Any married people have advice on how to track finances? I used bean count or ledger when i was single, but the manual system kind of breaks down when you have a family .
(If this is what you meant by family finances-- as others have pointed out, there's a difference between budgeting and accounting. YNAB has met all of my family's needs in the financial realm.)
I keep track of my expenses by CC and cash account, by the month. I don't care that I spent $5 on a coffee. I do care that for the month of January I stayed within my $X amount, and that for the year I'm on track for my savings goal(s), retirement, etc.
So I keep 2 spreadsheets, 1 is monthly, to ensure the bills get paid and the 2nd is my NW that tracks my retirement and savings goals.
From there I just use gmail filters to put all of those in a folder and then wrote a script to download, parse and enter those transactions on my ledger with “Expenses:FIXME”
Once a week or so (when I have around 10-20 transactions) I import them and go through them, asking my SO if there’s any transactions I don’t know of.
Alternatively I also just make one transactions to put in an account that is fully my SO’s and one that is mine (mostly for both of our hobbies) and those I don’t track, except for the monthly deposit to those
I have email notifications for all transactions and a maildir on my dev machine. I just need to write some code to make it all happen.
It supports preprocessing the csvs if you need to clean the data or compute some new fields which is really powerful. Once you are up and running it only needs some minor updates each month to map unidentifiable transactions I can do this in under an hour these days.
You can build rules too so the more you use it, the more automated it becomes.
I thought the photos app was a fairly innocuous form of screen time, not realizing that it was so easy to make a purchase! No password confirmation or anything.
Fortunately support made a one-time exception and refunded the payment even though it was well past the cancellation window.
I still removed all the payment methods and addresses from our Google Pay account because I couldn't figure out any other way to guarantee that this doesn't happen again.
Frictionless payment flows do not mix well with toddlers.
Though is the root issue just communication? At some point transactions need:
1. Recorded
2. Categorized (optional, but desirable)
3. Reconciled (This can only happen as often as bank statements are issued)
With multiple spenders, communication (to answer the question "what is this transaction for?!?!") is paramount and fits naturally at the reconciliation step or more frequently if desired.
The workflow described is synchronous, centralized and simple
The entire thread was about accounting, then a sub-thread on family accounting, then you pop in to just say 'I do my accounting solo, as does my wife" which may be on-topic, but just not relevant.
But the intention of your parent was "when funds start to co-mingle or you get more complicated accounts" and saying "Don't co-mingle" doesn't help answer the question for those who do co-mingle and asked for help in this thread.
>The short answer is that my wife and I have different opinions about how to track data.
I would advise not to worry about petty cash. Don't get pedantic. Worry about the big things. Just make a cash account for petty cash.
If you don't share accounts then just track your stuff and set up reimbursement account(s) for your family. You'll only know the net amount you need to transfer between yourselves to square up at the end of the month or whatever you agree to do.
It's not perfect but it's the best system I've tried, including YNAB, because I get paid biweekly and YNAB forces you to budget monthly.
Parent-Teacher Association??