Re:After a month on a cash diet, here are my best money savi...
by Jtsummers on Saturday January 28, 2017 @10:45AM
(#13506773)
For folks here, I like ledger-cli (and that family of tools) over excel.
1) It's designed for tracking finances.
2) It's plaintext so amenable to scripting and custom reporting using any of your favorite tools and languages.
3) It's reporting system is quite capable and paired with tmux and emacs I have a nice homemade financial dashboard. On one pane is an emacs instance for data entry. In others are various reports executed using watch. If you include stocks and other investments, you can use a pricedb file and have an up to date (set mine up for daily price downloads) view of your entire financial portfolio.
Paired with org-mode with custom PENDING/CLEARED todo states and noweb/tangle of babel code blocks, you can make a pretty effective workflow without much effort. And I prefer this over automated trackers like Mint or something where it's easy to ignore it for a few days and still have correct information, but not know where your money went. (I do use Mint, it's a convenient place to get aggregated data from the half dozen or so institutions holding different parts of my assets or debts).
1) It's designed for tracking finances.
2) It's plaintext so amenable to scripting and custom reporting using any of your favorite tools and languages.
3) It's reporting system is quite capable and paired with tmux and emacs I have a nice homemade financial dashboard. On one pane is an emacs instance for data entry. In others are various reports executed using watch. If you include stocks and other investments, you can use a pricedb file and have an up to date (set mine up for daily price downloads) view of your entire financial portfolio.
EDIT: I was on mobile earlier.
Ledger link: http://www.ledger-cli.org
Plaintext Accounting: http://plaintextaccounting.org
Paired with org-mode with custom PENDING/CLEARED todo states and noweb/tangle of babel code blocks, you can make a pretty effective workflow without much effort. And I prefer this over automated trackers like Mint or something where it's easy to ignore it for a few days and still have correct information, but not know where your money went. (I do use Mint, it's a convenient place to get aggregated data from the half dozen or so institutions holding different parts of my assets or debts).