Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

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I've been working on my own classifier for updating my ledger because I struggled too much trying to get other people's stuff to work. I'm getting about ~90% accuracy using a SVM from scikit-learn, but it can only ever be semi-automated. My plan is that every month I'll go through my various accounts and help to update my ledger. One thing that I don't think other software does is automatically remove the duplication when transferring between bank accounts/credit cards.

How does yours deal with transfers between accounts?

I really want a nice auto-completing thing to type in the account names when the classifier gets them wrong (or to add a new account if necessary). The best UI for this is ido or ivy in emacs. But it would be nice to have a tool that runs outside emacs. The best I've found is fzf but it doesn't support tab completion which is a shame.

I handle transfers between accounts manually - as in when I see duplicates show up, I remove one of them. A neat thing that ledger-reconciler does is to print the balance (as listed on the banking website) for each account. That information combined with Ledger's balance report tells me immediately whether something is off and if investigation is needed.

This in itself has saved me so much time that I can deal with manually editing the occassional duplicate entry (internal account transfers). I also keep all my ledger data in git so it's very easy to see what has changed, etc.

Have you looked at the reckon gem[0] for auto-classification? That is basically what this program uses.

[0]: https://github.com/cantino/reckon

I tried reckon amongst other things but couldn't get it to read my CSV files properly. I got frustrated enough that I thought writing my own would be easier.

Putting the account balances in the ledger file is certainly a good idea. At least one of my bank CSVs provides the balances with each transaction. It doesn't seem too hard to automatically merge the transfers between accounts, though. But maybe there is a difficult I haven't thought of yet.

Where there will definitely need some manual tweaking is on the those transactions where ledger really shines: many to many transactions. Have you built in some functional to flag a transaction as TODO when you know it will need manual tweaking later?

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