Hacker News Reader

Comment by chj | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, spreadsheets are born for these tasks.

I tried but didn't like accounting apps because they force you to do too much work and just aren't that easy to find the functions I need. In the end I designed an excel file tailored to my needs (and it's giving me more fun than writing code), which gives monthly view of my financial activities, with support for currency conversion. So at the end of every month I would spend about half an hour logging all the numbers and get a nice overview. I can also put in spending and earning projections so I can easily see how I will be at the end of year.

View on HN

Indeed. Only last week I imported a year's bank statement (one single file downloaded manually) into Google Sheets (worked perfectly first time). Then I spent an hour scanning it by eye and constructing dirt-simple regexes to extract outgoings into categories. As a check I compared total outgoings vs total regex-extracted outgoings; it was out by £400 for the whole year, which I can tolerate.

It told me exactly what to needed to know: I spend a surprising amount on eating out, and a surprisingly small amount on holidays. Budget for the year: spend 50% less on eating out.

Two hours work total. Not perfect, but a piece of cake, and very valuable.

Devils Advocate: Ah! but now you have a budget, you need to track it to make sure you're sticking to it - how do you know if you're spending 50% less on eating out this month if the data arn't there in-front of you to check?

I felt like the parent comment didn't meant 50% exactly, just an approximation. So, if it were me, I'd just keep that in mind when deciding to go out to eat.. After 1 or 2 months it's easy to see if I'm on track to the ~50% or not and adjust accordingly.

I guess he'll find out next year when he repeats the exercise :)

True. My pragmatic approach: 50% of the times I have the urge to eat out, don't do it :)

Spreadsheets are indeed suited for this very task. But on the other hand, they remain very user-hostile.

I couldn't keep my accounts up-to-date if it wasn't for ledger, vim, and the command-line interfaces. Projects like sc or ses aren't as versatile as Excel or LibreOffice Calc.

> Spreadsheets are indeed suited for this very task. But on the other hand, they remain very user-hostile.

Well, I disagree, at least for myself. I always have trouble memorizing commands. Even after at least a decade of using vim, I have to admit with a blush, if I want to turn on the syntax highlight for vim or to show the line numbers, I have to go google for it.

I can easily imagine that if I don't use ledger for two weeks, I will most likely have to relearn it.

Oh yes this. Accounting apps (home and small business) are horrible for cashflow forecasting. I really have no idea how most people accomplish this task without a complex spreadsheet like the one I've built for myself and my small business.

Perhaps most people don't appreciate the importance of cashflow forecasting and just think as long as they have a budget for this month and make a deposit to savings each month they're fine. If that's the case I would say they're probably misallocating.

YNAB? No YNAFSS.

I bought a copy of Quicken on sale a few years ago. Once everything was set up, it's been pretty darn minimal effort. I spend 5 minutes downloading & categorizing transactions every couple weeks. (needs to be fresh in my mind to categorize, and some banks only let you download 3 months back). Overview is continually available on a running basis.

A spreadsheet might work better, if I didn't have 20-30 accounts, and money constantly flowing around them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com