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Wow, two posts about accounting at the very top of the front page! Must be a slow Sunday. For my (extremely simple) accounting needs for my book writing, I loo

Wow, two posts about accounting at the very top of the front page! Must be a slow Sunday. For my (extremely simple) accounting needs for my book writing, I looked at some of the packages, got turned off by the subscriptions, and realized I could do what little I needed just by opening a separate bank account, and doing all the costs & revenue through that. The bank takes care of the storage, and you can download a CSV of the whole year and import that into a spreadsheet. Some massaging and then give it to the accountant. Obviously for a real business, you need something more, so I'm not saying this would work for everyone.

bombcar 3y ago
You can do a simplified budgeting this way - get a debit card and a few credit cards, and use one for food only, one for household expenses only, etc. Now you’re tracked monthly with no hassling with categorization.
pmcginn 3y ago
Reading the LWN post about why they chose GnuCash was a great reminder to me of why I chose beancount--all the other financial solutions out there did about 80-90% of what I wanted, but never 100%, and no way to get them to 100% either. I'm not a programmer, so I had to install and learn a lot of tools along the way, but now there's literally nothing I want to do with my financial data that I can't. It's all just text files, python, git, csv, and json. I haven't encountered a single problem that I wasn't able to solve with just a bit of time and searching through stackoverflow or github.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Very true. A lot of these big systems expend effort on basic stuff (storing, displaying, dating, categorizing, summarizing) that's done just as well by other systems. Also, your accountant doesn't need every transaction; just the categorized totals are good enough. He/she doesn't mind entering a FEW numbers in by hand.
hammyhavoc 3y ago
> Wow, two posts about accounting at the very top of the front page! Must be a slow Sunday. Or more people are feeling the cost of living squeeze and/or have been laid off and are trying to figure out their finances.

bombcar 3y ago

You can do a simplified budgeting this way - get a debit card and a few credit cards, and use one for food only, one for household expenses only, etc. Now you’re tracked monthly with no hassling with categorization.

pmcginn 3y ago

Reading the LWN post about why they chose GnuCash was a great reminder to me of why I chose beancount--all the other financial solutions out there did about 80-90% of what I wanted, but never 100%, and no way to get them to 100% either. I'm not a programmer, so I had to install and learn a lot of tools along the way, but now there's literally nothing I want to do with my financial data that I can't. It's all just text files, python, git, csv, and json. I haven't encountered a single problem that I wasn't able to solve with just a bit of time and searching through stackoverflow or github.

AlbertCory 3y ago
Very true. A lot of these big systems expend effort on basic stuff (storing, displaying, dating, categorizing, summarizing) that's done just as well by other systems. Also, your accountant doesn't need every transaction; just the categorized totals are good enough. He/she doesn't mind entering a FEW numbers in by hand.

hammyhavoc 3y ago

> Wow, two posts about accounting at the very top of the front page! Must be a slow Sunday. Or more people are feeling the cost of living squeeze and/or have been laid off and are trying to figure out their finances.