Gregory's ServerDo I know anyone who's using #hledger (https://hledger.org/) or similar for their personal finances? I'd be curious to hear how your experience has been, has it stuck with you, do you have any special workflow with it?
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@nobodyinperson Thank you for replying! The reporting is what attracts me to it in the first place, yes... how fine-grained does it make sense to be? Does it not make sense to just import all transactions from one's banks? @gosha Oh definitely import everthing. With fine-grained I meant metadata, categories or cash transactions that need manual entry. You can get arbitrarily complex with this 😃  @gosha @nobodyinperson Of course import everything .... but then what? Do you set up a rule to match your grocery store and categorize everything to that vendor as Expenses:Groceries or do you keep your receipts and split out how much of each payment goes to Expenses:Groceries:Produce, Expenses:Groceries:Meat, Expenses:Groceries:Desert, Expenses:Groceries:Snacks, etc. The reporting you can do will depend on how granular your data entry is.  @gosha Yes! ✋🏻 I've been using the original (non-Haskell) version for years to track my expenses, budgets, debts and savings. It can be daunting if you're not already familiar with double-entry bookkeeping, but the manual is an excellent guide. I use the official Emacs mode to write entries and run the reports, and version control my ledger file with Git. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to track every little receipt or small cash transaction! @gosha Oh, that could be a hassle! I record cash withdrawals from the ATM (and charging my Suica card) as already being spent ('expenses:cash'), and don't bother tracking most things that result in a receipt eg. a sandwich and a drink from the convenience store. I do track household expenses like groceries, though, so in that case I'd 'move' the money from 'expenses:cash' to 'expenses:groceries'. @gosha It's been very useful for me for more than 2 years now. I use it to track almost all of my income and expenses, but I do it all by hand. I have my own idiosyncratic categories that a rules-based converter just would not suffice for. I mostly use snippets to speed up entry for repeating entries and my text editor's various features for everything else. I still haven't figured out how to track investments and ROI. The resources I saw were way too technical for me. |
@gosha You don't know me I guess, but I have been using :hledger: #hledger for many years now. I love its flexibility, approachability, backupability, but depending on how fine-grained you want to sort your stuff, data entry and management can become quite tedious. But once you have it, it's magical to ask hledger to give you all kinds of numbers, averages or future predictions or plots [1].
You'll find nice people to talk about this here: https://pypi.org/project/hledger-utils/
[1] https://pypi.org/project/hledger-utils/
@gosha You don't know me I guess, but I have been using :hledger: #hledger for many years now. I love its flexibility, approachability, backupability, but depending on how fine-grained you want to sort your stuff, data entry and management can become quite tedious. But once you have it, it's magical to ask hledger to give you all kinds of numbers, averages or future predictions or plots [1].