I recently started giving plain text accounting a go. For a long time I did not do any accounting, as my income was high enough to get by perfectly fine, but recently I wanted to get a lot more control over my personal finance in order to easier achieve more long term financial goals.
I’ve only been at it for about a month now, and I started out with ledger. So far I am enjoying the concept, but have not made much out of reporting yet. But I like the idea of also building my own reporting in Python on top of existing reports, and checking out the ecosystem around this (I understand BeanCount has a large Python ecosystem, so I will probably check this out once I have some months of data).
Are there anyone here doing this? I would love to hear some perspectives about this, both good and bad, from people having used this for a long time.
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To save others some time
Plain text accounting is a way of doing bookkeeping and accounting with plain text files and scriptable, command-line-friendly software, such as Ledger, hledger, or Beancount.
That would’ve been a good idea to include in the post to begin with, I agree. Thanks for sharing!
Plain text accounting tickles the obsessive part of my brain that craves granular control over every minute detail of my money
If there were an easy way to get all of my bank, credit card, loan, tax, etc statements either via secure download or api with everything automatically imported to a platform I had full autonomy over I’d be more interested
Otherwise it’s a lot of time investment for minor payoff imo
Yeah, I’m hoping to automate somethings myself - without having done any research on this, I hope the PSD2 regulation in Europe allows me to use the APIs the banks have been forced to make. However, I am actually not sure about eligibility to use these APIs, and I might have to do make do with parsing .csv-files I manually download.
I am anyway giving it some months to see what kind of benefits I might get without putting to much effort into automation, but the thought have crossed my mind that this entire thing will be a “high effort, low reward” kind of deal.
This is the exact reason I lean into wealth management tools, and likely why more credit cards, brokerage services, etc are starting to offer them as a standard feature. Being able to plug your accounts into a tool that handles all the API horrors for you is such a time save, even if the result is dealing with something admittedly half baked in most cases.
Yes. I have experimented with using it to track the finances for a tiny organization for which I volunteer. I was able to write some simple software with jaq to generate journal entries from domain-oriented data files. I liked what I had.
I would like to use it for my company’s books, and I might have the opportunity to do it this year.
no sir
I wanted to go this route, but for the current stage of my life, I couldn’t go that granular. I currently have a spreadsheet that keeps track of totals in each bank account (short term, long term, college, retirement savings and checking) as well as total (net) income and expenditures (broken into “essential” and “non-essential”).
I then setup formulas to calculate total saved, (as well as necessary only saved, in case of financial stress to see what we can cut out), total assets, and compares those assets to the previous month and year.
While I want to get more granular, that is all I can do for now.
