Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by davidhunter 585 days ago
Has anyone else gone on the following journey:

1. Use excel

2. See ledger/hledger. Think this must be 'the way'. Go all in.

3. Constantly wrestle with ledger/hledger because you only do your accounting once per month/quarter which is not enough frequency to really grok it.

4. Use excel with a new sense of calm that you're not missing out on something better
2 comments
jsdwarf 585 days ago
Been there. hedger/ledger look tempting, but if you follow the approach of the OP, you need to build your own toolchain around it so that it recompiles your journals on each rule change.

I've found it easier to use a spreadsheet. Sheet 1 contains the csv export to which i constantly append, sheet 2 the hierarchical acoount structure: an account name like "expenses: groceries:walmart" is followed by a regex that matches the expense description on sheet 1 for that account (walmart). On sheet 1 I have an "detected Account" column, into which a formula outputs the detected account based in the regexes.

Sumif formulas sum up the totals per account. Since no compilation step is necessary, rule changes are picked up much faster

link
davidhunter 584 days ago
That's a nice idea. Thanks for sharing.

I have a single sheet per account (current accounts, share accounts etc). I download csvs and append to the relevant sheet - usually once per month.

In each sheet I've added a column called 'tag'. And I just tag anything that I want to keep track of - which is a small percentage of transactions. Then I can filter transactions by that tag.

Whilst it was a nice idea in theory to book every transaction to an account in a chart of accounts, I found that I very rarely looked at the PnL. And so it didn't justify the time involved in booking each transaction.

link
nulbyte 585 days ago
Not Excel, but LibreOffice Calc, here. It's just a biweekly budget, helps with making sure Ive acheduled my bills for the month and tracks savings.

Toward the end of every year, I go through the ritual of preparing to move back to ledger and getting files ready. And shortly after the start of the year, I abandon it. Maybe one year I will stick with it. Maybe.

link