Discussion:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463407 (100 points , 63 comments as of this post)
This is an excellent detailed review of OP's beancount-based workflow, and plain text accounting in general, going beyond the basics. Recommended!
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Thanks for sharing. I particularly like this:
Both of these are fundamental problems with how so-called “single-entry bookkeeping” works: each account’s transactions and balance are tracked individually but without the context of the “whole”. In the case of the transfer, because we’re looking at each account in isolation, we lose the fact that even though the money has left one account, it’s really still part of the “pool of money” that belongs to us. Similarly, when our friends pay us back, we’re not tracking the fact that our friends owe us money when the original transaction happened and their payment later neutralizes the debt.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I have been struggling with bank statements here because we don’t get CSVs, we do PDFs a lot more. TIL pdftotext is a thing. I am excited about how much time savings this can unlock in my workflow