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Just looking through the docs of one of these apps called Ledger [0], it seems to me it’s a lot of work to keep everything up to date. I guess one could write

by wsc981 5y ago

Just looking through the docs of one of these apps called Ledger [0], it seems to me it’s a lot of work to keep everything up to date. I guess one could write tools to ease importing data from banks, brokers and the like. Currently I don’t do the full accounting stuff. I just keep track of my net worth using an Apple provided Numbers sheet. It’s easy and quick, just occasionally logging into all my accounts and then updating the values in the sheet. This way I don’t get the historical overview, but at least the data can be updated in just a couple of minutes. As long as I see my net worth rise over time, I am happy. —- [0]: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.pdf https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.pdf

ilammy 5y ago
> it seems to me it’s a lot of work to keep everything up to date Unless you do dozens of transactions every day, it's not much of a hassle to keep track of them manually. If you're like a day trader or a small business owner then yeah, you'll probably need some helper tools.
- wsc981 5y ago
  > Unless you do dozens of transactions every day, it's not much of a hassle to keep track of them manually. I don't have too many transactions indeed. I am actually contemplating to switching from my Numbers sheet to the Ledger command line tool. I do like that this tool is multiplatform and based on simple text files. And it shouldn't be too hard to write a few scripts to convert data from my banks and brokers into the format used by Ledger. I guess I'd need a day to setup everything, so perhaps it'd be a decent weekend project. Eventually I would like to leave the macOS platform and not relying on Numbers would make the switch just a little bit easier.
  - kqr 5y ago
    I actually switched from the plain-text hledger to a spreadsheet. I still do double-entry in the spreadsheet, but the latter was easier to use on the phone (0--3 transactions per day) and easier to share with other family members.
hiq 5y ago
It looks like you don't feel like doing full accounting, in that case I'd say it's fine to stick to whatever you're doing. Accounting not done properly (e.g. with missing or incorrect transactions) is not (much) better than no accounting at all. In my case, I grew frustrated with my approximations. Computing the difference between my balances at different points in time hides the details that would make it actionable, or give any insight about past choices. So in practice I would go through my past transactions, try to get an intuition of what happened. At this point, switching to proper accounting is just about scratching an itch and making this whole process more efficient.

by wsc981 5y ago

ilammy 5y ago

> it seems to me it’s a lot of work to keep everything up to date Unless you do dozens of transactions every day, it's not much of a hassle to keep track of them manually. If you're like a day trader or a small business owner then yeah, you'll probably need some helper tools.

wsc981 5y ago
> Unless you do dozens of transactions every day, it's not much of a hassle to keep track of them manually. I don't have too many transactions indeed. I am actually contemplating to switching from my Numbers sheet to the Ledger command line tool. I do like that this tool is multiplatform and based on simple text files. And it shouldn't be too hard to write a few scripts to convert data from my banks and brokers into the format used by Ledger. I guess I'd need a day to setup everything, so perhaps it'd be a decent weekend project. Eventually I would like to leave the macOS platform and not relying on Numbers would make the switch just a little bit easier.
- kqr 5y ago
  I actually switched from the plain-text hledger to a spreadsheet. I still do double-entry in the spreadsheet, but the latter was easier to use on the phone (0--3 transactions per day) and easier to share with other family members.

hiq 5y ago

It looks like you don't feel like doing full accounting, in that case I'd say it's fine to stick to whatever you're doing. Accounting not done properly (e.g. with missing or incorrect transactions) is not (much) better than no accounting at all. In my case, I grew frustrated with my approximations. Computing the difference between my balances at different points in time hides the details that would make it actionable, or give any insight about past choices. So in practice I would go through my past transactions, try to get an intuition of what happened. At this point, switching to proper accounting is just about scratching an itch and making this whole process more efficient.