full-fledged-hledger

I've tried to track personal finances several times, but it only started to work when I've discovered the idea (from https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger) that you need to treat the whole PTA story more like a project compilation: - 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

I have a very similar setup but with HLedger[1]. A "do-nothing"[2] script helps me download statements by opening bank websites, waits for manual import and finally checks balances. That makes it a lot less repetitive and error prone. Or at least, I catch the errors faster. I've found HLedger and Shake to be fast enough to process almost a decade of finances. Dmitry Astapov has an extremely well produced tutorial workflow[3]. How have you managed the PDF parsing? Mine has become a bit of a mess dealing with slight variations in formatting as they change over time. I've been considering using LLMs but have been nervous about quality. [1]: https://hledger.org [2]: https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-... [3]: https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger

My partner and I have been tracking all our spending for the last five years with hledger (ledger reimplemented in haskell) and some custom import and management scripts inspired by "Full-fledged hledger" [1]. More recently we added Plaid [2] for auto-importing from financial accounts. I love having a plain-text history and being able to ask complex queries. One unexpectedly-sweet benefit is that your spending is a high-granularity record of where you have been and what you have been doing, encoding some signals you might not have thought to write in a diary. Things like "that was when we were saving for our down payment" or "I was going to coffee shops every day trying to finish my dissertation" or "that was when we had a pandemic." I enjoy looking back through our ledger the same way I enjoy going way back in my gmail history. [1] https

I've recently come across two systems that use hledger for processing bank statements: https://pauley.org.za/hledger-flow/ https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger/wiki They treat the statements as the single source of truth, with preprocessing and rules that can be used to turn them into hledger journals.

I agree that entering large numbers of manual transaction can be clunky, but for the occasional single transaction it can be pretty quick. For larger numbers of transactions, I've created a rules file that hledger uses to parse the downloaded CSV file from my bank to create a fairly detailed journal entry. (https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/wiki/Convert%20CSV%2...). The real added benefit for me is using git not only for my journal file, but also for the CSV files. It gives me an immutable record of transactions from my bank. I had a revelatory experience reading adept's methods for tracking his financials. Version control for everything. https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger