Is it actually all that useful to you to track each receipt line-item? For a few specific types of purchases, maybe, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you might be taking on needless work that doesn't create value for you anywhere near that level of effort.

I did this exercise for a little over a year to understand my expenses in detail. Like the OP, I found it really frustrating to do with any bookkeeping software I tried, to the point where I eventually gave up as I didn't think it was worth the effort. I started writing a web app to make this easier but just didn't have the motivation to finish.

With that said, I learned quite a bit as a result of that level of granularity. When all expenses at Amazon, Walmart, etc go into the same bucket, it's really difficult to truly understand what you're spending your money on and if you have a problem you need to curb. Seeing "$X in spending at Amazon" isn't really that useful without knowing how important or frivolous any of those expenses were.

There are many levels in between tracking at the "Amazon" level vs the "Meat:Pork" level. For example I currently track all unprepared food shopping as "Groceries", and would break down "Amazon" shopping into categories such as "Electronics" or "Books".

Ultimately it comes down to how much effort you want to spend categorising spending, but there are many levels of granularity and orthogonal dimensions to slice against

Sure, and my Amazon example wasn't very illustrative of the kind of information that could be gleamed from tracking this at a more granular level. A more concrete example is that my wife and I were flirting with the idea of reducing our meat consumption (for non-financial reasons) and wanted to see what the financial implications would be. Another example is to try to accurately price out past trips we went on: some things normally get filtered under other categories, such as clothes or other products purchased specifically for the trip.

This level of granularity probably isn't worth it to most people, but I found it useful as an exercise to do once because it opened my eyes to insights about my expenses I never would have thought about otherwise. And if there were software that made this super easy to do (<1 minute per entry), I might still be doing it.

You can do a lot with specific and very little with generic entries.

In NL we got the banks to allow exporting [YOUR] data kicking and screaming. Nothing real time sadly but at least it's a thing now.

I would like to force merchants to do the same.

Enforce some protocol that doesn't suck and it should take 0 seconds.

Imagine the things we could build and how many people we could fire.

[delayed]

You don’t need that level of accuracy, you just need “close enough”. Split things out that are important, but if you’re trying to get the sales tax calculated to the cent you’re going way past a level of utility that matters. Eyeball it and move on.

I’m with you on that one. Been tracking my personal finances since 2011 and I have yet found a need to go deeper with analysis. Although I can imagine it could be interesting to go extra deep, e.g. to observe changes in my nutritional habits based on my grocery receipts juxtaposed with, say, my bloodwork. But even then it’d be a gimmick as I could not potentially rely on any correlation noticed. I’m sure someone could come up with a better example.

In any case, unless tracking gets super easy, with digital receipts saved directly onto our mobile devices and standardized for processing, I just couldn’t be bothered to break down paper receipts.

That BTW makes me wonder why have we not seen e-receipts standardized yet. We can pay wirelessly with devices, so why not save some more meta data about the transaction, including the receipt itself? Seems like a low hanging fruit, also saving tons of paper.

I agree. I've also been tracking my family's personal finances for about that long.

You have to ask yourself what you're going to do with the data. Don't just collect data for data's sake.

The most granular I've ever needed is things like: "wow, I've spent way too much on hobbies in the past 3 months" or "we've spent way too much eating out this month" or "the kid's sports are getting out of hand". Or even "we can afford to spend a lot more on vacations over the rest of the year".

Those are all very top level categories. I can't imagine a world where I'd ever make a lifestyle change based on how I spend on meat over the past six months.

And if you're not actually making a change then the data is just data hoarding.

Yup. Although even if you’re not making any changes based on your habits, it’s still helpful to track money spent to know where your money actually is, especially the liabilities. Except you don’t even need to track expenses at all, outside of the generic “Expenses” category.

At the grocery store it would be extremely useful to understand where money is going related to other food groups (diary is 10% more). At the garage or clothing store not very useful because the entire purchase is a good group but how much you are paying for meat could help you decide to buy it elsewhere but allow you to keep buying bread.

Just tracking no but allocating yes.

If you plan ahead you know how much money you actually have and can plan better.

I find I save way more with a proper budget in place.

A proper budget does not require you to drill down to the level of tracking specific food groups.

Not normally, no. But we track things like cleaners vs food.

I budget very high level but when my wife did her own before we were married she prefered fine grain control. I think it's more of a personality thing.

I feel like it isn't for the vast majority of people. I did a bit of tracking on my spending but it just ends up showing that the vast majority of my spending was on rent and fixed bills which are very easy to track in just a spreadsheet. The amount I'm spending on biscuits and milk week to week doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme.

A lot of banking apps these days will automatically categorize your spending as well which eliminated much of the need to manually enter it in to a different app.

The sweetspot is to group by providers. Unless you have a huge all in one provider, you'll have enough granularity.

Here are two examples:

1. Amazon shopping. You can buy anything for your life in one place, and the credit card receipt just says, Amazon. Thats too broad a bucket to really track where your money is going. I like to understand, for example, what I am spending on consumables for house upkeep, like light bulbs and air filters, separately from things like bike accessories.

2. Splitting out alcohol and other highly discretionary purchases from grocery shopping. Lets say I want to budget for alcohol spend as a way of gently trimming back my consumption. Or chocolate, candy, etc. Would be nice to be able to do this quickly. The ideal would be to simply scan the supermarket receipt and let OCR figure it out for the majority case (aka the 2 or 3 stores I shop at every week).

I've tried a lot in the past as well, and after getting annoyed with proprietary OS X software (iBank in particular) back in 2009 or so, and not really liking GNUCash and KDEMoney (at least back in 2009) ended up writing my own open source simple app (native Cocoa, with a more recent Qt port for Linux) that I've been using every since on a daily basis.

In terms of the detail, I used to do very detailed breakdowns of categories, but now I don't really see the point: my app supports 'split transactions' (one of the reasons I actually made it, as existing solutions had poor support for them back in 2009), and I generally just use things like 'Food', 'Drinks', 'Essentials' as categories, as it never really made sense (at least for me) to detail them with such accuracy.

But for things like 'coffee', I do 'Drinks:Coffee', so I can see how much I am spending on fairly specific things, but I guess it's a balance in terms of whether it's worth the effort to record them so accurately compared to making use of the details.

Similarly, things like 'Car:Fuel', 'Car:Service', etc...

At some point I really should do a first principles analysis of why I track money... as far as I know, it mostly comes down to: 1. is fraud happening? and 2. Am I saving enough for retirement? Oh, and I guess 3. taxes

For fraud, I think it's basically a matter of whether we can recognize each transaction. You don't actually need to download transactions for that; you can just skim your monthly statements.

For saving, that's tricky because there needs to be that recognition of what categories are likely to increase during retirement versus decrease. I gave that a single pass a while back, and now I have a count each month of those expense categories that will continue into retirement, along with a 12-month average, so I can get a sense of what my portfolio needs to be able to fund after I retire. For that, even though I have Banktivity, I also have to use a spreadsheet.

For taxes, I don't know if anything really makes that easy. It's hard to know what category breakdown you really need to know whether you're capturing all your tax benefit, and my financial software doesn't tell me "oh, by the way, you'll want to split that transaction since some of it has a tax benefit."

Your grandparents tracked money because they were also verifying the math, which could have done by hand. Now, we assume the math is right, and we're checking for fraud.

That, and we like to watch a number go up.

Oh come on... there's lots of reasons. Understanding where the money goes. How much are you spending on dining out each month? How much does your car cost when you add it all up at the end of the year? It's easy to fool ourselves when it goes out $10 - $20 at a time.

This is true but unless you have a motivation, i.e. somewhere else that money could rather be going that's somewhat immediate, you're kind of wasting your time (IMO).

If you want a vacation and couldn't afford it or you wanted some cool home gadget and couldn't afford it then sure, delve into your finances. But if that money you're saving is just going to sit around then what's the point? If you already have a rainy day and a 401K or equivalent, then you're good. Ultimately money is worthless if you don't use it.

The reason I say this is because tracking money is not free. It's a mental burden. Do you really want that to be your business? How much mental energy are you willing to give it?

Because it sounds simple until you really want a coffee after work, but it turns out you don't have the budget and then you sit and cry in your car because that hypothetical coffee was the one thing tying you to reality.

In the early period after moving to the USA, for a few years I was tracking money in and out in great detail. Including splitting checks from stores. And while I did not set explicit budget, I believe it allowed me to keep our finances healthy. And it certainly decreased money-related anxieties, giving me sense of control.

I stopped doing it after a few years, after I felt pretty secure financially. And that certainly coincided with more spending on things that I would otherwise not spend on...

It would be better if the software could just scan the receipt. And if you live in the country with electronic receipts (like Russia) then you can get them to your email in electronic form or find online by identifiers on a paper receipt.

You're basically describing envelope budgeting, I think, where the money is (like checking) or isn't (like credit cards) doesn't matter. You have money inside of physical or virtual "envelopes" that represent what money you really have available for X or Y. It's kind of like an abstraction on top of all your money sources.

For this I recommend https://actualbudget.com/ . It is in many ways like You Need A Budget but you can host it yourself for free.

https://actualbudget.org/ is the open source site.

Envelope budgeting works really well, tbh. Especially for saving.

Due to a colossal screw up my bank had after I moved back to my home country, it took me several months to get a new debit card. So I got used to just taking out X cash per month, and dividing it.

I’ve tried a few financial tracking things since getting back on the card wagon, and found none of them actually have the same result (spending less) as just dividing cash into physical buckets.

> Maybe, I don't find it yet? Any suggestions?

It would be nice if there was a QRcode format on receipts for this. Off the top of my head, the encoded format would have:

* store name/location

* total amount

* field for tax(es) broken out

* a general category of the purchase if it's simple ("fuel", "food" for receipt from McDonald's)

* groupings of items for certain types/categories: at (e.g.) Costco you can buy groceries and clothing, so have a grouping for all your food with the total for that categorized as "food", clothes grouped together with its category; you can also get gas and tire/oil changes ("transportation")

The major categories could be what a lot of countries use for CPI categories:

* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/2018016/cpi-ipc...

* https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm

* https://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/cpi/158c.html

* https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/macroeconomic_and_sectoral/h...

May I ask why you want this? Does it have an actual purpose or do you just enjoy processing data? If the purpose is "check what % I'm spending in each category", you don't need account software for this. You just need a table with 2 columns, price and category and group by and sum. How you get that table has nothing to do with accounting.

As others have said, you're likely too granular. I just separate into "Groceries", "Supplies", "Clothes", etc.

I couldn't quite understand what you need, but I use KMyMoney (migrated from GnuCash over a decade ago). If you've gone to Walmart and itemized in the past, then the next time you go to Walmart and import your CC statement, it will pick the last Walmart transaction with a similar total charge as your starting point. It's mildly helpful.

And yes, it does do Categories instead of Accounts. The latter, however, is more in line with accounting principles.

I think the only thing that will ever really make sense is flat horizontal property lists.

A given item and a given transaction could have any number of different properties, and no single heirachical category can express the reality.

Is it a work expense or is paid through paypal or is it a subscription or is it from amazon or is it food? A single item could be all of those at once, and sometimes when you want to know "all food" you want to include that regardless what it's other properties are.

IE, pork doesn't really have to be under some heirarchy like meat. It is both pork and meat, and it also may be art supplies or photographic subject etc.

I’d expect something like claude 3.5 or chatgpt 4 to do OK at this. (Maybe ocr the receipt, or just send a copy to a multimodal model).

You might be able to use one of the open weight models instead. (Maybe one of the apache 2.0 qwen’s?) Scan a batch, then hand check the results in fifo order. That way you can probably get away with a local gpu.

The hard part will be getting structured output that gnucash likes. I’d try a simple json schema (stick the schema and some example input/output in the context), and then write some code to convert it to a format gnu cash can import.

Frankly the easiest way seems to be apps that parse your sms messages in your phone and build up an expense report out of that. Many people here will balk at this, but it takes a lot of effort out of keeping expense reports.

I haven't gotten a single bill over SMS, is this an US thing?

They don't send a bill over sms, but a transaction acknowledgement indicating total amount over sms.

Would only work for Lidl, but I wonder if there's anyway of pulling the data using the APIs that they use for the Lidl Plus app. The Lidl Plus app contains a digital receipt of every shop you've done with them.

Not something I've looked at and specific to Lidl but if you shop there regularly it might be worth trying.

When I started to track my finances I quickly ran into limitations with just a spreadsheet, and also didn't feel like any of the existing options fit my need. I agree that for most (all?) people this level of detailed tracking is probably too much, but it doesn't take that much time for me.

I ended up making my own app https://github.com/VMelnalksnis/Gnomeshade. I also felt similarly regarding accounts, so I split transactions into two parts - transfers and purchases. That allows to handle multiple currencies, and handle categorization separately from accounts. I haven't looked into suggestions like you mentioned, I went with trying to parse receipts for my most common purchases.