[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.