4 ms·

I began with PTA recently. I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already) and then you

I began with PTA recently. I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already) and then you need to decide between ledger-cli, hledger, or beancount, with the differentiators being on the margins and with some promise of being able to switch later. The choice really comes down to which tool has the documentation/community that makes the most sense to you at the time. Then, there's the import workflow: which "accounts" should you start with? How much history do you pull in? How do you set up an automatic importer? Hledger has a DSL. Beancount uses Python. Either way, an OP says, much of your time is spent manually editing text. And finally, then what? Can I make a budget now? Will this thing do my taxes? Am I more financially responsible? How do I explain this to my spouse? My pension is kind of like a commodity, but I don't know what the unit price is, and I don't sell units, but what's a virtual PnL and what if I only have a quarterly PDF!? It may sound like I'm ranting, but I have found that realizing I don't know the answers to these questions (or even that they exist) is the true benefit of PTA. Every year, I'm asked if I want a different pension investment mix or if I want to change my car insurance. Or, I might wonder if I'm getting a good deal on my internet plan or if a new job offer's total comp is actually better. Am I "on track" for "retirement," how long until I have enough for a new roof, am I keeping up with inflation, did I spend too much on gifts this year? There's immense privilege in not really needing to know the answers to these questions; getting them "wrong" won't really hurt you. But, being familiar with the routine minutiae of your economy by way of counting every cent, is rewarding, enlightening, and empowering—even if it's also finicky and brittle sometimes. I may have to try beancount again. OP's importers look promisingly robust compared to my hledger scripts.

djhworld 10mo ago
I think there's definitely something in it around there's a huge learning curve. Double entry book keeping isn't that difficult but that's easy to say once you've been doing it a while I've been doing PTA since around 2018 and there's definitely lessons I've learned along the way along with plenty of mistakes. I think the main benefit for me is just the system gives you a complete picture of your finances. The commercial services you can pay for just give you a view into a certain slice (e.g. open banking in UK/Europe to see your current account(s)) - I think mint.com did something similar in the US but it never came over here, I don't know if it still exists. Maybe that's enough for most people, but for me I want everything, investments, liabilities, assets etc. None of these commercial offerings have that because it's so complex and niche, e.g. your open banking provider won't tell you how your pension is doing. It's also just nice to have the provenance of transactions, e.g. if you receive some shares from work, and you sell the shares and the money ends up in your bank account - the incoming transaction will just be the net proceeds but it won't tell you if you paid any tax prior to that - PTA gives you a more of a complete picture that tracks the whole chain of events that led up that transaction into your bank happening. Overkill for most people? Probably.
- cyberlurker 10mo ago
  FYI, Mint shutdown as a service in early 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/budgeting-app-mint-is-shutting-down-users-are-disappointed.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/budgeting-app-mint-is-shutti...
  - chrisweekly 10mo ago
    Mint's value to me was destroyed long before 2024; its originally-reliable backend was swapped out for a third-party one (plaid?) and half my accounts couldn't sync -- making it useless. YMMV, but IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this space...
    - phoenixy1 10mo ago
      I work at Plaid, so this got me curious about who their provider was -- per Wikipedia, Mint used Intuit's internal account aggregation tools from ~2010-2024. It's possible that Mint swapped out to some other third party provider and Wikipedia doesn't know about it, but based on both internal and external records, I'm pretty sure it wasn't Plaid. (Intuit's Credit Karma, which was marketed to Mint customers as a replacement after Mint shut down, does use Plaid.)
    - astura 10mo ago
      > IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this space... Monarch is just horribly overpriced. I'm not opposed to paying for a SaaS or anything, but Monarch is much too expensive for what it is. Empower (used to be called Personal Capital) is free and what I use instead of Mint. In fairness, the only thing that I really ever used Mint for was to see my net worth and account balances.
      - masterj 10mo ago
        I dunno. Insights from Monarch have easily saved me many times the annual cost. Other tools could as well of course, but the ease-of-use makes it easy to maintain
- 10mo ago
mbork_pl 10mo ago
Besides being a mathematician and a programmer, I have a degree in finance and banking, so I learned double-entry accounting pretty early. As a mathematician, I appreciate the beauty of this very clever, very general and very abstract system. As a geek, I've been using ledger-cli with Emacs for a decade now, and Gnucash earlier. Re: learning curve, it's not that difficult. Shameless plug: I wrote a textbook (actually, a textbooklet, if that is a word;-)) about the basics of DEA, focused on personal finance and using ledger-cli: https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/ https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/
coliveira 10mo ago
If you're running a business, double entry BK is essential. If you're doing personal finances it is completely overkill. I think the perfect tool is just excel or any similar spreadsheet, and track what matters for you. I usually add numbers weekly to my spreadsheet.
- stvltvs 10mo ago
  Double-entry bookkeeping is a transformational way of thinking about money. There's a reason it took over the world. Even if I just tracked expenses in a spreadsheet, it would help that I know double-entry.
  - coliveira 10mo ago
    The concept of DE BK is simple, yet powerful. The difficult part is to track every penny. For personal finances that doesn't make much sense, but for a business it's essential.
stackghost 10mo ago
>I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already) This. Accounting seems easy if you already know accounting. Learning accounting is difficult because the literature is dense, contradictory, and it's not helped by the fact that most accountants don't even seem to understand it at a fundamental level, they've merely memorized false-but-workable ideas like "debits increase assets because debit means left", or the silly idea about viewing it from the perspective of a bank. Even accounting profs are surprisingly bad at at this, at least in my experience.
- djhworld 10mo ago
  ehhhhhhh I don't think you need to go as far as reading dense accounting literature, I never have and I've been maintaining a beancount files for 7+ years. I just followed the documentation in here https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_method.html https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... - it gives you the general principles to follow and you can just pick it up from there.
  - stackghost 10mo ago
    The point I was trying to make is that "Debits increase assets" isn't some esoteric technique; it's a fundamental aspect of double-entry that you'd need to know, but it's also counterintuitive and most of the literature out there is full of bullshit explanations that do nothing to help people understand. The link you posted is similarly full of bullshit, written by someone who demonstrably does not understand the double entry system (they even say so in the text). But I'm the sort of person who finds it very grating to have to do something without understanding why I'm doing it. If that's not you then party on.

djhworld 10mo ago

I think there's definitely something in it around there's a huge learning curve. Double entry book keeping isn't that difficult but that's easy to say once you've been doing it a while I've been doing PTA since around 2018 and there's definitely lessons I've learned along the way along with plenty of mistakes. I think the main benefit for me is just the system gives you a complete picture of your finances. The commercial services you can pay for just give you a view into a certain slice (e.g. open banking in UK/Europe to see your current account(s)) - I think mint.com did something similar in the US but it never came over here, I don't know if it still exists. Maybe that's enough for most people, but for me I want everything, investments, liabilities, assets etc. None of these commercial offerings have that because it's so complex and niche, e.g. your open banking provider won't tell you how your pension is doing. It's also just nice to have the provenance of transactions, e.g. if you receive some shares from work, and you sell the shares and the money ends up in your bank account - the incoming transaction will just be the net proceeds but it won't tell you if you paid any tax prior to that - PTA gives you a more of a complete picture that tracks the whole chain of events that led up that transaction into your bank happening. Overkill for most people? Probably.

cyberlurker 10mo ago
FYI, Mint shutdown as a service in early 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/budgeting-app-mint-is-shutting-down-users-are-disappointed.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/budgeting-app-mint-is-shutti...
- chrisweekly 10mo ago
  Mint's value to me was destroyed long before 2024; its originally-reliable backend was swapped out for a third-party one (plaid?) and half my accounts couldn't sync -- making it useless. YMMV, but IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this space...
  - phoenixy1 10mo ago
    I work at Plaid, so this got me curious about who their provider was -- per Wikipedia, Mint used Intuit's internal account aggregation tools from ~2010-2024. It's possible that Mint swapped out to some other third party provider and Wikipedia doesn't know about it, but based on both internal and external records, I'm pretty sure it wasn't Plaid. (Intuit's Credit Karma, which was marketed to Mint customers as a replacement after Mint shut down, does use Plaid.)
  - astura 10mo ago
    > IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this space... Monarch is just horribly overpriced. I'm not opposed to paying for a SaaS or anything, but Monarch is much too expensive for what it is. Empower (used to be called Personal Capital) is free and what I use instead of Mint. In fairness, the only thing that I really ever used Mint for was to see my net worth and account balances.
    - masterj 10mo ago
      I dunno. Insights from Monarch have easily saved me many times the annual cost. Other tools could as well of course, but the ease-of-use makes it easy to maintain
10mo ago

mbork_pl 10mo ago

Besides being a mathematician and a programmer, I have a degree in finance and banking, so I learned double-entry accounting pretty early. As a mathematician, I appreciate the beauty of this very clever, very general and very abstract system. As a geek, I've been using ledger-cli with Emacs for a decade now, and Gnucash earlier. Re: learning curve, it's not that difficult. Shameless plug: I wrote a textbook (actually, a textbooklet, if that is a word;-)) about the basics of DEA, focused on personal finance and using ledger-cli: https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/ https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/

coliveira 10mo ago

If you're running a business, double entry BK is essential. If you're doing personal finances it is completely overkill. I think the perfect tool is just excel or any similar spreadsheet, and track what matters for you. I usually add numbers weekly to my spreadsheet.

stvltvs 10mo ago
Double-entry bookkeeping is a transformational way of thinking about money. There's a reason it took over the world. Even if I just tracked expenses in a spreadsheet, it would help that I know double-entry.
- coliveira 10mo ago
  The concept of DE BK is simple, yet powerful. The difficult part is to track every penny. For personal finances that doesn't make much sense, but for a business it's essential.

stackghost 10mo ago

>I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already) This. Accounting seems easy if you already know accounting. Learning accounting is difficult because the literature is dense, contradictory, and it's not helped by the fact that most accountants don't even seem to understand it at a fundamental level, they've merely memorized false-but-workable ideas like "debits increase assets because debit means left", or the silly idea about viewing it from the perspective of a bank. Even accounting profs are surprisingly bad at at this, at least in my experience.

djhworld 10mo ago
ehhhhhhh I don't think you need to go as far as reading dense accounting literature, I never have and I've been maintaining a beancount files for 7+ years. I just followed the documentation in here https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_method.html https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... - it gives you the general principles to follow and you can just pick it up from there.
- stackghost 10mo ago
  The point I was trying to make is that "Debits increase assets" isn't some esoteric technique; it's a fundamental aspect of double-entry that you'd need to know, but it's also counterintuitive and most of the literature out there is full of bullshit explanations that do nothing to help people understand. The link you posted is similarly full of bullshit, written by someone who demonstrably does not understand the double entry system (they even say so in the text). But I'm the sort of person who finds it very grating to have to do something without understanding why I'm doing it. If that's not you then party on.