 (and I'm a sub since 2011). Or Starbucks (which I rarely go
| to). But it's very powerful. One thing I've long wanted is better
| visualizations.
| idahoduncan wrote:
| Looks like it's four years for me with beancount.
| $ git log --oneline --reverse | head -n1 5f72575 Initial
| commit: January 2022
|
| My importers take care of reconciling the common transactions,
| like train fares and groceries, which means my monthly session
| takes under an hour. The slow bits are exporting CSV statements
| from my banks, and reconciling transactions from amazon and the
| local pet supply store (is it useful in practice to track litter
| and treats separately? probably not).
|
| I'm also yet to migrate to beancount v3.
| fastasucan wrote:
| I found that doing anything too detailed was too big of a chore
| for what I got out, and that I didnt get much from doing
| budgeting.
|
| I ended up just logging my total holding of cash and stocks
| spread over my different bank accounts and my investment
| portfolio. Doing it every few months helped me make sure that my
| overall holdings went up. As long as I pay off my bills and then
| save enough to see my holdings rise I am happy. However I can see
| that having a more detailed overview over your spending might
| help you cut down even more.
| coliveira wrote:
| That's good enough for most people, but I also track my fixed
| costs over time, so I have a picture of how much money I need
| every month, and what could be eliminated if needed.
| b_t_s wrote:
| same. I've settled on Empower + google sheets. Empower mostly
| as a free shortcut to pulling a dozen account balances in
| seconds. Sheets for keeping quarterly snapshots(in case empower
| goes away like mint did) and for turning those snapshots into a
| graph. Took a little setup, but then it's like 15 minutes once
| a quarter when I get the calendar reminder. Wish I had data
| going further back in time, but I'm not sure what I'd do with
| more detail/a full budget. The only things I've ever really
| cared about are approximate net worth/investment returns as a
| sanity check on retirement assumptions.
| bspammer wrote:
| I go a step further than this, which is to make the beancount
| files 100% generated by a program - no manual edits allowed at
| all. I have a version-controlled directory with the raw data
| (csvs, pdfs, weird text formats) from a bunch of different
| sources (bank accounts, payslips, pension funds, mortgage
| statements, and stock market price data). The process is then
| just an ETL pipeline to an intermediate data structure. That data
| structure can be serialized to beancount format, hledger format,
| whatever. I've even had it output prometheus metrics so I can
| create nice dashboards in grafana.
|
| I dump more raw data in every month, handle the 1-2 new edge
| cases in code, and voila: a complete, accurate, queryable,
| debuggable, visualizable, and fully reproducible history of my
| finances.
| nelup20 wrote:
| For anyone else wondering which PTA solution to try/choose, I
| found this summary: https://plaintextaccounting.org/FAQ#which-
| pta-app-should-i-c...
|
| I think I'll finally give PTA and beancount a go this year. I'm
| tired of changing and re-learning tools due to enshittifcation,
| so I heavily prefer those that use open formats / plaintext. I
| use Obsidian for my notes, specifically because it's just
| Markdown files. Since I realized that I don't even really use
| most of Obsidian's features, I might just switch to a regular
| editor + a markdown viewer.
| fluffyllemon wrote:
| Do folks any recommendations for automation around banking? We
| use a sort of "envelope system" across many accounts, and it
| would be helpful to have some timing to help automatically move
| and rebalance funds across the accounts.
|
| My bank has some very limited options to move specific amounts of
| money on a weekly schedule, but I'm looking for something more
| powerful then that.
|
| Should I look at like ~Stripe~ Plaid or something? Or are there
| more pre built tools?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Accounts don't have to be physically "real" with your Bank.
| That's one of the insights of the "envelope system" that isn't
| always obvious.
|
| One of the benefits to specifically using a double-entry system
| (including most of the PTA space) is that it makes it easier to
| build your "envelopes" as hierarchical sub-accounts. Instead of
| having just Assets:Checking you could have
| Assets:Checking:Grocery and Assets:Checking:General and
| Assets:Checking:Entertainment and so forth. The Assets:Checking
| sum of all of Assets:Checking:* will still reflect your total
| checking balance for situations when you need to know that
| information, but the sub-accounts in your double-entry system
| become your "envelopes" to check on your budget spending and to
| transfer between.
|
| Automating your budgets can be just a matter of when you get
| your Income:Salary transaction you split it appropriately
| between the various Assets:Checking:* sub-accounts you want.
| You could automate other transfers between them as necessary as
| well.
|
| You can also automate things like verifying your
| Expenses:Grocery account always takes funds from
| Assets:Checking:Grocery rather than any other "envelope"
| account when paid for by your debit card. (With Credit Cards
| potentially needing a different level of automation, and maybe
| a bunch more Liabilities:* sub-accounts.)
|
| Your bank won't have any idea of those sub-accounts and nothing
| will physically prevent you from overspending those sub-
| accounts, of course, but also you can automate warnings for
| that and you would have visibility of that in your sub-accounts
| "going negative" when you spend too much from the same
| envelope.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've been doing it since 2011 with ledger, so over 14 years! It's
| quite cool to see my finances over that time and reflect on it. I
| made a machine learning thing years ago to read my bank
| statements and categorise them into my accounts. I also have a
| few scripts for plotting it all with matplotlib, including an
| overall wealth plot which shows key life/world events for
| context. Can share these if there's any interest.
|
| I'm now considering combining by finances with my partner. It
| would make a lot of things easier. We'd get paid into a joint
| account and then pay ourselves into individual "spending
| accounts" according to our budget. Anyone have any experience
| with this kind of thing?
| binarin wrote:
| 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 scripts to .csv files that
| are readable by PTA import engine
|
| - There are rules files that describe how to convert .csv lines
| to PTA entries
|
| - Generated files are included from per-year PTA journals (and
| you can put any manual transactions in here also)
|
| The benefit is that you can change any part of this pipeline, and
| just re-generate the changed parts:
|
| - improve the program that converts to .csv - raw data
| immediately gets better across the whole repo
|
| - add/customize import rules - better classification is
| immediately applied to all of the past data
|
| And with this approach you can start small (like, a single month
| of data from your primary bank), and refine the thing in steps,
| like adding more historical data or adding more data sources
| (examples being not only bank statements, but even things like
| itemized Amazon orders and Paypal slips).
| olsondv wrote:
| 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.
| binarin wrote:
| 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, ...
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Do you want to share what's confusing about mortgage
| payments?
|
| You have a balance that accrues a monthly interest.
| Separately, you're told that you're owed a monthly payment.
| If monthly payment > interest, then the difference is
| subtracted from the balance. No need for haskell.
| davkan wrote:
| Loans can be confusing in double entry accounting for the
| uninitiated.
|
| On the accounting side you have liabilities:mortgage which
| would only include the principal. Then for an individual
| bill you have to debit liabilities:mortgage the principal
| portion and debit expenses:interest the interest portion.
|
| I'm not sure how mortgage bills usually come but for my
| auto loan the principal vs interest were not noted on the
| bill, so i had to calculate via apr myself for each payment
| for which the interest accrued daily. If i imported those
| payments from my bank statement or the bill i would not be
| able to enter the transaction correctly without doing the
| math.
|
| For calculating interest automatically upon entry based on
| the rate and payment amount and date I used python iirc as
| i used beancount, but that was a while ago.
| nightski wrote:
| Why is the parent teacher association involved in personal
| finances?
| frogpelt wrote:
| I'm fairly certain it's Percutaneous Transluminal Angioplasty
| croisillon wrote:
| haha :) https://plaintextaccounting.org/
| bnj wrote:
| Sorry if this was a joke, but just in case- PTA = plain text
| accounting
| sxg wrote:
| 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.
| stvltvs wrote:
| I haven't used this GUI, but this was the comment below yours.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464042
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| If you're on iPhone highly recommend MoneyStats. Its pretty and
| easier to setup/get everyone onboard
| bronco21016 wrote:
| I was really into this idea a few years ago. Even started
| logging.
|
| However, I just cannot bring myself to constantly pull the
| transactions down manually from multiple banks.
|
| Many suggest automating. How is this working in practice? Are
| there providers like Plaid you can use? Build web scrapers? Build
| PDF statement parsers?
|
| I ended up just paying YNAB the $130/year or whatever they're at
| now. High wife approval factor and everything just connects. They
| also have an API. In theory I could just constantly backup YNAB
| with PTA by pulling down transactions from the API.
| JulianWasTaken wrote:
| I went the "build a few PDF statement parsers" route.
|
| Some I wrote by hand using PyMuPDF, some I coerced Claude into
| writing (again using PyMuPDF) by uploading a sample bill (I'd
| never put my own data into an LLM but it's nice being able to
| find a sample bill, gets it close enough to correct that I can
| do the remaining bits if there are variations in bills over
| time).
|
| Overall it's effort (and yes certainly a bunch effort for
| manually downloading transactions). The financial industry is
| very behind on this stuff clearly. I'm not sure in a few years
| whether I'll still think it's worth the effort I put in, which
| has gone down over the past few months as I automate things,
| but until it stops being fun I'll keep going.
| 360MustangScope wrote:
| From this post, I just got mine setup this morning. I already
| enjoy going through my 18 accounts every 2 weeks on pay day
| (yes, every credit card is the highest for the category of
| spend). For me, it seems like it would be just one extra step
| for me to get the data every 2 weeks.
|
| But for most, I understand that they aren't enjoying what I am
| doing every couple of weeks. I was using YNAB before but due to
| how many cards I had something got messed up in the importer
| all the time. Sometimes my transactions would duplicate or even
| get triplicated and then I would decline one of them only for
| it to pop up again a few days later. This lead to a very messed
| up and not accurate tracking. For me I was just fighting this
| thing every single day.
|
| This is probably user error but after wiping it 3 times and
| starting over and over I just gave up and went back to mentally
| keeping track which worked but I needed something better.
| eviks wrote:
| > Imagine one account for categorizing supermarket spending, one
| for tracking your income, one for your Netflix subscription, and
| so on.
|
| Why would you go that unintuitive route instead of simply having
| a category "Supermarket" (with your most common supermarkets
| autocategorized by name) and payee "Netflix"?
| tantalor wrote:
| What's the difference
| sghiassy wrote:
| I have 13 years of personal finances tracked in Quickbooks.
|
| Intuit sucks as a company, but I can hack my way around their
| requirements for upgrades
| elric wrote:
| 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 consider to be
| part of "living life".
|
| Two main goals: track how my expenses evolve over time, and stay
| on top of how much money I need to reserve for the coming year to
| pay those bills. Anything that's leftover is spending money.
| Which I dutifully spend.
| dheera wrote:
| I'm also less obsessive than some people but I don't want to
| use anything proprietary or have to pay for a product to track
| my finances ("Hey you spend a lot, we can help, how about you
| spend more on us?" is just ridiculous).
|
| I do everything with CSV exports of my bank accounts and credit
| cards. I drop the exports once a month into a directory and
| Python scripts (my newer versions of which are mostly written
| by LLMs) take all the analysis from there, breaking things down
| by category and by merchant (so that I can see if I'm
| unintentionally spending more on a particular merchant over
| time or if that merchant is charging more without notice).
|
| I also have one credit card for strictly recurring expenses
| ONLY and never put non-recurring expenses on it. That way it's
| quite easy to see on that credit card bill what changed from
| month to month. If Comcrap tries to charge me $10 more one
| month they're going to be getting nasty messages from me pretty
| quickly.
| elric wrote:
| > I also have one credit card for strictly recurring expenses
|
| I do the same. I have a bank account dedicated to all those
| recurring expenses I track. Every year I make a budget for
| those categories, work out the monthly average, and set up a
| transfer for that amount into that account. Some prices
| fluctuate quite a bit (like power) while my mortgage has a
| fixed rate, so I apply a healthy margin to make sure there
| are no nasty surprises.
| icameron wrote:
| Is there any other way to deal with comcrap? I've been doing
| the annual ritual of calling them to say the bill went up by
| 50% give me the best rate again. Every year it's always a
| short term promo. This year took a lot longer to get through
| to a human
| distances wrote:
| 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.
| stvltvs wrote:
| 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 if you don't pay attention, you'll
| die by a thousand cuts to small expenses that feel
| insignificant by themselves.
| distances wrote:
| 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.
| astura wrote:
| I don't track purchases at all, I track savings. I find
| that much more sustainable. I have a savings rate goal
| (50%), and automatic withdrawals to make that goal. If I
| can't pay my bills without dipping into the savings then
| I'll have to reevaluate my spending only then. As long as
| my savings rate is what it needs to be I don't worry
| about spending money.
| distances wrote:
| This sounds like a good way to do it.
|
| I'm a freelancer with variable income so I can't do a
| fixed investment rate. For me it's useful to see what was
| the actual rate vs. what I'd like it to be, and the high
| level view is quite enough to track that.
| elric wrote:
| I used to track every single payment, thinking I was doing
| excellent budgeting. But in reality it was mostly
| bikeshedding. The current approach works well for me, but I
| can totally see a use for tracking more in some cases. If I
| were a smoker or a heavy drinker I'd probably track those,
| for instance.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I am also using a spreadsheet now. I used to do things in plain
| text files, even did one year entirely in org-mode in emacs.
| But I started a spreadsheet the year I got married so my spouse
| and I can look at things together.
|
| We track way fewer categories than you do. But in addition, we
| also track larger expenses by amount. Right now everything over
| $100 gets an entry. That means a fancy $100+ dinner gets
| tracked but a normal $30 dinner doesn't.
| mkozlows wrote:
| 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.
| dmoy wrote:
| I do household finances in a spreadsheet. I do track every
| single transaction just to make sure there's no CC fraud (catch
| one stolen card every 3-ish years on average).
|
| I do _other people 's_ finances with hledger. That is, if I'm
| responsible for someone else's money (trustee, etc), I add
| another layer of complexity for double entry, reconciliation,
| etc.
| amelius wrote:
| Anyone here using LLMs to do personal accounting?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I'd hope not. The math is simple and the concepts are simple.
| Even if you could trust the LLM to give the right advice or
| calculations, which you can't, there's the opportunity cost of
| developing those skills yourself. Would you rather have those
| primary and fundamental skills for the rest of your life or the
| more secondary skills that are proprietary to the moment and
| contemporary tools and models? There's an important difference
| between self sufficience and dependence.
| amelius wrote:
| I'm thinking more of the work to enter all the data, read
| receipts, check and classify bank transactions, etc.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| I don't want to cause a scene, but if you're not running your own
| business, why would you do this? There are commercial services
| out there that take next to no time every month.
|
| Anathema?
|
| Yes, I know the data live in a data-center/cloud. But, don't the
| content of all those statements, payments and bills live there
| too. Yes, I know the service might go away tomorrow. But,
| couldn't one find the new-new service and import it all again
| from the banks, cc companies, utility companies etc.?
|
| I like text accounting. It's useful. It has a niche. But, is this
| the best use of your time every month?
|
| Tastes differ, but 30-45 minutes a month to hand-key data (or
| write the scripts that avoid that) isn't my taste.
| RankingMember wrote:
| > Tastes differ, but 30-45 minutes a month to hand-key data (or
| write the scripts that avoid that) isn't my taste.
|
| I'd wager it isn't most peoples' taste, which is why the off-
| the-shelf cloud-based options are as popular as they are. I see
| people in here doing things like writing PDF statement parsers
| and then dealing with the maintenance that this strategy
| entails whenever formatting changes and, well, I appreciate the
| people to whom this appeals, but I am not one of those people.
| :)
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| 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 text is backlash against the over-
| reliance on "services", "clouds", and "lock in", but I think it's
| misguided. If you're concerned with someone locking you in, it's
| perfectly concievable to do double entry accounting which lives
| only on your computer and manipulated with software that is under
| your control (read: free software).
|
| So in summary, my opinon is:
|
| - accounting: important
|
| - double entry: important
|
| - avoid clouds and ventor lock in: important
|
| - avoid proprietary file formats: important
|
| - plain text: unimportant
|
| (I use GnuCash. It's not without its flaws, but it's great if you
| agree with the above views)
| the_arun wrote:
| I think Accounting needs automation. Because manual tasks are
| error prone & Accuracy is a P0 requirement for finance.
| tekchip wrote:
| This! It blows my mind every bank doesn't have a sort of
| scripting language of some sort that let's me automate
| whatever I want to happen. I've seen a few services that
| supposedly enable this but their prone to breakage, don't
| support one bank or another, or are simply way too expensive.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| I suppose one problem with this is that accounting needs
| legal responsibility in case of mistakes. Software usually
| (if not always) does not guarantee anything (in the legal
| sense) and its seller/producer does not assume any
| responsibility whatsoever.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other
| than the accountant's mental model of the entity he's doing
| the accounting for.
|
| It doesn't have to be this way, though. It isn't impossible
| (for most use cases) to embed that mental model into your
| automation tools.
|
| You the correct that it means you can't have purely general
| purpose automation that will do all accounting work for
| every entity, but you could certainly create automation
| rules that cover everything (or nearly everything) for some
| particular entity.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| I think many accountants would laugh at saying accuracy is a
| requirement. They have full time jobs because the books for
| any major company are a disaster that are kept together by
| prayer and duct tape. Accuracy is the ideal, but when you
| have hundreds of revenue streams, discounts, rebates,
| deprecation, tax structures, salesmen actively trying to sell
| out the company, etc keeping the books in order is a tall
| order.
| stvltvs wrote:
| 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.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| 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.
| forty wrote:
| To be able to do mass action, it would be nice if there was
| an equivalent of gnu cash but using plain text files as a
| file format, so we could do mass editing of the file using
| our usual text editor (like emacs) rather than having to
| learn a new library.
|
| (Just kidding ;))
| subtle-byte wrote:
| Few years ago I created simple web application to track spendings
| https://receipt.ifels.dev (code: https://github.com/subtle-
| byte/receipts) It stores all info in your browser and allows to
| export it as json.
| mayukh wrote:
| This would be so valuable as a service.
| bregma wrote:
| 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 write Python
| scripts to import investment statements sent in PDF format
| (broker does not support transaction downloads) and pay stubs
| (payroll company does not do transaction downloads) and CSV
| imports for bank and credit card statements which lets me
| autocategorize most transactions. Turns out it's exactly what I
| wanted all this time I just didn't know it.
|
| I spend about an hour each month updating accounts. I generate
| investment reports, budget reports, and tax summaries. It's all
| there, except tracking the ACB of my investments (which I
| probably could do except a simple spreadsheet is less effort).
| Everything I need for my coming retirement this year.
|
| And because it's plain text I will never have to lose everything
| when data formats change due to new upstream releases. And
| because it's plain text I can use git to track changes and
| recover and do better off-site backups.
|
| I guess the downside is it doesn't work on your phone and you
| have to know what you're doing. But if information like how much
| money you have and where you're spending it is actually
| important, it's the right tool for the job.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| why-o-why wrote:
| Right there with you. I've tried to leave quicken multiple
| times. Especially when they moved to annual subscriptions. I
| haven't tried to leave since 2019-ish, and all the
| alternatives were just clunky as hell, as if the devs
| completely ignored UI/UX. Also, I'm on the latest quicken for
| mac and it has an export feature, but I have never used it.
| Maybe when they start charging per transaction I'll finally
| leave. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford it annually, but
| it still stinks that there's no open source alt, even to do
| just the basics conveniently.
| catgirlinspace wrote:
| Quicken isn't Intuit (as far as I know at least). You're
| probably thinking of QuickBooks?
| entangledqubit wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning this. I didn't realize Intuit sold it
| off to private equity in 2016.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Have you tried [0] Tiller Finance?
|
| [0] https://tiller.com/
| wxre wrote:
| I've used tiller for several years. Handles all the
| connections to pull data, but all the data is completely
| accessible within a spreadsheet on my own storage.
| repiret wrote:
| I use MoneyDance, which does automatic bank sync, is double-
| entry (although you can make single-entry transactions if you
| try hard enough), and is a program rather than a web service.
| It's got some rough edges, but it meets my needs well enough.
| I haven't looked into how hard it would be to read its data
| files if I wanted to migrate away.
| bregma wrote:
| Problem solved for me because no banks in my country provide
| an API for anyone or anything to download transactions
| directly. Not even Quicken. Banks here are _stable_. The only
| change they tolerate is increasing their fat quarterly
| dividends, although there has been talk in the smoky back
| rooms of government about passing legislation to force them
| kicking and screaming into the present.
|
| On the other hand, downloading a PDF or a CSV from time to
| time isn't that much of a hassle. I have Python scripts to
| parse the PDF and output hledger text, and hledger itself
| reads the CSV files and autocategorizes the transactions (I
| had to supply the categorization rules, naturally). You don't
| have to import anything, it's plain text. You don't have to
| copy/paste anything.
|
| If there were APIs to download transactions, it would be as
| simple as curl $BANKURL | hledger print
| --rules-file bank.csv.rules - >>bank.journal
|
| or something. Of course, you don't get the colourful eye
| candy of Quicken.
| why-o-why wrote:
| What do you mean re-enter? I've been using every new version of
| Quicken since 1992 and never had to re-enter all my data, and I
| switched from PC to MAC around 2005.
| runjake wrote:
| For others who don't know what Beancount is (the link on his site
| is 404). It's a Python library to work with money.
|
| https://github.com/beancount/beancount/blob/master/README.rs...
| robcohen wrote:
| I just made the jump to PTA and it is really, incredibly slick.
| Finally escaped the financial system's grip on my data. Look into
| SimpleFIN to get data feeds, but I also used LLMs and browsermcp
| to download all my statements from all of my banks.
|
| Really awesome to have control finally. I am very interested in
| extending PTA to be more like blockchain ledgers, with signing
| for every transaction and decentralizing the ledger. still
| mulling through how this would work, but it would essentially be
| KERI based.
| mpol wrote:
| 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.
| hasperdi wrote:
| In 2025 I started managing my small business finances using
| hledger (started with beancount, but got confused with missing
| packages in the new version). I use Claude Code to help me enter
| transactions eg from pdf receipts and to ensure the books are
| balanced. It's quite a pleasant experience I must say, as I find
| accounting tedious / not my cup of tea
| antaviana wrote:
| Am I the only one using Microsoft Money Sunset Edition? Granted I
| cannot connect to banks and get live quotes, but I think it is
| well done and has a lot of features.
| vikingerik wrote:
| I did too with Money Sunset for quite a while, but mostly gave
| up in the last couple years. Several of the online accounts
| stopped supporting exporting to QIF/OFX, and it's not worth the
| effort to type in everything manually or figure out another
| export/conversion process.
| why-o-why wrote:
| I'll see your decade old text file and raise you one more: my
| current quicken file goes back to 1992! Lemme tell you about gas
| and grocery prices back then... (hint $1.09/gallon in Oneida, NY
| and $15/bag at Price Chopper)
| loeg wrote:
| I just use Fidelity's portfolio-and-spending tracker these days.
| It's fine; not great. But it can automatically import from a
| variety of other financial institutions including Vanguard and my
| bank, so it's adequate for my needs. I spend a little time
| occasionally cleaning up the automated spending categorization.
| bzmrgonz wrote:
| This is a very detailed document. Thank you for that. I am
| currently poking my head into beancount, hledger, and the new kid
| on the block, DIGITS(which aims to take on quickbooks head-on. I
| love the PTA philosophy, but I worry about catering to the non-
| tech data entry personnel(bookkeeping), is there a gui for these
| folks to enter the day to day? Essentially I would love to have
| the back-end be PTA and GIT for full control, and build/use data-
| entry front-end<bookkeeping>, and reporting/graphing/dashboards
| for executives and owners. Perhaps we can even do an OCR workflow
| ontop of PAPERLESS-NG to stream the bookkeeping into the back-
| end.
| RatchetWerks wrote:
| Call me simple. I manually export CSV files from the finance
| companies. (Should automate this). Vibe coded a CSV parser that
| will auto categorize, sort all expenses/income. Expenses go in
| one sheet. Income goes in another. Pivot table renders the data.
|
| I can track money spent and earned down to the penny.
|
| Takes less than 20 mins a month to update/manage it. I actually
| enjoy having sit-down time to "do finances". Keeps me leveled,
| and forces me to think about how much money I spent and the value
| I gained from the expenses.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| you can do that or you can use free, open source solution like
| firefly. Accessible from everywhere, has backup options,
| automatic import data from bank account.
|
| To me, the choice is very easy.
| shivekkhurana wrote:
| I have been recording every txn with GnuCash for the last 8
| years. I reached a point where I started writing scripts on top
| to support my multi-currency setup.
|
| Then Claude became a thing, and I thought what if I use Hledger
| and let Claude manage my books ? I was reluctant to migrate years
| of txns, so I started with an opening balance.
|
| This has been the highest leverage usage of Claude for me. I drop
| everything: bank statements, invoices, etc and ask Claude to make
| entries. When it makes a mistake, I add a new rule for future.
| Privacy issues aside, I cannot go back to traditional tools.
| W0lf wrote:
| I've been using MoneyMoney for over 12 years now (started Nov.
| 2013) on Mac and have never regretted it. I am automatically
| importing from all my bank accounts, including all statements and
| even track my portfolio with it. It can automatically categorize
| every transaction (basically string matching with OR clauses) and
| doing this consistently for years gave me pretty good insights on
| my spending behavior over time. It's a pity that they don't have
| a iOS app though.
| dfee wrote:
| I never found efficiency. For five months I imported and
| categorized my transactions - from payroll through food. I
| definitely had reports being generated (using hledger) but the
| amount of time I invested and the ROI wasn't there.
|
| Had it been 5m a week, maybe I could've done it. But it was 3h/wk
| - finding transactions, transcoding them with scripts I was
| maintaining, and breaking down the costs with my wife to
| understand if Costco purchases were "groceries" or "home".
|
| I nailed the micro and failed the macro. With two kids, and no
| desire to invest 150h a year into this, there's no way I can get
| this to work.
|
| I imagine AI would be great at:
|
| 1. Maintaining scripts to extract and normalize various financial
| artifacts (PDFs, CSVs, XLSXs) into text files
|
| 2. Helping draw insights
|
| But manual effort of:
|
| 1. Collecting from various banks, paystubs and investment
| accounts
|
| 2. Ensuring flows net to zero and make sense
|
| Is Too Much Work.
| dorgo wrote:
| have a "Costco purchases" sub-category for "groceries". If you
| ever feel differently, just move it to "home". Your system has
| to support this though. I did multiple re-organisations in the
| last 10+ years.
| dfee wrote:
| Maybe the right way to do this is to only track accounts, and
| no tracking of individual txns?
|
| Importing and tracking 401k contributions and stock dividends
| across multiple brokerage accounts - and then trying to
| handle timing differences (money in flight)... oof
| fittingopposite wrote:
| Yes. Also wondering about the ROI. What do you gain by this?
| dfee wrote:
| For transactions: you spot fraud, mischarges or subs to
| cancel. Really a watchdog service would be good here. High
| effort, low return. IMO. (And a bit of tracking around
| reimbursements)
|
| For savings: helps you keep an eye on where you're at by
| forcing you to reconcile.
|
| It's totally worth it for a low value of invested time. But,
| it's not going to be low effort.
| rapidfl wrote:
| The hard part has been to import all the accounts and to
| categorize the transactions on the 1-2 cards and 1-2 checking
| accounts that get used a lot. However doing hledger motivated
| me to simplify things. Either delete cards and accounts. Or
| barely use them so I can update them once or twice a year. And
| helps to reduce the number of categories.
|
| I have not made updates for all of 2025 after 3 or 4 years of
| hledger. ROI diminished once the itch to zero everything wears
| off and since I have somewhat steady state expenses.
| dfee wrote:
| If ROI has diminished (maybe dopamine diminished?) then what
| keeps you motivated?
| rapidfl wrote:
| These days, I find it is doable 2-3 times a year. Its a lot
| of work at one shot but somehow able to catch up so as to
| review the main spending accounts. The zeroing is what
| attract me still. I get to see some patterns in my overall
| spending/categories. And it is side project where there is
| perceivable concrete progress, so still somewhat easier
| dopamine.
|
| Simplifying/automating the workflow is a pull. As I type
| this, I have an idea to stop tracking NW in hledger - it
| can seem incomplete because money moves from checking to
| brokerages. That's fine. I only want to see expenses.
| dfee wrote:
| Interesting! In a different comment, I took the other
| side: maybe it's only worth tracking NW in hledger?
| Itemizing transactions is heavy duty bookkeeping effort,
| and I didn't feel any directional value.
| sublinear wrote:
| I'm not sure what people are defining as "plain text" here.
|
| I feel the strong urge to let people know that excel files are
| just a zip file containing XML. Sure it's not quite as simple as
| CSV, but not far off.
| loufe wrote:
| I set up tracking all my bank statements, pay slips, Costco (and
| other multi-category store) receipts, and other things in Fava
| (beancount's webui) over the last month. I spent way too much
| time developing a plugin to help categorizing transactions,
| making a full api and python scripts as well to let AI make edits
| for me (dry runs before clearing).
|
| I stumbled upon Maybe (https://github.com/maybe-finance/maybe)
| and the community fork (https://github.com/we-promise/sure) a
| couple days ago and almost invested too much time to migrate to
| it. That project still doesn't have split transactions. A fresh
| intuitive UI is great but Beancount's format is so simple it's
| hard to beat.
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