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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

I want to love the plain text accounting tools. I used them for over a year on all my finances. They’re incredibly expressive and exact, and they play well with vim and git.

The trouble is ingesting transactions. You do your best—save receipts, try to note things in your phone. Then some auto-pay thing blindsides you. Or, that separate tip charge from Uber Eats. Yes, you can capture all of these things, but it will require hours of weekly time investment to counteract financial entropy.

I ended up just buying Banktivity. I do miss the perfection offered by plain text accounting. I miss nothing now because they’ve contracted with teams that write scrapers and API clients for banks I would have otherwise had to write myself. Reconciliation is now the work of minutes. It’s not perfect, but everything is a tradeoff.

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I find there's a balance to be struck between convenience and granularity. If I insisted on categorising every transaction into very specific categories it would be far too much of a pain for me. So, for example, I have a big expense account called "Eating and Drinking Out". Ideally it would be great if I knew specifically what I was spending on coffee, on lunch, on beer, etc, but it would just be too much work. Likewise, I don't track my cash - I just have an expense account called "Cash Withdrawals" (unless I am withdrawing a large amount of money for a specific purpose, which I usually remember so am able to allocate it to a more specific account).

In the normal course I try to update my GnuCash once a week, which takes about half an hour on a Sunday. However I've been quite bad lately and today I'll be trying to input over a month of transactions which I'm not looking forward to...

In addition to this, I've started sampling days. Instead of recording transactions for every day, I can do something like every fifth day. This reduces precision, but it's still within a range acceptable for my purposes.

(Though it's important that it's either a systematic sample (every n days) or a random one (throw a dice each day, if it's 5 or higher, record that day). The days you pick have to be uncorrelated with the types of expenses those days, or your results will be biased.)

I feel this pain every time I go to reconcile transactions for the week/month. At the same time, I'm not ready to trade the exposure I get to every penny of my income/expenses that manually typing entries gives me. It's just not the same as reviewing a ledger - the act of typing, reviewing, and reconciling has really boosted my confidence in how I currently manage my finances.

I used ledger for 2019–2020 and by the end of it I had scripts to pull just about everything automatically, whether via OFX, Plaid, CSV, or PDF. It became a drag when I realized that I’m starting a new job, I’m opening new accounts, &c., and all my tooling would have to be constantly changing.

Now two years later I’m porting my details into Beancount (the tool whose documentation is linked), and I’ve changed my approach to one that seems much more sustainable: once a month, download statements and enter them in with some templates to assist. Maybe I use a CSV parser for credit cards and other high-frequency accounts, but for what I want out of plaintext accounting, I don’t need hours of weekly time to keep decent finances, but perhaps an evening a month.

If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your use case or motivation for having sub-weekly updates to your financial picture?

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