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Comment by Liquid_Fire | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting, my experience was different from yours. While it is indeed very useful to see all my spending, I found it took way too much of my time to maintain it.

This was partially because the UI has a lot of issues (especially the bank statement importing - if you don't do everything just right, you have to redo it from scratch, and it is very easy to make it fail), and partially because the ability to automatically assign transactions to categories was too limited (it expects the reference to match exactly, but in many cases it doesn't, so I would have to spend a lot of time manually assigning things to categories, again from a really bad UI).

I have to add, this was 5-6 years ago, so it's possible that the UI has improved since then.

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I gave up early on with importing bank statements. Instead I just manually create each gnucash entry for each transaction on my online bank statement. If the final gnucash account balance matches my actual bank balance then I know I did it correctly. If it does not balance, I persist in finding the mistyped entry.

This method relies on balancing to the cent each time, since I use my actual bank balance as the target.

It is indeed tedious at first, however I find that 1) manually entering transactions helps me spot problem payments quickly (comprimised credit card, overcharges on direct debits etc.) and 2) the predictive auto-complete feature speeds entries up over time, as most entries are assigned to either a a)groceries, b)eating-out or c)bills expense account. You just press 'Tab' when the correct suggestion pops-up after entring the first few letter, and the line entry gets auto-filled. I still usually need to change the numerical value, but the correct expense account and transaction detail are prepopulated correctly most of the time.

Overall I would recommend giving it another chance.

I use hledger and while I also use my actual bank balances as targets (and often I do get obsessive, to the point of chasing down cents), I think it would be impossible for me to do it without importing my bank statements.

It's not the transactions themselves that I find tedious, it's all the ways I split them. My partner and I split many transactions together and we often travel with friends so I charge friends over Zelle/Venmo for transactions we had while out. Importing transactions from my banks makes it significantly easier to reconcile all of these, especially when I'm on a vacation. Ease of writing importers was a huge driving factor when I switched to hledger from GNUCash.

It's amazing discipline that you enter these manually. I remember that GNUCash has decent autocomplete which certainly helps. I don't think I'd be able to keep up with my finances myself if I had to input it all myself. I personally have anywhere from 50-100 transactions a month.

If you don’t mind my asking, how many transactions go through your account a month?

Roughly 100 transactions per month I would say. On average 2 card based transactions per day --> 60 transactions per month. Then bills, incidentals and direct debits make up the remaining 40.

I use HomeBank [1] because I find the UI a lot simpler than GnuCash and importing mostly just works, with pretty good automatic category assignment that lets you use regular expressions.

The only quirk is that one of my accounts uses a non-standard ordering for its csv file which needs fixing before HomeBank will accept it since the import UI is limited.

I also find that it is useful to track the database file under git.

[1] http://homebank.free.fr/

Yup, this is what I ended up using for some time. Though, and YMMV, after doing this in a dedicated way for 2-3 years, I ended up stopping entirely. Probably because more than anything, all the pretty graphs and tracking was mildly interesting -- but it mostly just taught me that I spend reasonably and don't have much of a need to track every little transaction.

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