I mentioned this in another HN post from yesterday about beancount, one of the tools that uses this approach. My beancount file is nearly 3 years old now and I

I mentioned this in another HN post from yesterday about beancount, one of the tools that uses this approach. My beancount file is nearly 3 years old now and I love it. Maybe it's overkill for personal finances, but I've tried countless other PF tracking tools and online services and none of them have the flexibility you get from tools like this. For example, tracking RSU vests, my house purchase etc. Combining beancount with Fava gives you a nice visualisation tool as well which auto updates when it notices the underlying beancount file has changed. I edit the file in Emacs using the beancount-mode, it's actually the only thing I use Emacs for but I have a bunch of custom elisp functions that add things to the file whilst I'm editing it. I don't bother with any auto txn importers, which does make it a manual process but it's like 10-15 minutes a week at most. Additionally most of my purchases are generally quite rote so a lot of them are just copy/paste from previous txns and modify the date and amount. This might not scale if I have a partner, but for now just Emacs + vim keybindings + a few custom elisp fns + a little patience works for me!