9/19/2023 0 Comments Quicken vs gnucashThe financial software market has grown a bit more competitive. Back in those days, Quicken was amazing, in part because there was nothing quite like it, but today, there are several great Quicken alternatives. Also it would be a pretty huge piece of code to write using spreadsheet macros (not that this ever stopped anyone before -) ).Quicken has been around a long time - since 1983 to be exact, making it ancient in the personal finance software world. Like I said, you could do it with a spreadsheet, but without the constraints of the file format/validation it will be pretty easy to make a mistake. ledger and the like are really just file formats coupled with a validator and a few canned reports. I can write code to automate transactions and I can do it in any language I like. I can write my own reports using any language I want. My text editor is already an extension of my hands. Perhaps that's why I find double entry accounting soothing now :-)Īs a programmer, I find ledger/hledger/beancount to be the most convenient way to do things. I never reconciled the books and so never noticed the errors. The downsides for screwing up can be massive (especially if you get your taxes wrong!) I have personal experience with the government handing me huge penalty fees for mistakes that my employer made with various things (stock options, etc). If you are running a company, or you have a large portfolio of stocks/bonds/etc, or if you are dependent on transactions in FOREX, then double entry accounting is usually a necessary tool. But it's kind of neat/cool/zen to do it anyway. For most people double entry accounting for your home finances is overkill - you probably don't care if you make mistakes because the consequences are pretty small. "Fun" is not really the word to use, but it's a bit like fishing when you don't really expect to catch anything -). I find double entry accounting weirdly soothing. There are other kinds of reports you can do, but your main purpose is to ensure that there haven't been any errors. You have transactions against accounts and you are trying to validate that the transactions are consistent. A ledger is a tool for double entry accounting. I have rows and columns and I can do arbitrary calculations on rows, columns and various cells. You could do it in a spreadsheet, but it would be very difficult and error prone.Ī spreadsheet is more of a general calculating device. These ledger programs don't really do the same job as a spreadsheet. Several friends use YNAB (there's also financier.io) instead for those needs. I'm still wrapping my head around how to leverage beancount to function as a budgeting / forecasting tool. You don't have to do it for everything, just the ones that are too unwieldy for tracking manual transactions. You might find some odd ones on github but you ultimately want to write your own - the examples in beancount's source code are a good starting point. Writing your own importers is part of the learning curve. Ultimately you'll find yourself refactoring/re-categorizing things over time, and because it's in a git repo you won't be afraid to be ruthless about this. It's a masochistic option but really wanted some historical data. I went through the exercise of categorizing many transactions from earlier years. but those aren't perfect because the data from mint isn't always perfect. And no you don't have to be an emacs/vim nerd to do this (i'm using sublime FWIW). Use syntax highlighting & more importantly code folding. The ledger file will get big, but it's easier than having multiple files. ) is great but is dense and spread out a bit, thankfully their email list ( !forum/beancount ) is pretty active and helpful. Your situation may vary but it took me a while since I didn't organize finances at all before aside from earlier attempts of using mint. It took me about a year from committing to organize my finances this way to now having a regular import-review-commit workflow. Or just write your own script for a custom report. But eventually you get rewarded once all the data is in and can leverage web-based frontends like fava to visualize and filter things. Plus, recategorizing/restructuring things The repo gives you a feedback loop of how often you're keeping up with your finances. Yeah, I've particularly liked the approach suggested by Beancount - you in some ways treat your finances like a software project - meaning you keep the plain text ledger file, importers, and documents structured and all in a git repository.
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