I’d appreciate hearing how others have used the various plain text accounting tools for their own use. Are you legitimately using it to inform yourself of your spending habits and taking corrective action? Is it simply for tracking your expenses, revenues, net worth, etc? Or is it simply about the process? I can certainly see the appeal of such an orderly, structured process.
Every time I’m reminded of plain text accounting, I have either an irresistible urge to immerse myself fully into the process, or feelings of guilt for not staying committed to my previous attempts. Right now, it’s mainly guilt, since I’ve not updated my personal ledger in a month and a half.
Ultimately, I think I’m unsure about why I’m using it, and eventually feel like I’m logging transactions just for the sake of it.
I’m always using it for spontaneous group accounting, e.g. three guys vacation. Because for group expenses it’s much easier to split the check later in the day or the week. We just accumulate the web of debts and sort it out on demand. It’s very hard to track such chaotic expenses otherwise.
Same for business expenses, I just pay with my card for equipment, services, etc. Later I report it up and get cash/transfer back (doesn’t work for some countries/businesses).
My personal eaten-shitten expenses I know from my bank and experience, there’s no need to account for these.
Every time I’m reminded of plain text accounting, I have either an irresistible urge to immerse myself fully into the process, or feelings of guilt for not staying committed to my previous attempts
You must have financial motivation, not emotional. Once you know that if you give up on accounting, your buddy will happily drink through hundreds of bucks, or your company will get a free hdmi cable, you enter the damn sum without hesitation. Personal accounting doesn’t work because you only can lose analytics, not money.
I feel like plain text accounting software is overkill for splitting vacation expenses. The Splitwise phone app is very good for this, and shares some of the responsibility.
I'm self employed and use it (Beancount, as I like the more strict approach) for my business accounts and also for my stock portfolio. Fava, the web UI, is very handy for reporting and visualising things, though I also have a few scripts to automate certain processes like importing transactions from Wise and tracking exchange rates. I really don't have the discipline to use it for daily personal expenses or budgeting though.
I don’t use it as some motivational tool to change spending habits or whatever but I do like to keep a record of all my accounts and assets, I think it gives me a better understanding of my whole financial picture and I create ‘virtual’ accounts within some cash savings account that divides the balance into pots for things I’m amortizing like car maintenance or insurance
- Keeping track of my expenses in various sectors, food (groceries, eatout), books, magazine subscriptions, etc
- Keeping track of my current balance accounts across various currency deposits
- Loans I give to people, and gifts I give to people
- Creating virtual envelops to segregate my savings account money for my goals like travelling, buying gifts for someone, investment goals, etc
This has helped me tremendously
- for reducing my eatout habits and eating more at home by realising just how much I was wasting money by eating out daily, and inputting the saved amount into compound interest calculator to realize potential lost income and wealth from putting those into an index fund account
- to keep track of pending payments from clients and calculating my real cashflow against cashflow based on expected income
- reduce my impulsive spending, by tracking my savings account money with virtual envelops aka 40% for investment goals, 1% for gifts, etc, it helps me to not just see a big balance on my account and start spending it away seeing that money as segregated chunks in my mind helps me stay in my lane.
- I have a program that generates all sorts of charts to track my wealth growth over time, expense growth and decline across categories, which I then dump into a webpage with my notes on how the changes were a net positive or negative outcome on my life, I do it annually to decide what i’ll do next
- I also have a python script that takes my ledger file and converts it into an excel sheet to send it to my chartered accountant to file my annual taxes
I also maintain a separate ledger file for my business (I dont maintain that one manually, I just export the data from accountant’s software, to do my own calculations at home)
- I use it to calculate cashflow projections to predict how my expenses might potentially grow with rise in revenue
- Track categories of spending to spot anomalies in spend across departments
- Calculate whether I should hire more or raise marketing spend, calculate metrics like ROIC (Return on Invested Capital)
The double entry helps me catch discrepancies in accounting if any, by importing bank statements and generating a ledger from that, I have accounts separated by usecase (discretionary spends, employee perks, business inputs) , with each one getting deposit from main account weekly. I use that to calculate if somethings odd and books are all cool.
I have had trouble before with an accountant running pseudo expenses on my books without telling me, just to impress me by showing a high taxes saved, without being transparent, landed me in court once, with a huge fine with late penalties.
Now I dont trust accountants and make sure I double check no matter what.
Plus I have a lot of automation scripts and stuff, imports from stripe account, imports from bank statements, accountant’s own ledger, etc
I match them all with python scripts and try to look for discrepancies.
I love plain text accounting, as a programmer it works for me, I automated a ton of it, and I have tons of my own macros and shortcuts in my code editor(vim) to make things very easy and simple,
I love it overall, I built out my own system on top of hledger across the years.
You've inspired me to rethink my approach to Anki. I've used it on and off for the last few years, but always fall in the trap of creating cards that were too convoluted. Sounds like I could benefit from some deliberate "laziness".
Did you ever feel like you were answering correctly, on close cards specifically, not because of an improved understanding but because you were associating the correct answer with the prompt/excerpt? Would appreciate any advice on how to avoid this!
> Did you ever feel like you were answering correctly, on close cards specifically, not because of an improved understanding but because you were associating the correct answer with the prompt/excerpt?
I actually suspect that associating the word with the context helps, as surprising as that might be.
Let's say I grab a few sentences from an interesting article, and I boldface a word. I'll mark the card as "pass" if I at least sort of understand it in context.
On day 1, I honestly might find the word fairly confusing. I can explain what it means, but maybe the grammar is unfamiliar. Ditto for the first few reviews. But then around day 8 or so, the card disappears until day 20 or 30. And the next time I see that card, suddenly the odd bit of grammar is completely natural and obvious. There's maybe some kind of medium-term memory consolidation mechanism occurring? Something happens when I'm not looking at it.
Seeing the word in context somehow allows my brain to grab on. The human brain contains some incredibly powerful language learning machinery. In adults, that machinery still exists. Even if it's a bit rusty. And that machinery seems to work best on semi-comprehensible speech in a natural context. So think of Anki less as a set of facts you must learn, and more as a tool to distill and concentrate natural language so that you can let your brain work on your weak points. (And as soon as possible, start reading lots of books and watching TV! I learned the hardest 10% of my vocabulary using Anki, and much of the rest from context reading books.)
Also, I find it fascinating that LLMs are trained using a very similar process. Either "predict the next word" or "fill in the blank". Now, they need a lot more input than any human does, but the fact that fill-in-the-blanks works so well in both cases is fascinating.
Here are two of the most interesting experiments I tried with Anki:
(The only language I ever bothered to push to a high level was French. Spanish and ancient Egyptian were basically experiments to see how quickly I could pick up the basics, using the tricks I learned while working on French. A language that you can use at a professional level is a bit like a pet; it requires ongoing care.)
That is a legitimate problem of SRS (recognition vs knowing), I use a few ways to avoid it:
-Don't do many repetitions of the same card. Eg. if i want to learn 5 new specific words, maybe I use 6-8 sentences that each use 2 new words, so that each new word shows in 2-3 cards. Then I only review each cards 6-8 times in a 2-month period (normally).
-Use long intervals. I rather forget than learn to recognize the thing. But even if I forget, I almost never click "fail". You learn with retrieval effort, even if you just forgotten the thing (that's science)
-Even so, by the 4-5th rep I start recognizing cards, so I be mindful when reviewing, and force myself to really think the answer (occasionally, writing down the answer, for instance). This clashes with my principle of going fast, so there is deff a balance.
-I don't track "streaks", but if I struggle or I have the feeling that something shows up too much, I archive and create more cards.
Every time I’m reminded of plain text accounting, I have either an irresistible urge to immerse myself fully into the process, or feelings of guilt for not staying committed to my previous attempts. Right now, it’s mainly guilt, since I’ve not updated my personal ledger in a month and a half. Ultimately, I think I’m unsure about why I’m using it, and eventually feel like I’m logging transactions just for the sake of it.