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This all seems too complex for most people. I use Google Sheets, I import a year-to-date csv from my bank and credit card every month, categorize each transacti

This all seems too complex for most people. I use Google Sheets, I import a year-to-date csv from my bank and credit card every month, categorize each transaction, then use QUERY to aggregate expenses by category. This data I feed into a rough budgeting sheet which I use for expense trimming. This monthly maintenance takes maybe 30 minutes. And I have another sheet to compute net worth - retirement and brokerage accounts hold funds for which I can get a price using the GOOGLEFINANCE function, so the numbers change over time and I know pretty much down to the penny what my net worth is after I sorta manually enter in a couple bank balances.

NicoJuicy 6y ago
Do you have a similar public sheet as example?
- mattbillenstein 6y ago
  Yes, I've tried to get a few friends who don't budget at all into some sort of system - so I made this template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c24ZmUy19_n_QggMOjcEFUO9oqULpNDAT7JHL4N62yU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c24ZmUy19_n_QggMOjcE...
igpay 6y ago
I'd definitely agree that this is overkill for most people. In your case, though, I think that you could put the same amount of work into GnuCash and get the same results without writing any code. Plus you'd have a GUI with built in reports and whatnot. Not sure if that matters to you. In the article, I briefly touch on skipping manual transaction logging and just importing statements from your bank / credit card. And I gloss over this, but it looks like GnuCash offers similar functionality for automatically updating stock prices https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Online_Quotes https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Online_Quotes - not sure if it's a pain to set up or not, but it's probably not as easy as just calling a google sheets function. Seems like you wouldn't have any reasons to switch over given that you've already got a nice system going, but just wanted to point out that you can use GnuCash in a way that's not quite as... rigid as the way I use it :)
- mattbillenstein 6y ago
  I don't really want a GUI - or the GUI I want is a spreadsheet. I have some charts and graphs embedded with the data - like net worth over time, brokerage over time, etc. My worry with a baked system is it doesn't have the data in a way I want in a chart, whereas with this system, I can pretty much create whatever I want from the raw data in the sheet...
  - lbotos 6y ago
    Tiller is trying to build exactly that: https://www.tillerhq.com/ https://www.tillerhq.com/ I haven't used, because I use personal capital and they both used Yodlee, and my biggest gripe about personal capital is yodlee isn't keeping up with 2fa style logins from banks
- jldugger 6y ago
  Online quotes is fairly easy to set up. First you set up the ticker symbol in the prices menu, then you set an account for the stock, make the type "Stock" and set the currency to the symbol in question. From then on, you can just 'get new data' and stuff mostly updates automatically. However, stock symbol APIs break on the regular, so there can be times when this process is broken until a fix is published and you upgrade.
mjs7231 6y ago
When I was using Google sheets I was really looking at this company Tiller to auto-fetch my transactions. I never actually tried them out, but the service looks pretty compelling: https://www.tillerhq.com/ https://www.tillerhq.com/
- sklarsa 6y ago
  I've been using Tiller for a few months and really enjoy the flexibility of using spreadsheets to manage my finances. Some of the sheets aren't incredibly flexible because there are a lot of macros updating them behind the scenes, but Tiller is constantly developing new analyses, and it's very easy to extract data for your own custom sheets. Also, data entry (mostly for transaction categorization) is a breeze, which is a huge plus for me, and the ability to easily add custom categories is huge.

NicoJuicy 6y ago

Do you have a similar public sheet as example?

mattbillenstein 6y ago
Yes, I've tried to get a few friends who don't budget at all into some sort of system - so I made this template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c24ZmUy19_n_QggMOjcEFUO9oqULpNDAT7JHL4N62yU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c24ZmUy19_n_QggMOjcE...

igpay 6y ago

I'd definitely agree that this is overkill for most people. In your case, though, I think that you could put the same amount of work into GnuCash and get the same results without writing any code. Plus you'd have a GUI with built in reports and whatnot. Not sure if that matters to you. In the article, I briefly touch on skipping manual transaction logging and just importing statements from your bank / credit card. And I gloss over this, but it looks like GnuCash offers similar functionality for automatically updating stock prices https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Online_Quotes https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Online_Quotes - not sure if it's a pain to set up or not, but it's probably not as easy as just calling a google sheets function. Seems like you wouldn't have any reasons to switch over given that you've already got a nice system going, but just wanted to point out that you can use GnuCash in a way that's not quite as... rigid as the way I use it :)

mattbillenstein 6y ago
I don't really want a GUI - or the GUI I want is a spreadsheet. I have some charts and graphs embedded with the data - like net worth over time, brokerage over time, etc. My worry with a baked system is it doesn't have the data in a way I want in a chart, whereas with this system, I can pretty much create whatever I want from the raw data in the sheet...
- lbotos 6y ago
  Tiller is trying to build exactly that: https://www.tillerhq.com/ https://www.tillerhq.com/ I haven't used, because I use personal capital and they both used Yodlee, and my biggest gripe about personal capital is yodlee isn't keeping up with 2fa style logins from banks
jldugger 6y ago
Online quotes is fairly easy to set up. First you set up the ticker symbol in the prices menu, then you set an account for the stock, make the type "Stock" and set the currency to the symbol in question. From then on, you can just 'get new data' and stuff mostly updates automatically. However, stock symbol APIs break on the regular, so there can be times when this process is broken until a fix is published and you upgrade.

mjs7231 6y ago

When I was using Google sheets I was really looking at this company Tiller to auto-fetch my transactions. I never actually tried them out, but the service looks pretty compelling: https://www.tillerhq.com/ https://www.tillerhq.com/

sklarsa 6y ago
I've been using Tiller for a few months and really enjoy the flexibility of using spreadsheets to manage my finances. Some of the sheets aren't incredibly flexible because there are a lot of macros updating them behind the scenes, but Tiller is constantly developing new analyses, and it's very easy to extract data for your own custom sheets. Also, data entry (mostly for transaction categorization) is a breeze, which is a huge plus for me, and the ability to easily add custom categories is huge.