4 ms·

Seconding this request, I do something similar and it is quite janky

bbkane 3y ago
Mine is janky as well, but here's a writeup of what I do - https://www.bbkane.com/blog/monthly-banking-report/ https://www.bbkane.com/blog/monthly-banking-report/ I'm very interested in improvement suggestions or comments you may have (just reply to this comment).
- alanbernstein 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing! I think everyone has their own expectations/needs from a tool like this, so just for the sake of comparison: For classification and visualization I prefer tags (not necessarily mutually exclusive) rather than categories (too rigid and therefore arbitrary and therefore hard to keep consistent), but then the database management becomes more complicated (need a transactions-tags table or equivalent). I want to automate the classification as much as possible, so I set up merchant-tags, which are automatically applied to all matching transactions. Again, this means managing a merchants table. It turned out that both the number of repeat merchants is high (so lots of patterns to maintain; these are stored in the DB as part of the merchant record, rather than in the code) and the number of novel merchants is high (so still spend a lot of time on the manual classification). Part of the motivation for the above complexity was a vision of some kind of dynamic, auto-generated, multi-level breakdown of cost categories. For example, I might want to see a "date night" tag in both food>dining>date night, and entertainment>date night. Anyway, all the above complexity was fragile, and too much work on top of the manual classification. A few years ago something in the DB broke and I just didn't get around to fixing it. I probably need to restart with something simpler. Also, I'm considering trying this: https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/
  - bbkane 3y ago
    Yeah I use tags for browser bookmarks, but I find that it's very hard to remember the names of tags over time. +1 on restarting with something similar. If you can get away without a db it might be easier
    - alanbernstein 3y ago
      Oh yeah, that's the other thing, tags effectively require an auto complete interface, and I didn't have that.

Mine is janky as well, but here's a writeup of what I do - https://www.bbkane.com/blog/monthly-banking-report/ https://www.bbkane.com/blog/monthly-banking-report/ I'm very interested in improvement suggestions or comments you may have (just reply to this comment).

alanbernstein 3y ago
Thanks for sharing! I think everyone has their own expectations/needs from a tool like this, so just for the sake of comparison: For classification and visualization I prefer tags (not necessarily mutually exclusive) rather than categories (too rigid and therefore arbitrary and therefore hard to keep consistent), but then the database management becomes more complicated (need a transactions-tags table or equivalent). I want to automate the classification as much as possible, so I set up merchant-tags, which are automatically applied to all matching transactions. Again, this means managing a merchants table. It turned out that both the number of repeat merchants is high (so lots of patterns to maintain; these are stored in the DB as part of the merchant record, rather than in the code) and the number of novel merchants is high (so still spend a lot of time on the manual classification). Part of the motivation for the above complexity was a vision of some kind of dynamic, auto-generated, multi-level breakdown of cost categories. For example, I might want to see a "date night" tag in both food>dining>date night, and entertainment>date night. Anyway, all the above complexity was fragile, and too much work on top of the manual classification. A few years ago something in the DB broke and I just didn't get around to fixing it. I probably need to restart with something simpler. Also, I'm considering trying this: https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/
- bbkane 3y ago
  Yeah I use tags for browser bookmarks, but I find that it's very hard to remember the names of tags over time. +1 on restarting with something similar. If you can get away without a db it might be easier
  - alanbernstein 3y ago
    Oh yeah, that's the other thing, tags effectively require an auto complete interface, and I didn't have that.