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Comment by rpb92 | Hacker News Reader

I’d appreciate hearing how others have used the various plain text accounting tools for their own use. Are you legitimately using it to inform yourself of your spending habits and taking corrective action? Is it simply for tracking your expenses, revenues, net worth, etc? Or is it simply about the process? I can certainly see the appeal of such an orderly, structured process.

Every time I’m reminded of plain text accounting, I have either an irresistible urge to immerse myself fully into the process, or feelings of guilt for not staying committed to my previous attempts. Right now, it’s mainly guilt, since I’ve not updated my personal ledger in a month and a half. Ultimately, I think I’m unsure about why I’m using it, and eventually feel like I’m logging transactions just for the sake of it.

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I’m always using it for spontaneous group accounting, e.g. three guys vacation. Because for group expenses it’s much easier to split the check later in the day or the week. We just accumulate the web of debts and sort it out on demand. It’s very hard to track such chaotic expenses otherwise.

Same for business expenses, I just pay with my card for equipment, services, etc. Later I report it up and get cash/transfer back (doesn’t work for some countries/businesses).

My personal eaten-shitten expenses I know from my bank and experience, there’s no need to account for these.

Every time I’m reminded of plain text accounting, I have either an irresistible urge to immerse myself fully into the process, or feelings of guilt for not staying committed to my previous attempts

You must have financial motivation, not emotional. Once you know that if you give up on accounting, your buddy will happily drink through hundreds of bucks, or your company will get a free hdmi cable, you enter the damn sum without hesitation. Personal accounting doesn’t work because you only can lose analytics, not money.

I feel like plain text accounting software is overkill for splitting vacation expenses. The Splitwise phone app is very good for this, and shares some of the responsibility.

I'm self employed and use it (Beancount, as I like the more strict approach) for my business accounts and also for my stock portfolio. Fava, the web UI, is very handy for reporting and visualising things, though I also have a few scripts to automate certain processes like importing transactions from Wise and tracking exchange rates. I really don't have the discipline to use it for daily personal expenses or budgeting though.

I don’t use it as some motivational tool to change spending habits or whatever but I do like to keep a record of all my accounts and assets, I think it gives me a better understanding of my whole financial picture and I create ‘virtual’ accounts within some cash savings account that divides the balance into pots for things I’m amortizing like car maintenance or insurance

I use it for many things (i use hledger)

- Tracking pending payment from clients

- Keeping track of my expenses in various sectors, food (groceries, eatout), books, magazine subscriptions, etc

- Keeping track of my current balance accounts across various currency deposits

- Loans I give to people, and gifts I give to people

- Creating virtual envelops to segregate my savings account money for my goals like travelling, buying gifts for someone, investment goals, etc

This has helped me tremendously

- for reducing my eatout habits and eating more at home by realising just how much I was wasting money by eating out daily, and inputting the saved amount into compound interest calculator to realize potential lost income and wealth from putting those into an index fund account

- to keep track of pending payments from clients and calculating my real cashflow against cashflow based on expected income

- reduce my impulsive spending, by tracking my savings account money with virtual envelops aka 40% for investment goals, 1% for gifts, etc, it helps me to not just see a big balance on my account and start spending it away seeing that money as segregated chunks in my mind helps me stay in my lane.

- I have a program that generates all sorts of charts to track my wealth growth over time, expense growth and decline across categories, which I then dump into a webpage with my notes on how the changes were a net positive or negative outcome on my life, I do it annually to decide what i’ll do next

- I also have a python script that takes my ledger file and converts it into an excel sheet to send it to my chartered accountant to file my annual taxes

I also maintain a separate ledger file for my business (I dont maintain that one manually, I just export the data from accountant’s software, to do my own calculations at home)

- I use it to calculate cashflow projections to predict how my expenses might potentially grow with rise in revenue

- Track categories of spending to spot anomalies in spend across departments

- Calculate whether I should hire more or raise marketing spend, calculate metrics like ROIC (Return on Invested Capital)

The double entry helps me catch discrepancies in accounting if any, by importing bank statements and generating a ledger from that, I have accounts separated by usecase (discretionary spends, employee perks, business inputs) , with each one getting deposit from main account weekly. I use that to calculate if somethings odd and books are all cool.

I have had trouble before with an accountant running pseudo expenses on my books without telling me, just to impress me by showing a high taxes saved, without being transparent, landed me in court once, with a huge fine with late penalties.

Now I dont trust accountants and make sure I double check no matter what.

Plus I have a lot of automation scripts and stuff, imports from stripe account, imports from bank statements, accountant’s own ledger, etc

I match them all with python scripts and try to look for discrepancies.

I love plain text accounting, as a programmer it works for me, I automated a ton of it, and I have tons of my own macros and shortcuts in my code editor(vim) to make things very easy and simple,

I love it overall, I built out my own system on top of hledger across the years.

Bravo!

Woah :O I cannot believe I’d get a reply from the creator of hledger himself.

Damn

God bless you simon !

Hledger is AWESOME

Thank you teitoklien. I found your list seriously inspiring, thanks for writing it up.

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