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Show HN: Using mkdir to track financial transactions

• HenryBemis 3y ago
  "My goal is to create the easiest way to enter transactions for those who live in the terminal." Are you TRYING to make your life difficult? :) How about a 'simple' spreadsheet, with Date, Amount, Currency, Shop/Vendor, and then 2-3 columns with "Necessary/Unnecessary/Junk", "BAU/Vacations/Work", and/or Town (to be able to calculate that your trip to Paris actually cost a total of X (tickets, hotel, drinks, etc). I spent a lot of time trying to solve this for myself, and trust me when I tell you.. mkdir for transactions did not cross my mind at all :) EDIT: with an excel spreadsheet you can then use Pivot tables to get meaningful data per-category-per-month so you can see side-by-side that groceries in June-at-home cost less than groceries in-September-at-home (and so on).
  • elpachongco 3y ago
    Yes it's not for everyone. But in my defense, difficult is subjective. I built this for me because this is easier to me. It's a single line I have to keep in mind. The goal here is to remove the friction on entering the data. It means that it has to be highly available, fast, and easy. Though, I admit even I'm not sure if this project can actually achieve those things (even for me)[1]. This is just a personal experiment that I wanted to share. I've actually tried the spreadsheet approach for 6 months. I tried to record all transactions I made in those 6 months. What I've observed is that it becomes too slow. Maybe there are clever workarounds but the spreadsheet just feels unfriendly to me. Also, I usually have slow 4g connection (Philippines) and I'm using a phone from 2016[2]. These variables are guranteed to NOT make a frictionless experience. > I spent a lot of time trying to solve this for myself, and trust me when I tell you.. mkdir for transactions did not cross my mind at all :) Haha. I've been working on exiftool and was looking for methods to track every transaction I have. I'm not sure what happened. I don't know how useful this will become but learning awk is a nice side effect. > How about a 'simple' spreadsheet, with Date, Amount, Currency, Shop/Vendor, and then 2-3 columns with "Necessary/Unnecessary/Junk", "BAU/Vacations/Work", and/or Town (to be able to calculate that your trip to Paris actually cost a total of X (tickets, hotel, drinks, etc). This approach doesn't scale for me. Sure, tools can handle the data but can you? I sure can't. When a busy month comes, that's going to be a messy spreadsheet with gaps. Which makes the month-per-month comparisons almost impossible. Also, do you need that much data? I'm only concerned about where things go so I think this is enough. [1] as stated in the README: https://github.com/elpachongco/finance-tracker#state-of-this-project https://github.com/elpachongco/finance-tracker#state-of-this... [2] I've written a bit about the phone: https://elpachongco.github.io/uses/#the-phone---lg-v20 https://elpachongco.github.io/uses/#the-phone---lg-v20
• redavni 3y ago
  If this works for you, great, but seems overly complicated. Possibly you could support double entry accounting with diff? :)
• ttyprintk 3y ago
  Two advantages to this: - muscle memory is easy to change - format is easy to migrate One migration would be sqlite, which has advantages: - found everywhere with Python - A custom command to slot in for mkdir would be maybe 10 lines - sharing is straightforward - if kept simple-enough, two unrelated databases can be manually merged offline with two `sqlite dump` text files. I do the manual merge all the time within vim: autocmd FileType sql let &makeprg='sqlite3 %:r:s/-[0-9]*//:S.db ".read %:S"' This will feed your vim buffer into a probably-new database
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  You might enjoy ledger (cli tool)!