Hacker News Reader

Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

Very cool, and interesting that Martin Kleppmann of DDIA is an author. I am glad to come across this - I was brainstorming such a manifesto, now I can use this as a resource.

One local first that I recently switched to is migrating from ynab.com to my own Libre Calc spreadsheets. It took a few days to figure out all the formulas, but now I have even more control over how I track my budget.

View on HN

Do you integrate your bank accounts/etc via API or do you pull the data into the sheet manually on some periodic basis? Second question - are you using your own categories or do you rely on bank/card?

Asking as I’m sort of in the middle of the two. I keep a mostly complete spreadsheet of my expenses but that doesn’t account for things that I purchase regularly like groceries/Amazon/etc. Trying Copilot for a year right now as well.

Right now I have a sheet for each account that has columns for date, payee (i.e. the merchant), envelope (e.g. Groceries or Books etc.), memo, outflow, inflow and balance. And I enter the transactions manually. I enjoy that part actually since it keeps me mindful and I only have two accounts (checking and a credit card) that I frequently use.

Copilot looks very polished and handy. Though I have found that I really like the customized control that a spreadsheet gives me. Though I haven't used it, I could implement most of what I see in Copilot in my spreadsheet, and have already.

Care to share your Libre Calc spreadsheet formulas?

I'd be glad to, but I'm not sure yet how helpful it would be to do so here, without just sharing the full spreadsheet. Which I would need to clean up and anonymize first. It may be very particular to my needs. I drew inspiration from many other "YNAB spreadsheets" (searching reddit etc.) I can say that learning the SUMIFS formula to sum the relevant transactions for a given envelope was a big key to making it work well. The other details are polish around it. I'm afraid that this might not come across very clear. I found that the more that I desired a certain feature and searched for how to do it in Excel or Google Sheets (or Libre Calc, but there is less specific resources for that) then it gave me the next bit that I needed.

bordercases - I can't reply to your comment, it's dead.

Interested in sharing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com