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Anyone doing plain text accounting here? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml to c/personalfinance@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] gpw@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] sidenote@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

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.