Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

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> We don’t care about how much money we’ve spent at Amazon

That's like, your opinion man. While I'm sure that's one perfectly valid approach, I find a lot of value in knowing where my money has gone beyond categories.

To make it more concrete, how much I spend at Amazon my Rewards Visa determines whether the 2% bump in rewards is worth the cost of Prime. (I know - most people find enough value in the videos or not thinking about shipping. But I find that I simply spend more at Amazon when I have Prime, so I avoid having it!)

To counter myself, my own software is probably too granular and I waste time on those little details of where I've spent money. I could stand to simplify a bit.

You can track these kinds of things in GNU Ledger (cousin of GNUCash)

The expense category is still something like `Expenses:Books:SciFi`, or whatever. The payee for the transaction is then `Amazon`. If you prefer to make the payee the specific retailer that's selling to you, using Amazon as a platform, you can do that, and instead "tag" the transaction with `:Amazon:`.

You can also track points as a byproduct of the transaction, but that's another rabbit hole.

And that's definitely an important shortcoming in GnuCash. I don't know of a great way to deal with transactions that go beyond "categories". You could use the description field + custom reporting, but that seems a bit error-prone. Luckily, I haven't run into many cases where I felt like I needed something like this.

Last time I looked they seem to have a pretty decent python API so splitting down transactions by retailer shouldn't take too much python-fu methinks.

na, the problem is the data doesn't commonly exist in the model. If I buy a book from a local independent bookstore, that's a debit on checking and a credit in the 'Books' account. If--perhaps due to coronavirus--I buy the sequel on Amazon, that again results in a transaction from checking to books. The payee data isn't there.

I think you can do it via vendors but the small business feature set is somewhat cumbersome.

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