10 Years of Personal Finances in Plain Text Files
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A heated debate erupted over an author's decision to write a book about using Beancount, a FOSS software, to manage personal finances, with some commenters accusing the author of profiting off someone else's work. However, others pointed out the author's significant contributions to the Beancount community, including maintaining a list of resources and writing several plugins. As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that the real issue wasn't the author's monetization, but rather a perceived disconnect between contributing to open-source and profiting from related work. The thread ultimately celebrated the value of plain text files and the creativity of individuals finding innovative ways to use them.
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I would be okay with that as a monetization model, except that the book author despite being a self-described FOSS dev doesn't seem to have anything to do with the project (https://github.com/beancount/beancount/graphs/contributors).
Ah, not quite true. The author fixed a typo in a docstring once (https://github.com/beancount/beancount/commit/8584763b618f76...).
I'm just, you know, pretty sensitive to HN submissions trying to sell me something.
And that's still ignoring that evangelism is also a valuable contribution.
Can you point to some of your contributions to this project?
[0] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/awesome-beancount
[1] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-n26
[2] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-ing
[3] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-dkb
[4] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-commerzbank
I know money is the root of all evil and all that, but ye gods.
It's cumbersome at times, and I do miss the (G)UI of entering transactions, but with (neo)vim I got used to it and I breeze trough my finances in 15-20 minutes once a week.
I'm intrigued by this and now thinking I should start doing it. Just start with a clean slate for 2026 and see how I go.
But for the vast majority of people (even including devs), this will not be ideal at all and most people don't really care about it being in text files.
What I'm trying to say is that its designed for a very specific niche userbase and I doubt most people will have the same experience as you described after trying every single personal finance app to settle on this.
That's 6–9 hours every year!
5 years: 30–45 hours 10 years: 60–90 hours
As we've crossed into the new year I've switched to a similar directory setup as the OP with 1 file per year. Previously I just had one file that was from 2022 which ended up being like 2 million lines of text, which was starting to bog down the emacs plugin.
What I appreciate the most about this approach to personal finances is it just tracks everything. Investments, pensions, RSUs, bank accounts. You could even go as far as accounting for any resource that's modellable, e.g. energy usage in kwh vs. bills. I probably wouldn't go that far though :D
Also you can build a bunch of tooling around it too, with the advent of LLMs my toolset for beancount management has expanded quite significantly. Most. recently I got claude to rewrite my transaction rules engine https://djharper.dev/post/2025/08/19/using-llms-to-turn-scri... into something nicer with a UI
And when it’s fragile even when working. The cost per unit changes with limited notice in various ways (line rate, unit cost, time period that various rates occur, the day, ‘free’ power bonuses etc).
But good to hear the positive story side for this.
Then, there's the import workflow: which "accounts" should you start with? How much history do you pull in? How do you set up an automatic importer? Hledger has a DSL. Beancount uses Python. Either way, an OP says, much of your time is spent manually editing text.
And finally, then what? Can I make a budget now? Will this thing do my taxes? Am I more financially responsible? How do I explain this to my spouse? My pension is kind of like a commodity, but I don't know what the unit price is, and I don't sell units, but what's a virtual PnL and what if I only have a quarterly PDF!?
It may sound like I'm ranting, but I have found that realizing I don't know the answers to these questions (or even that they exist) is the true benefit of PTA.
Every year, I'm asked if I want a different pension investment mix or if I want to change my car insurance. Or, I might wonder if I'm getting a good deal on my internet plan or if a new job offer's total comp is actually better.
You don't have to have a perfect answer to all the questions, but being familiar with the routine minutiae of your economy by way of counting every cent, is rewarding.
Double entry book keeping isn't that difficult but that's easy to say once you've been doing it a while
I've been doing PTA since around 2018 and there's definitely lessons I've learned along the way along with plenty of mistakes.
I think the main benefit for me is just the system gives you a complete picture of your finances. The commercial services you can pay for just give you a view into a certain slice (e.g. open banking in UK/Europe to see your current account(s)) - I think mint.com did something similar in the US but it never came over here, I don't know if it still exists. Maybe that's enough for most people, but for me I want everything, investments, liabilities, assets etc. None of these commercial offerings have that because it's so complex and niche, e.g. your open banking provider won't tell you how your pension is doing.
It's also just nice to have the provenance of transactions, e.g. if you receive some shares from work, and you sell the shares and the money ends up in your bank account - the incoming transaction will just be the net proceeds but it won't tell you if you paid any tax prior to that - PTA gives you a more of a complete picture that tracks the whole chain of events that led up that transaction into your bank happening. Overkill for most people? Probably.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/budgeting-app-mint-is-shutti...
Monarch is just horribly overpriced. I'm not opposed to paying for a SaaS or anything, but Monarch is crazy overpriced. Empower (used to be called Personal Capital) if free and what I use instead of Mint. In fairness, the only thing that I really ever used Mint for was to see my net worth and account balances.
This. Accounting seems easy if you already know accounting. Learning accounting is difficult because the literature is dense, contradictory, and it's not helped by the fact that most accountants don't even seem to understand it at a fundamental level, they've merely memorized false-but-workable ideas like "debits increase assets because debit means left", or the silly idea about viewing it from the perspective of a bank.
Even accounting profs are surprisingly bad at at this, at least in my experience.
I just followed the documentation in here https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... - it gives you the general principles to follow and you can just pick it up from there.
The link you posted is similarly full of bullshit.
But I'm the sort of person who finds it very grating to have to do something without understanding why I'm doing it. If that's not you then party on.
Re: learning curve, it's not that difficult. Shameless plug: I wrote a textbook (actually, a textbooklet, if that is a word;-)) about the basics of DEA, focused on personal finance and using ledger-cli: https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/
But what about basic Cost Of Goods Eaten?
I have fading thermal tapes in boxes with grocery store purchases. They get scanned once a year into large PDFs: grocery, home goods, repairs (large purchases are kept separately for easier finding).
I’m looking to pay for a personal AI tool to manage the data extraction (though not excited about the $20/mo cost. NPR should get the next $5 of my monthly).
Now here’s the funny part. The data sits in a box all year or in PDFs for years, and gets little attention. What janky home server AI could I spin up to perform as bad as me (but no worse)?
I'm about to start out again and I chose not to track different categories individually, knowing that I can still add sub-accounts to distinguish between them later (even if I can´t recover the information for older transactions.)
Now I just need to investigate how to track gains/losses on the ETFs I own but that's common enough that there should be information out there on how to do it.
I just put "Groceries" account based on the total that gets charged to my card. If there's a substantial item that doesn't fall into groceries then I can split that out on a case-by-case basis (e.g. I go to Costco and buy both a bunch of cereal and a dehumidifier).
Start easy and see what you want to get out of the data. If you can store the original source (e.g receipts) so that you can later go back and increase the granularity if you find yourself wanting it, that would be ideal.
I just spent a few hours using LLMs (aider, specifically) to reconcile my books for the past year. Worked great, but was slightly fiddly.
I was also confused about double-entry accounting for most of my life until I read the article, "Accounting for Computer Scientists"[0] by Martin Kleppman (author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications). It explains double entry accounting in a surprisingly accessible way be putting it in terms of graph theory. I don't even like graph theory that much or consider myself competent in it, but Kleppman's explanation was extremely effective.
[0] https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu...
I didn't understand the point of the two entries.
My prior experience with bookkeeping was that I imported my bank statements into some tool and categorized each transaction. So, if I bought a cookie for $5, I'd mark that transaction as "food," and that felt intuitive to me. I didn't understand why it would become two transactions where one is food and the other is my cash. It just felt like, why split it into two? What does that do for me?
The "ah-ha" moment from Kleppman's post was seeing how it's not just about creating two entries but about defining flows between accounts. The graphs helped because they show how balances increase or decrease as you traverse the nodes.
To be clear, it wasn't like I spent hours banging my head against the wall trying to understand double-entry accounting and failed until Kleppman's post. It was just that I'd encountered the idea a few times, and it never clicked until Klepmman.
Thank you for clarifying. That makes sense. Graph's do more directly depict the transition with edges. Whereas that part is kind of just implicit in double entry accounting.
• Bank accounts and cash. If you're tracking a single number, do you track a cash withdrawal (and then ignore purchases with cash), or do you ignore cash withdrawals (and track cash purchases)? With double-entry accounting, you just track withdrawals as money flowing (Bank account) -> (Cash), and purchases as (Cash) -> (Stuff) or whatever you want to call it; both are equally cleanly represented.
• Bank accounts and credit-card (or other loan) repayments. Similar thing: if you were to use a single number, do you change it when you make a purchase with a credit card (and ignore tracking paying your credit card bill) or do you change it when you pay your credit card bill (and ignore purchases with your card)? With double-entry accounting you just treat them as money flowing (Bank account) -> (Credit card) and (Credit card) -> (Expenses). And your bank account statements and credit card statements will both make sense in isolation, if you have this complete picture.
(Personally I found https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... even more useful for the basic idea than https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu... but both are interesting.)
This summed it up nicely, from https://github.com/mortisj/quicken2beancount
I ended up just logging my total holding of cash and stocks spread over my different bank accounts and my investment portfolio. Doing it every few months helped me make sure that my overall holdings went up. As long as I pay off my bills and then save enough to see my holdings rise I am happy. However I can see that having a more detailed overview over your spending might help you cut down even more.
The main account I use for day to day spending is Monzo, they correctly categorise 99% of my transactions for me (and this is included in the csv export) which makes this way easier.
My bank has some very limited options to move specific amounts of money on a weekly schedule, but I'm looking for something more powerful then that.
Should I look at like Stripe or something? Or are there more pre built tools?
One of the benefits to specifically using a double-entry system (including most of the PTA space) is that it makes it easier to build your "envelopes" as hierarchical sub-accounts. Instead of having just Assets:Checking you could have Assets:Checking:Grocery and Assets:Checking:General and Assets:Checking:Entertainment and so forth. The Assets:Checking sum of all of Assets:Checking:* will still reflect your total checking balance for situations when you need to know that information, but the sub-accounts in your double-entry system become your "envelopes" to check on your budget spending and to transfer between.
Automating your budgets can be just a matter of when you get your Income:Salary transaction you split it appropriately between the various Assets:Checking:* sub-accounts you want. You could automate other transfers between them as necessary as well.
You can also automate things like verifying your Expenses:Grocery account always takes funds from Assets:Checking:Grocery rather than any other "envelope" account when paid for by your debit card. (With Credit Cards potentially needing a different level of automation, and maybe a bunch more sub-accounts.)
Your bank won't have any idea of those sub-accounts and nothing will physically prevent you from overspending those sub-accounts, of course, but also you can automate warnings for that and you would have visibility of that in your sub-accounts "going negative" when you spend too much from the same envelope.
- Everything is managed by build system that is able to track dependencies
- Inputs from financial institutions are kept in the repo as is
- Those inputs are converted by your scripts to .csv files that are readable by PTA import engine
- There are rules files that describe how to convert .csv lines to PTA entries
- Generated files are included from per-year PTA journals (and you can put any manual transactions in here also)
The benefit is that you can change any part of this pipeline, and just re-generate the changed parts:
- improve the program that converts to .csv - raw data immediately gets better across the whole repo
- add/customize import rules - better classification is immediately applied to all of the past data
And with this approach you can start small (like, a single month of data from your primary bank), and refine the thing in steps, like adding more historical data or adding more data sources (examples being not only bank statements, but even things like itemized Amazon orders and Paypal slips).
You have a balance that accrues a monthly interest. Separately, you're told that you're owed a monthly payment. If monthly payment > interest, then the difference is subtracted from the balance. No need for haskell.
On the accounting side you only have liabilities:mortgage which would only include the principal. Then for an individual bill you have to debit liabilities:mortgage the principal portion and expenses:interest the interest portion.
I’m not sure how mortgage bills usually come but for my auto loan the principal vs interest were not noted on the bill, so i had to calculate via apr for each payment which was calculated daily. For calculating interest automatically I used python iirc as i used beancount but that was a while ago.
I just downloaded a bunch of qfx and csv files, and got Claude Code to do this. Took an hour to create the whole system from nothing. Then of course I stayed up until 2am getting CC to create Python rules to categorize things better, and trying to figure out what BEENVERI on my bank statement means
(If you do this, make Claude generate fingerprints for each transaction so it’s easy to add individual overrides…)
Getting Claude to write a FastAPI backend to serve up a “Subscriptions” dashboard took about 3 minutes, plus another minute or two to add an svg bar graph and change ordering.
Crazy times.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464042
However, I just cannot bring myself to constantly pull the transactions down manually from multiple banks.
Many suggest automating. How is this working in practice? Are there providers like Plaid you can use? Build web scrapers? Build PDF statement parsers?
I ended up just paying YNAB the $130/year or whatever they’re at now. High wife approval factor and everything just connects. They also have an API. In theory I could just constantly backup YNAB with PTA by pulling down transactions from the API.
Some I wrote by hand using PyMuPDF, some I coerced Claude into writing (again using PyMuPDF) by uploading a sample bill (I'd never put my own data into an LLM but it's nice being able to find a sample bill, gets it close enough to correct that I can do the remaining bits if there are variations in bills over time).
Overall it's effort (and yes certainly effort for manual transactions). The financial industry is very behind on this stuff clearly. I'm not sure in a few years whether I'll still think it's worth the effort I put in, which has gone down over the past few months as I automate things, but until it stops being fun I'll keep going.
But for most, I understand that they aren’t enjoying what I am doing every couple of weeks. I was using YNAB before but due to how many cards I had something got messed up in the importer all the time. Sometimes my transactions would duplicate or even get triplicated and then I would decline one of them only for it to pop up again a few days later. This lead to a very messed up and not accurate tracking. For me I was just fighting this thing every single day.
This is probably user error but after wiping it 3 times and starting over and over I just gave up and went back to mentally keeping track which worked but I needed something better.
Why would you go that unintuitive route instead of simply having a category "Supermarket" (with your most common supermarkets autocategorized by name) and payee "Netflix"?
Two main goals: track how my expenses evolve over time, and stay on top of how much money I need to reserve for the coming year to pay those bills. Anything that's leftover is spending money. Which I dutifully spend.
I do everything with CSV exports of my bank accounts and credit cards. I drop the exports once a month into a directory and Python scripts (my newer versions of which are mostly written by LLMs) take all the analysis from there, breaking things down by category and by merchant (so that I can see if I'm unintentionally spending more on a particular merchant over time or if that merchant is charging more without notice).
I also have one credit card for strictly recurring expenses ONLY and never put non-recurring expenses on it. That way it's quite easy to see on that credit card bill what changed from month to month. If Comcrap tries to charge me $10 more one month they're getting an LLM bot fighting with their CSR pretty soon.
I do the same. I have a bank account dedicated to all those recurring expenses I track. Every year I make a budget for those categories, work out the monthly average, and set up a transfer for that amount into that account. Some prices fluctuate quite a bit (like power) while my mortgage has a fixed rate, so I apply a healthy margin to make sure there are no nasty surprises.
I think that lack of sound financial education is the real problem here. Of course, it's country-dependent, but I doubt it's done really well in a lot of places. I have a slightly conspiracy-ish theory explaining why good financial education is not a part of primary school curriculum...
If you have plenty of income, tracking grocery expenses might be a waste of time, like tracking how much air you breathe.
If your income is barely meeting your expenses (or worse), the grocery budget is one of the few places you can make meaningful decisions that will lower your costs.
And there's a tricky middle ground where it feels like you have enough income, but if you don't pay attention, you'll die by a thousand cuts to small expenses that feel insignificant by themselves.
I didn't track anything until about 5 years ago as my mental model was "track all purchases", and I wasn't willing to do that. Someone had to point out that higher level tracking can be quite useful too, and this is what I found to work well for me. That's why I bring this up in related topics: it's not an all-or-nothing choice.
I'm a freelancer with variable income so I can't do a fixed investment rate. For me it's useful to see what was the actual rate vs. what I'd like it to be, and the high level view is quite enough to track that.
We track way fewer categories than you do. But in addition, we also track larger expenses by amount. Right now everything over $100 gets an entry. That means a fancy $100+ dinner gets tracked but a normal $30 dinner doesn’t.
I do other people's finances with hledger. That is, if I'm responsible for someone else's money (trustee, etc), I add another layer of complexity for double entry, reconciliation, etc.
Anathema?
Yes, I know the data live in a data-center/cloud. But, don't the content of all those statements, payments and bills live there too. Yes, I know the service might go away tomorrow. But, couldn't one find the new-new service and import it all again from the banks, cc companies, utility companies etc.?
I like text accounting. It's useful. It has a niche. But, is this the best use of your time every month?
Tastes differ, but 30-45 minutes a month to hand-key data (or write the scripts that avoid that) isn't my taste.
I'd wager it isn't most peoples' taste, which is why the off-the-shelf cloud-based options are as popular as they are. I see people in here doing things like writing PDF statement parsers and then dealing with the maintenance that this strategy entails whenever formatting changes and, well, I appreciate the people to whom this appeals, but I am not one of those people. :)
Beancount is both, but you can do either one or the other or both. In particular, you DONT need to learn double entry to do plain text accounting. Of course, you SHOULD learn double entry accounting because it's a great tool for organizing knowledge.
Whether plain text is beneficial for accounting is less clear cut in my mind. I think plain text is backlash against the over-reliance on "services", "clouds", and "lock in", but I think it's misguided. If you're concerned with someone locking you in, it's perfectly concievable to do double entry accounting which lives only on your computer and manipulated with software that is under your control (read: free software).
So in summary, my opinon is:
- accounting: important
- double entry: important
- avoid clouds and ventor lock in: important
- avoid proprietary file formats: important
- plain text: unimportant
(I use GnuCash. It's not without its flaws, but it's great if you agree with the above views)
First, automation is a new orthogonal dimension. You can have automation with or without plain text.
Second, your emphasis on "automation" leads me to believe that perhaps you misunderstand what accounting is. Accounting is not just taking a list of transactions and recording them (database, file etc). That is called *bookkeeping". Yes, accounting is also amenable to automation, but much less so than bookkeeping. Although, you could argue that when applied to the life of a normal individual, accounting and bookkeeping are almost indistinguishable. You have income, you have costs, and you have a mortgage - pretty straightforward. My point is in general you cannot entirely automate accounting. The reason for that is that accounting isn't just processing bytes, but instead requires the understanding of the underlying economics associated with the transactions. This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other than the accountant's mental model.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. It isn’t impossible (for most use cases) to embed that mental model into your automation tools.
You the correct that it means you can’t have purely general purpose automation that will do all accounting work for every entity, but you could certainly create automation rules that cover everything (or nearly everything) for some particular entity.
The fact that accountants still exist should tell you that you're mistaken.
I've been using it for years, and it helps a lot. I would pay good money for someone to improve the UI, maybe even separate the accounting engine into a library that could be used by different UIs.
On the point of "library" - you know that GnuCash the apps comes with its lib, and there's python wrappers?
(Just kidding ;))
Finally I discovered PTA. I chose hledger (because of possible performance issues with beancount). I learned double-entry bookkeeping (it's pretty simple, honestly). I write Python scripts to import investment statements sent in PDF format (broker does not support transaction downloads) and pay stubs (payroll company does not do transaction downloads) and CSV imports for bank and credit card statements which lets me autocategorize most transactions. Turns out it's exactly what I wanted all this time I just didn't know it.
I spend about an hour each month updating accounts. I generate investment reports, budget reports, and tax summaries. It's all there, except tracking the ACB of my investments (which I probably could do except a simple spreadsheet is less effort). Everything I need for my coming retirement this year.
And because it's plain text I will never have to lose everything when data formats change due to new upstream releases. And because it's plain text I can use git to track changes and recover and do better off-site backups.
I guess the downside is it doesn't work on your phone and you have to know what you're doing. But if information like how much money you have and where you're spending it is actually important, it's the right tool for the job.
But I can't find an alternative that has cracked the killer feature: Syncing with each of my online accounts. I like to track every expense and every transfer down to the penny, and then update from the bank's online connection to confirm each of them. I do this daily so I can catch any fraud or mistakes. I have 27 accounts tracked, and I'm simply not going to log in to each of them using their janky web sites, download CSVs, and import them manually into personal finance software. It's just not going to happen. Quicken's support for this is far and away the best out there.
Doing this all in plaintext and copy/pasting from downloaded CSVs every day seems like an absolute nightmare.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be banks turning down their public-facing OFX services, and instead moving to the model where Intuit is the middleman and you need to tether yourself to them, who in turn channel your requests to the banks. So it's been getting even more and more difficult to escape from Quicken.
[0] https://tiller.com/
On the other hand, downloading a PDF or a CSV from time to time isn't that much of a hassle. I have Python scripts to parse the PDF and output hledger text, and hledger itself reads the CSV files and autocategorizes the transactions (I had to supply the categorization rules, naturally). You don't have to import anything, it's plain text. You don't have to copy/paste anything.
If there were APIs to download transactions, it would be as simple as
or something. Of course, you don't get the colourful eye candy of Quicken.I'm also yet to migrate to beancount v3.
I think a nice thing about beancount is that given how simple it is you can almost even ignore whole parts of it. In my case I chose to write my own importing tooling essentially without learning at all about the built-in one: https://github.com/Julian/alubia. I had no intention to make that approachable for lots of users not named me (in fact none of my actual importers are present) but it's been very fun to watch my ledger get more and more accurate.
I am already used to logging everything manually, so importing isn't needed for me. Also I think having some 'manual labor' in this regard can help with becoming more 'in tune with your finances', to actually learn what is going on, instead of having an app that you check once a month.
Intuit sucks as a company, but I can hack my way around their requirements for upgrades
All those require standard entries and processes, which I've yet to find, which means that now I need to become an accountant and write these standard tools.
None of which generates any income and only creates more work for myself.
I absolutely hate my current accounting software, but this is not (yet) a viable option as far as I can tell.
Happy to learn I'm wrong.
https://beancount.github.io/fava/
I really like its big picture view of the accounts, the search / query interface, and live editing of transactions.
It's crazy to see just how much money I've paid Netflix since 2015 (and I'm a sub since 2011). Or Starbucks (which I rarely go to). But it's very powerful. One thing I've long wanted is better visualizations.
I just have 1 text file with monthly data. Each month is on a separate line, with only 5 columns (expanded below).
Where the date is the last day of the month that I need to make (the next day there is income, for me it's 19th, not 31th). Saldo is my bank account that day. Savings are, well, savings in a separate account. delta is the sum of special income and outcome. row 5 is all special income and expenses. Groceries are not listed, I need them every month anyway.I started storing all my notes (500+ by today) in markdown files locally. It's easy to search and navigate with grep and ag/rg. It's easy to edit in Vim or your favorite editor. It's easy to append all sorts of informations. I add some flags and properties in metadata, like last_reviewed, some tags, etc.
The versioning and sync is solved by git + a private github repo.
I'm now considering combining by finances with my partner. It would make a lot of things easier. We'd get paid into a joint account and then pay ourselves into individual "spending accounts" according to our budget. Anyone have any experience with this kind of thing?
Really awesome to have control finally. I am very interested in extending PTA to be more like blockchain ledgers, with signing for every transaction and decentralizing the ledger. still mulling through how this would work, but it would essentially be KERI based.
I think I'll finally give PTA and beancount a go this year. I'm tired of changing and re-learning tools due to enshittifcation, so I heavily prefer those that use open formats / plaintext. I use Obsidian for my notes, specifically because it's just Markdown files. Since I realized that I don't even really use most of Obsidian's features, I might just switch to a regular editor + a markdown viewer.
https://github.com/beancount/beancount/blob/master/README.rs...
I made a tool that parses transactions (of my specific bank) into categories based on tx description and a GUI to analyze them in different time frames.
Highly recommend.
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