I've tried to track personal finances several times, but it only started to work when I've discovered the idea (from https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger) that you need to treat the whole PTA story more like a project compilation:

- Everything is managed by build system that is able to track dependencies

- Inputs from financial institutions are kept in the repo as is

- Those inputs are converted by your scripts to .csv files that are readable by PTA import engine

- There are rules files that describe how to convert .csv lines to PTA entries

- Generated files are included from per-year PTA journals (and you can put any manual transactions in here also)

The benefit is that you can change any part of this pipeline, and just re-generate the changed parts:

- improve the program that converts to .csv - raw data immediately gets better across the whole repo

- add/customize import rules - better classification is immediately applied to all of the past data

And with this approach you can start small (like, a single month of data from your primary bank), and refine the thing in steps, like adding more historical data or adding more data sources (examples being not only bank statements, but even things like itemized Amazon orders and Paypal slips).

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olsondv 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The mortgage payments always confused me and that link has a good explanation of how it works. Have you used that code base in your own system or just the principles? I don’t know Haskell so not sure how much I can/need to modify.

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ekjhgkejhgk 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do you want to share what's confusing about mortgage payments?

You have a balance that accrues a monthly interest. Separately, you're told that you're owed a monthly payment. If monthly payment > interest, then the difference is subtracted from the balance. No need for haskell.

	▲	davkan an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Loans can be confusing in double entry accounting for the uninitiated. On the accounting side you have liabilities:mortgage which would only include the principal. Then for an individual bill you have to debit liabilities:mortgage the principal portion and debit expenses:interest the interest portion. I’m not sure how mortgage bills usually come but for my auto loan the principal vs interest were not noted on the bill, so i had to calculate via apr myself for each payment for which the interest accrued daily. If i imported those payments from my bank statement or the bill i would not be able to enter the transaction correctly without doing the math. For calculating interest automatically upon entry based on the rate and payment amount and date I used python iirc as i used beancount, but that was a while ago.

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binarin 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, I'm using parts of this codebase. But Haskell is only being used as a build tool, so you can replace it with anything that you're comfortable with, like make, bazel, ...

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nightski 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why is the parent teacher association involved in personal finances?

	▲	bnj an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sorry if this was a joke, but just in case- PTA = plain text accounting
	▲	croisillon 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		haha :) https://plaintextaccounting.org/
	▲	frogpelt 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’m fairly certain it’s Percutaneous Transluminal Angioplasty