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I can easily see both depending on how diligently people track their spending. I have a budgeting system setup that adds a task to my daily to-do list if my ban

by WJW 3y ago

I can easily see both depending on how diligently people track their spending. I have a budgeting system setup that adds a task to my daily to-do list if my bank balance differs from what is in my hledger files (ie if I have transactions in my bank account that I have not yet put into hledger). The chances of me not being aware of on-card spending is extremely low. Cash money is not tracked nearly as accurately though, I don't bother tracking it when I spend a few euro on some sandwich from a roadside stall.

jfim 3y ago
That sounds like a pretty interesting setup, how do you have it work with your bank accounts?
- WJW 3y ago
  It's extremely hacky and there is barely any automation at all. Everyday at 0500 a cronjob uses https://github.com/djc/abna https://github.com/djc/abna to fetch the bank balance and makes no effort at all to automatically parse more than the balance. It then compares that with what the balance "should" be according to hledger and sets up a todo item if there is any difference. Somewhere during the day I manually reconcile the two and check off the todo item. I'm sure it could be smarter with automatic parsing and whatnot, but I actually kinda like the manual action. It makes sure I'm aware of everything happening to my bank account. Time spent per day is actually quite low because it's kept updated and there is never any big backlog of transactions. I would say it takes 2-3 minutes if there are any transactions, or zero ofc if I didn't spend anything.
noeontheend 3y ago
Can I ask how you get the current balance from your bank (i.e., do you have a bank that provides a nice API, or is there another trick you're using)? I've spent a lot of time looking for a way to automatically download transactions from all my accounts but still have to either enter them by hand or manually log in and download a CSV to import.

by WJW 3y ago

jfim 3y ago

That sounds like a pretty interesting setup, how do you have it work with your bank accounts?

WJW 3y ago
It's extremely hacky and there is barely any automation at all. Everyday at 0500 a cronjob uses https://github.com/djc/abna https://github.com/djc/abna to fetch the bank balance and makes no effort at all to automatically parse more than the balance. It then compares that with what the balance "should" be according to hledger and sets up a todo item if there is any difference. Somewhere during the day I manually reconcile the two and check off the todo item. I'm sure it could be smarter with automatic parsing and whatnot, but I actually kinda like the manual action. It makes sure I'm aware of everything happening to my bank account. Time spent per day is actually quite low because it's kept updated and there is never any big backlog of transactions. I would say it takes 2-3 minutes if there are any transactions, or zero ofc if I didn't spend anything.

noeontheend 3y ago

Can I ask how you get the current balance from your bank (i.e., do you have a bank that provides a nice API, or is there another trick you're using)? I've spent a lot of time looking for a way to automatically download transactions from all my accounts but still have to either enter them by hand or manually log in and download a CSV to import.