Plain Text Accounting

I can really recommend doing this for your personal finances! Tools like ledger are really powerful, and properly accounting is a great way to save on money. I can very easily go into my personal ledger and (say) get a report on "How much money did i spend daily on groceries last month" or "List all subscription services i pay for and how much they cost each month" or whatever. It gives you a great view into where your money…

Systems that use immediate strict categorization don’t work for some people. At a company I worked at we went with a two-phase approach. A person would write notes (literally iphone notes) in the following format: Apr 5 24 -50 Alice tools -220 Bob home project Apr 2 24 +20 Bob returned loan Note that time goes “up” to avoid scrolling too much on open. Later we loaded it into a script which would parse dates, detect keywords and make templates…

I've used the ledger-likes extensively, and they have two major problems: (1) One of the hard problems in personal finance is data capture and input validation. Programs like QuickBooks and Xero don't just hide the GL because they're being mean, they're doing it because even experienced bookkeepers make mistakes on the general ledger all the time. "Since it's a text file it's easy to read" solves exactly the wrong problem: you want it to be easy to write, and easy…

I’ve been using hledger for a few years. I’ve tried Mint, Personal Capital, PocketSmith, YNAB, RightCapital, Tiller, and none of them ever give me a complete view of expenses because there’s always a problem getting data from one or more banks. All of these hosted tools use Yodlee or Plaid on the backend and there’s always a problem. The common denominator, however, is CSV. Every service lets you download historical data as CSV, which can be imported by hledger and…