[nlh]

Agreed 1000%! I think ‘do the busy work’ can even be applied more broadly:

Years ago I ran a small business in my mid-20s, and one of the critical mistakes I made was getting hopelessly behind in our bookkeeping (and by hopelessly behind I mean it - things were going well and the bank account kept going up, so I kinda just piled the sales receipts on top of each other for close to a year).

When the company started to grow up, we had to get properly reconciled financial statements in order for our bank loans to be renewed. I hired what felt like an endless stream of contract bookkeepers and financial consultants who all had their own way of “doing it more simply” to try and avoid what at that point was probably 100 hours of busywork to reconcile all the credit card transactions.

They all failed. We just kept falling more and more behind and lost resolution on how the business was doing.

In the end, the ONLY thing that worked was when I found someone who understood this and just rolled his sleeves up and did the work. There simply was no way around it. No shortcuts. No way to intuit how your business was doing without knowing exactly how much each customer spent. And no way to do that without matching up each credit card transaction.

Do the work. Don’t try to find ways around doing it because it’s hard or rote or mind numbing. Do the work.

[janwillemb]

This. And it's often not even that much work after all, given the amount of energy that went into procrastination and finding easier solutions. I've know this professionally for a long time now, but only recently "found out" that this applies to my personal/family bookkeeping process too. I've always been looking for easy automated solutions for importing and categorising my transactions until I read an article here on hn about bookkeeping with gnucash. I now enter all transactions by hand, for a few months now, and it has given me more control and insight than ever before.

[rthomas6]

Quick plug for ledger-cli (and hledger, and beancount). It is a command line tool for double entry bookkeeping in plain text files. All your transactions get recorded in a human readable file, and then you can run pretty complex queries over it. I currently have an envelope budget system set up in it, and even track my mortgage, including compounding the interest.

[nlh]

That's great! By the way, on a similar vein - I finally ditched QuickBooks / Quicken / all that crap and moved everything personally & for my consulting company over to hledger (which is just a slightly fancy version of ledger).

Turns out, everything I hated about QuickBooks for all these years centered around its inability to bulk-edit transactions or categorize/recategorize things en masse, leading to countless hours wasted clicking or, worse, those bulk journal entires to move things from one place to another (which forces you to follow a breadcrumb path of asset movements, which is a nightmare).

But when everything is just a list of things in a text file, you get the power of every great text editor on earth (vi, emacs, or whatever) and can make mass changes trivially. Life's much much much much better this way.