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Comment by lionkor | Hacker News Reader

I continue to be confused how people use these kinds of programs. They're cool, yeah, but how do you keep track of your credit card(s), bank account(s), possibly your significant other's as well, subscriptions, fees, automated payments, cash in/out, taxes, varying income, investment returns, savings, balances on platforms you may use like wise/revolut (for travel) in different currencies, automated "fees" like interest on savings, loans, which may change every now and then, etc?

I dont see any good way to manage this stuff, maybe just by monitoring what goes in and out of a main account. I would love if there was a protocol that all these services supported, but there sure as hell isn't.

At that point, does something like GNU Cash become just another inaccurate representation of in, out and have?

Edit: Maybe you just update it once a month from statements?

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You have to be a "personal accounting hobbyist" to really make your ledger match up with reality. If you have even moderately complex finances, you will have to take input from several different sources, do a lot of preening of transactions that were imported a bit incorrectly, reconcile against external sources of truth like bank statements, and in general spend time keeping your accounts straight.

How much time you need to spend to do a good job can vary widely. It depends on your data sources, your tolerance for error, and how well your use cases match up with your software's assumptions.

Balance that cost against the benefits, which are subjective -- how much do you value easier tax preparation? How much do you value peace of mind from having your financial state clearly articulated? How much do you value understanding your in and outflows, making a budget, monitoring activity for potential fraud?

> but how do you keep track of your credit card(s), bank account(s), possibly your significant other's as well, subscriptions, fees, automated payments, cash in/out, taxes, varying income, investment returns, savings, balances on platforms you may use like wise/revolut (for travel) in different currencies, automated "fees" like interest on savings, loans, which may change every now and then, etc?

I do things like that.

All those accounts can be represented. Many of those things are Scheduled Transactions.

When you Reconcile a statement from a bank or something, it'll even prompt you for recurring interest, in case you don't already have a transaction for that (because, e.g., the interest transaction was already there when you imported the OFX/QFX for that statement).

Investments like stocks and funds are tracked by shares, you can easily enter dividend reinvestment, and you can pull data for the current value in whatever primary currency.

You can also mix many world currencies in the same file, and see the totals according to exchange rates, and you can even define your own units and exchange rates for some purposes (which I've done in the past for metals and cryptocurrencies).

You can enter transactions as you go, and when you periodically Import, any transactions you didn't enter will be added. You can check this when you Reconcile a statement.

You can do all of this and more with something like gnucash, and also foreign exchange fees, tax accounts,etc. I ran a small business off this for a while some years ago without much trouble, mostly because I wanted to understand what was going on. You could also do invoicing and AR/AP which is t needed for home finances.

Process was pretty easy. Some entries manual or automatic during the month. At whatever period you want download OFX/QFX from bank accounts, CC accounts, etc. and import. Or CSV files or whatever you can get from your banks. When you get statements, reconcile those accounts.

Double entry is the only way to really keep track of things and catch errors, but you control granularity so in some sense amount of work. So in your scenarios, you would have expense accounts for interest fees per bank, loans, income accounts for different sources etc. the number of accounts you have is not a reflection of the institutions (eg banks) but the the things you want to keep track of.

If you want things accurate, you pretty much have to add a reconciliation step somewhere, tools like gnucash will let you see what has been reconciled and what hasn’t yet.

> They're cool, yeah, but how do you keep track of your credit card(s), bank account(s), possibly your significant other's as well, subscriptions, fees, automated payments, cash in/out, taxes, varying income, investment returns, savings, balances on platforms you may use like wise/revolut (for travel) in different currencies, automated "fees" like interest on savings, loans, which may change every now and then, etc?

I use a phone app (there are many out there) for my needs instead of desktop software, but in my case I log every single bit of income/expense ASAP - if I buy groceries, I pull up the app and categorize it (takes like 20 seconds). Sometimes my bank is kind enough to have their phone app alert me of new changes in account balance, but that's really flaky, so I check the balance on their website/app occasionally as well and log the changes.

Since I log just my own data, the approach scales wonderfully well (since it doesn't need to scale much). If I ever want to have a look at more data, I export the statements from my bank and either just open them up in LibreOffice, or maybe do some light Python code.

I enter transactions manually.

It's not for everybody, but I want to see every transaction.

I do this by going to the website for the bank account or credit card and looking at the Activity section (or whatever it's called).

I know that I'm weird. This is not for everybody.

I did this when I was still by myself, but a) having family and b) having more and more micro transactions (like coffee, transit, lime scooters…) and c) more and more accounts (amazon, paypal) means I had to declare time bancruptcy meanwhile

I completely understand since I have a wife.

But we do not do a lot of micro transactions, so it still works.

Once it doesn't, I'm hoping that the cards and bank accounts we use the most will export the stuff into a format that GnuCash can use.

LPT: If you do switch to importing use CSV, not QIF. A lot of (i.e. all but one of my) credit card companies have two "description" fields, a short one and a long one. The OFX usually only has the short one, leaving you with often cryptic entries; things from Stripe and PayPal often get truncated before the name of the vendor upstream of them, making them impossible to decipher.

Oh, goodness, thank you for that.

I do the same (ledger, not GnuCash). A few minutes each day. I used to outsource (part of) the work to my daughter when she was ~8yo (and paid her for that) to teach her that work is where you get money from.

One argument would be

How can you NOT keep track of “keep track of your credit card(s), bank account(s), possibly your significant other's as well, subscriptions, fees, automated payments, cash in/out, taxes, varying income, investment returns, savings, balances on platforms you may use like wise/revolut (for travel) in different currencies, automated "fees" like interest on savings, loans, which may change every now and then, etc?”.

There’s a lot of people who would absolutely panic at the thought that they have all their money flowing around and they can’t even keep track of it.

Also, there’s an argument that if your finances are so complex that you can’t keep track of it (and youre not wealthy enough to pay someone to keep track of it) maybe that in itself is the problem, and that you need to simplify your finances.

Also, is it really that hard? Is it harder to note that you spent money buying something, or transferred money internationally than to actually spend that money buying the thing or transfer it internationally?

And recurring expenses are fairly easy to keep track of with even the most legacy software solutions.

I use GnuCash to track all of my family accounts. I feel better not letting any third party have my financial data and it served me as a forcing function to learn about accounting. I does take less than 20 minutes each months to cleanup and import transactions from my accounts, without any automation and with some checking for data correctness. I don't mind the lack of automation (yet), I set aside time to go through expense classification and to look at the past months. Reports are kind of dry but helpful. The pain point is that they are not easily shareable

You automate all the recurring things (this is built into Gnucash), enter the non-recurring things (takes a minute or two a day if that day even had any transactions) and reconcile against the bank's statement/app/website monthly to make sure its representation stays accurate.

Once you've entered a transaction once, its autocomplete handles those going forwards so entering a new transaction is as quick as typing the first couple of letters of the shop name, pressing tab a few times, then entering the amount.

> You automate all the recurring things (this is built into Gnucash

Is it? When I last looked at GnuCash (which, admittedly, was like 7 years ago) you could not setup automatic categorization of transactions. You couldn't say, while going through imported transactions, "Every transaction where the payee is utility company should come from the Utilities account". The idea was that GnuCash was using some kind of Bayesian scheme to learn how to categorize your transactions automatically, but you had to input your transactions manually 3 or 4 times before it started working. Which, for me, seemed like a huge waste of time since 90% of my transactions could be automatically categorized by simple keyword matching against the payee or description.

I'm not talking about importing transactions, that's not a feature I use because it'd take longer than entering manually if you did it daily. I'm talking about the scheduled transaction editor, where you enter e.g. your rent manually once then schedule the same transaction to happen monthly. This should still work if you also import the non-recurring ones.

I do this. Sometimes I add the info the same day, or just do it all on the weekend. Probably takes 10 minutes a week. I can then take that info and compare to any budgets or predictions and see where things are going right or wrong.

I’ve had everything balance down to the penny for 20 years now. If you have some attention to detail and make it a habit, it’s not really that difficult or time consuming.

It’s also kind of like paying cash. It makes you more aware of what you are spending.

I track everything as only three accounts regardless of where they are. Debit, Savings, Investments. Credit charges are just uncleared debit charges until I pay the bill.

I use tags to categorize recurring charges and on the 1st of the month I will sit down and pre-enter all of last month's recurring charges into the next month, as well as check the statement to make sure that last month's were really what I expected them to be.

I enter new charges on the day that they happen. It's 5 minutes a day instead of an hr or three at the end of the month.

What I end up with is that I know where everything has been going, and I have a good forecast for where it's going to go in the near future. If I need to answer a question like 'how much of a rent hike can I tolerate' or 'how much car can I afford' I have a good basis for deciding it. I also have a single 'available spending money' number that I can refer to if I need to, but honestly im a casual minimalist and not buying things is a great way to keep your finances afloat with minimal stress.

I just update it monthly-ish from CSV (or occasionally OFX) files I can download from my bank, credit-card companies, and brokerage.

You can save the mapping of columns <-> GNU Cash fields for each one, and it takes me about 10 minutes for my most heavily used CC account. GNU Cash supports guessing the balancing entry, which speeds things up quite a bit.

The only issue I have is that you can't enter splits from the import dialog, so I leave split transactions unbalanced then go through those manually. My only regular splits are my mortgage payment (Interest, Principle, and Escrow) and deposits (I usually deposit multiple checks at a time, but they show up as a single entry on the CSV I get from my bank).

I'm a recent convert to YNAB. I tried multiple times over the years, but always gave up after only a few days.

The key for me and my wife to get it to work was getting into the groove of entering your transactions and reconciling daily. It is a bit obsessive, but we've been able to completely overhaul our finances with it.

Basically every morning I start my day by opening up YNAB and my bank, and for our personal finances, just making sure everything matches. For my business finances, I actually manually input all expenses (from receipts, invoices, etc) then once a week, I will go through and reconcile with online banking (I usually miss a transaction or two).

Do you not link to your credit card/bank (respect if you don't want to, of course) - I use YNAB and only check it once a week or so and mostly just edit the names of new merchants and double-check categories of the new transactions.

In our personal budget, we link everything we can, because we spend a lot more smaller items randomly, so we can't manually input everything.

For unlinked credit, we just create a budget item for that card and we try to budget them out properly, but it isn't as easy, and we lose tracking into the spending.

Yes, uploading statements is the way I do it. I try to do it once a week and it takes barely any time at all. Lately I'm not so good at that and end up doing it every few weeks, so it might take 1-2 hours. Most of that time is spent tracking down one or two expenditures to see how they should be categorised if it's not clear from the face of the statement. Recurring payments or payments to frequent payees are generally correctly categorised by GnuCash without any intervention by me.

> I continue to be confused how people use these kinds of programs.

GnuCash is made for common people, my wife uses it and loves it.

I found that, to be really effective, you need to import the transactions from your bank somehow. I use YNAB to have it automatic, but you can also manually export/import CSVs from your bank (I used to do that before they supported EU banks).

> Maybe you just update it once a month from statements?

In my experience, this is the only reliable way. Most banks also support exporting transaction data as CSV, but the data quality is usually too poor for automatic account assignments.

I also used to log and tag everything by hand. Did it for years but have given up lately.

Now I'm thinking if there's an easy way to just give all transactions with metadata to chatgpt and let it tag everything. This would be great!

Openai runs keeper which sounds similar

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