For me I simply had a spreadsheet with rows for each month and columns for each account: chequing, mortgage, RRSP, RESP, etc. I’d spend 10 mins a month logging in and typing out each balance. I’d chart the over-time trend and that’s all I needed to detect any changes in habit or ugly trajectories. 90% of what signal I needed with 10% of the effort.
If you don’t need to micromanage all your flavours of spending or other details, consider keeping it dead simple.
I find that once I normalize against the price movements of my goals, the significantly positive trend becomes much less significant. Since I am relatively young with likely a couple decades or more work left in me, I like to benchmark against a low cost broad market equity index ETF.
I ported it to Qt for Linux last year and still use it, but to be honest, I don't really know why I track my finances that religously - although it has helped me a few times with accounting / tax purposes given I'm a contractor now.
I suspect one of the reasons there are so many different solutions is everyone wants to do things differently, and integration with the banks for automated transaction import/download is quite complicated.
All of my financial history is contained in a text file processed by beancount and long may it continue!
One thing I do wonder though is how well it scales, I'm a single man so tracking everything isn't too much effort but if I had a partner it suddenly becomes at least 50% more things to track
I love these command line self hosted accounting software packages. But double entry bookkeeping was invented using ledgerbooks with ruled tables. I feel the plain text dataformats are a regression compared to a sql database. A general ledger just works so well with columns that you can sum.
It also saves you from needing a custom tool like bean-query to replicate sqlite-ish queries because it could have been in a database from the start
And on a somewhat unrelated note: his book on building data-intensive applications is another goldmine (on a different topic).
I use the envelope style. Every dollar is assigned a bucket when it comes in. All spending is done from a bucket and balances always persist. I don't like monthly budget targets. I prefer to put money in a bucket when the money comes in.
I might move back to plain text accounting as it is so flexible. I will miss the amazing interface to Lunch Money. I also like supporting a small business like Lunch Money.
Many thanks to Simon Michael for not only that wonderful program but also being so responsive.
I also had a good collection of scripts to manage my finances. I ran it all on a VPS so I could access anywhere. I had an ssh client on my phone to make changes on the go. Not as ergonomic as an app but it worked.
Agreed Simon is an amazing project owner. He and his documentation are the reasons I like HLedger over the alternatives.
I'll admit that GoDBLedger is also tempting.
> Recall that the flow of money in double-entry accounting is represented using transactions involving at least two accounts. When you download CSVs from your bank, each line in that CSV represents money that's either incoming or outgoing. That's only one leg of a transaction (credit or debit). It's up to us to provide the other leg.
> This act is called "balancing".
Balance (accounting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_(accounting)
Are unique record IDs necessary for this [financial] application? FWICS, https://plaintextaccounting.org/ just throws away the (probably per-institution) transaction IDs; like a non-reflexive logic that eschews Law of identity? Just grep and wc?
> What does the ledger look like?
> I wrote earlier that one of the main things that Beancount provides is a language specification for defining financial transactions in a plain-text format.
> What does this format look like? Here's a quick example:
option "title" "Alice"
option "operating_currency" "EUR"
; Accounts
2021-01-01 open Assets:MyBank:Checking
2021-01-01 open Expenses:Rent
2021-01-01 * "Landlord" "Thanks for the rent"
Assets:MyBank:Checking -1000.00 EUR
Expenses:Rent 1000.00 EUR
People use other flags to indicate, for instance, whether a transaction has been reconciled, or cleared their bank, or whatnot.
https://github.com/csingley/ofxtools
</shameless plug>
I just added a link to it on https://awesome-beancount.com/#tools.
For budgeting, I import csv from my bank/credit cards into google sheets and tag transactions with ~20 different categories - I do this every month or two and it doesn't take that long. It gives me a backwards view of my spending that I can use to influence future spending. I don't run a hard budget really.
We have this feature at Nordigen (I'm the cofounder), where we allow developers to download their bank statements in JSON format from 1,000+ European banks (free): https://nordigen.com/en/blog/download-your-bank-statement-js...
"in order to derive statistical models for future data enrichment purposes", "to improve the performance and accuracy of the Services", "to improve Your experience while using the Services" and "to send Users and website visitors relevant informational content regarding Services and personalized offers they subscribed to".
"Nordigen may also provide personal data to companies that process personal data on behalf of Nordigen such as marketing service providers." - wonderful, thank you for doing that. not.
GDPR requires you to be more specific in terms of "purpose", to actually list your data processing partners, what purpose the data sharing with that particular partner serves, and which data exactly is shared with which partner.
At the end of every month, banks send out statements so importing all transactions aren't necessary to keep track of one's overall financial standing.
Banks do make mistakes but extremely rarely that it's not worth wanting to import all transactions in the off chance that you'll catch a mistake. Retailers can make mistakes like double charge you but again those are rare and you can take a quick look at your statements to find them usually.
Keeping track of individual transactions are important to be able to figure out where the money is going in general but this doesn't require keeping track of 'every' transaction. Just the ones that make up the biggest percentage of the total money spent. They are usually easy to spot on the bank/creditcard statements.
One doesn't even have to be perfectly accurate to gain from inspecting statements either. You spent $834.56 for new tires? You can enter that as $850 and it's fine.
Sure, there might be cases where the total is split more or less evenly across several small transactions and that can be handled similarly to the above.
Knowing where the money is going isn't terribly useful actually unless there are a lot of frivolous spendings. It usually comes down to "you are not making enough money" or "the lifestyle you desire is too expensive for your current income". No app can fix either of these, other than point out the obvious problem. Most personal finance blogs end up leaning towards "how to earn more" because that's more important than keeping track of your transactions or budgeting.
I have a report that does how much money I spent per period that is unaccounted for, that's money that got spend on "miscellaneous". As long as that number is beneath some threshold that I consider acceptable I let it be. If it's high, I might look back and try to determine where my money went and make adjustments.
The guiding principle behind this approach is resilience to laziness. It's not an all or nothing system, instead it gives me whatever I give it. If I am busy and don't enter as many transactions, no worries - I'll just have more in the miscellaneous category. If I don't track my balances every month, the period will be longer. But the system always "balances".
The system also serves as a log for bigger purchases. When did I buy that fridge? How much did I pay? What is the exact model number of that piece of equipment in case I need to buy it again? I can search my transaction log.
I personally find the topic difficult and comes with a lot of nonsensical jargons.
It’s not targeting technical users but it would be cool to add a SQL integration like Stripe Sigma, etc at some point.
> No, your personal data is not sold or rented or given away or bartered to parties that are not Plaid, your bank, or the connected app. We talk about all of this in our privacy policy, including ways that data could be used — for example, with data processors/service providers (like AWS which hosts our services) for the purposes of running Plaid’s services or for a user’s connected app to provide their services.
>> I saw that. Thank you for your patience and persistence in responding to so many pointed questions.
>> For any interested, here is a link to relevant section of the referenced privacy policy: https://plaid.com/legal/#consumers
>> I am also impressed by the Legal Changelog on the same page that clearly lays out a log of changes made to privacy & other published legal documents.