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> If you share your finances with N people (family) or N companies (free-lancer/consultant, etc), the path of least resistance to financial sanity is a well-mai

by uryga 6y ago

> If you share your finances with N people (family) or N companies (free-lancer/consultant, etc), the path of least resistance to financial sanity is a well-maintained ledger. that was it for me! i started using hledger because of: - tracking irregular payments from a bunch of sources, often outstanding for a while - tracking how much somebody owes me / i owe them - being pretty much cash-only for a long while (long story). with cash, if you don't track the expenses manually, you wake up at the end of the month with a whole bunch of money gone and no idea what happened to it - not knowing how much money i actually have available because it's spread across my wallet / bank account / paypal / piggy bank hledger really helped me not go crazy with all of this! PS. another unexpected benefit - tracking expenses can also help with ambient worries like "ugh i spend too much on takeout food". like, if you track it, at the end of the month you can look at how much you spent on it and conclude that it's actually reasonable (within your budget) and stop feeling guilty about it!

gen220 6y ago
Everything you described is a great gateway drug for GNUPlot :) Inspired by your example, here's our rolling monthly sums of food expenses, COVID marked [1]. You can see where we moved (temporarily) to a place with lower food costs, and stopped eating out. But there's also a dip around the holidays, because we spend a lot of that time with family and our food expenses go down proportionally. That dip happens to be consistent YoY, but we don't realize it because we have other things on our mind. It's just great fun to have this stuff at your fingerprints. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/8wb6YLn https://imgur.com/a/8wb6YLn
- uryga 6y ago
  i haven't used gnuplot before, what's your setup for getting these? a monthly-cumulative plot is exactly what i'm missing from hledger-web.
  - gen220 6y ago
    I’d never used it before using it for ledger, either! It’s kind of tricky. I have an AWK script that reads a ledger report to compute the X and Y-value pairs. These are written to a temp file that is read by GNUPlot. It’s a bit of work to get setup, but I’m able to copy paste the idea around my reports. I’ve also found the GNUPlot manual to be very easy to read! I’m away from my laptop now, but I’ll add a gist tomorrow.
    - gen220 6y ago
      Here's the pastebin for those interested. (it's three files). It probably would have been better done in python (I probably wouldn't have needed the zero-inserting hack), but it works pretty well. https://pastebin.com/mxXDqqTK https://pastebin.com/mxXDqqTK
  - smichael 6y ago
    You can use command-line hledger to produce the appropriate balance report data as CSV, suitable for gnuplot (or drag into a spreadsheet and use the charting tools there).

by uryga 6y ago

gen220 6y ago

Everything you described is a great gateway drug for GNUPlot :) Inspired by your example, here's our rolling monthly sums of food expenses, COVID marked [1]. You can see where we moved (temporarily) to a place with lower food costs, and stopped eating out. But there's also a dip around the holidays, because we spend a lot of that time with family and our food expenses go down proportionally. That dip happens to be consistent YoY, but we don't realize it because we have other things on our mind. It's just great fun to have this stuff at your fingerprints. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/8wb6YLn https://imgur.com/a/8wb6YLn

uryga 6y ago
i haven't used gnuplot before, what's your setup for getting these? a monthly-cumulative plot is exactly what i'm missing from hledger-web.
- gen220 6y ago
  I’d never used it before using it for ledger, either! It’s kind of tricky. I have an AWK script that reads a ledger report to compute the X and Y-value pairs. These are written to a temp file that is read by GNUPlot. It’s a bit of work to get setup, but I’m able to copy paste the idea around my reports. I’ve also found the GNUPlot manual to be very easy to read! I’m away from my laptop now, but I’ll add a gist tomorrow.
  - gen220 6y ago
    Here's the pastebin for those interested. (it's three files). It probably would have been better done in python (I probably wouldn't have needed the zero-inserting hack), but it works pretty well. https://pastebin.com/mxXDqqTK https://pastebin.com/mxXDqqTK
- smichael 6y ago
  You can use command-line hledger to produce the appropriate balance report data as CSV, suitable for gnuplot (or drag into a spreadsheet and use the charting tools there).