this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Personal Finance

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I recently started giving plain text accounting a go. For a long time I did not do any accounting, as my income was high enough to get by perfectly fine, but recently I wanted to get a lot more control over my personal finance in order to easier achieve more long term financial goals.

I've only been at it for about a month now, and I started out with ledger. So far I am enjoying the concept, but have not made much out of reporting yet. But I like the idea of also building my own reporting in Python on top of existing reports, and checking out the ecosystem around this (I understand BeanCount has a large Python ecosystem, so I will probably check this out once I have some months of data).

Are there anyone here doing this? I would love to hear some perspectives about this, both good and bad, from people having used this for a long time.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm hoping to automate somethings myself - without having done any research on this, I hope the PSD2 regulation in Europe allows me to use the APIs the banks have been forced to make. However, I am actually not sure about eligibility to use these APIs, and I might have to do make do with parsing .csv-files I manually download.

I am anyway giving it some months to see what kind of benefits I might get without putting to much effort into automation, but the thought have crossed my mind that this entire thing will be a "high effort, low reward" kind of deal.