Plain Text Accounting

Is there a way I could see my is view monthly, but from current date from each month? I.e. if I ran the command today I would see January to April where each month is showing expenses and incoming from 1-9, i.e. 1-9 January, 1-9 February, 1-9 March and so forth?

Idea is to have a comparison how expenses/income ratio is going compared to previous months at the "same time".

Like for January only I could $ hledger print -b $(date +%Y-)01-01 -e $(date +%Y)-01-$(date +%d)

Have a look at the linked post. What are your thoughts ? Is it worth exploring further ? Cc @zako

This is a brain storming I want to share with you 😆 .

I feel that PTA is very good to track every transaction but sometimes it is difficult to "understand" the evolution or if I am in the right path of my finances. It easy to know your expenses one month, year... (hledger bal expenses -p 2023 or hledger bal expenses: -M -p 2023). But it does not provide a good and quick picture if I am expending more or not.

I think that many use graphics to try to understand the trend of our personal finances. But I think it could be also achieved with text reports. I am thinking in two kind of reports:

• Balance Report to compare the same period of time in the last years. For example, compare the Q1 (or months, or weeks...) of the last 3-4 years

hledger report-type-1 --period-report q1 --period 2020..2023 "expenses:"

                ||   Q1-2020   Q1-2021   Q3-2022
================++==============================
 expenses:...   ||  

• Moving Average Report. For example, I can obtain the average expenses in the last 12 months with hledger bal expenses: -MA -p 2022.01..2023.01 and I could obtain the average 12 month expenses of the previous month with hledger bal expenses: -MA -p 2021.12..2022.12. The idea would be to have a report to know if I am spending less in average in the last X months and, not exactly month to month or quarter to quarter.

                ||   2022.11-Average-12m   2022.12-Average-12m   2023.01-Average-12m
================++==================================================================
 expenses:...   ||  

These are a bunch of ideas. Perhaps it should not be directly linked with the reporting capabilities of PTA. Perhaps it should be scripted with bash, with org-mode...

What do you think? How do you analyze your PTA data?

In hledger I have my income set up like income:job:main (gross) and taxes are in expenses:job:tax, so when I run: $ hledger is -t job I can see my net value for my work and if I run $ hledger is -t other expenses come into play as well.

Sometimes though, I would like to be able to see the income statement view with my net for my job under Revenues and the rest of my expenses under Expenses. Is there any easy way to do this with an alias or similar?

I have a csv file I'd like to read, seems I'm correct other than parsing the date. The csv file shows the date like so: ""2023-03-04 07:54:33"

I've tried a bunch without success. I feel it should be:

date-format %Y-%M-%D %H:%M:%S

But nope, getting an error it can not parse it.

Delighted to announce hledger 1.32, with more precision control, beancount output, TSV output, --summary-only, strict/idempotent import, CSV rule enhancements, timedot letters, fixes - it's a lot !

• https://hledger.org/release-notes.html#2023-12-01-hledger-132
• https://hledger.org/install

Boosting the discussion of PTA in the Fediverse (for Mastodon users)

If you are a mastodon user, these are some tips to follow discussions about PTA:
- follow hashtags #plaintextaccounting, #hledger and others (https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-follow-hashtags-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/)
- follow account @plaintextaccounting to follow posts in the PTA Lemmy Community https://lemmy.world/c/plaintextaccounting

Experiences of PTA and personal budget?

There are many options for a #plaintextaccounting budget: #hledger builtin feature, automated transactions with virtual accounts, subaccounts of assets for envelope budgeting... I like the idea of accumulative budget of envelope budgeting but I would like to have one reduced list of budget categories (necessary, non-necessary, savings) and a broad list of expense categories (home, transport, utilities...).

@plaintextaccounting

The last version 1.31 of hledger came with an improvement to the output of hledger roi that makes easier the tracking of investments to even take decisions. They added the "TWR/period" column to the report.

Until now, "hledger roi" provided the annualized IRR and the annualized TWR but not the real return of the desired period. The difference between return and annualized return is key, because if I earned 5% for 6 months, I earned an 10.25% annualized return but what I really have in my pocket is an additional 5% of my initial investment.

The next screenshot is the output of the first 9 months of 2023.

Now for every month I have the anualized IRR and TWR, but the most interesting column is the "TWR/period" column which display the return of the period. Finally, the last line provides the return of the first nine months of the year (TWR/period) and also the annualized TWR and IRR.

My credit card statement has two kinds of debit entries:

• Payments from my bank account
• Refunds from retailers (say because of a return)

In my csv import rule, I have a rule that filters the first item, where I assign account2 to a dummy "transfers" account that I will match payments to from my bank statement.

if %description BPAY PAYMENTS
  account2 transfers:credit:coles

However, I am not sure how to filter the second category. They show up with seemingly random descriptions. I don't see a way to do an if condition on whether the amount if positive or negative. So all of the refunds get assigned to the default "income:unknown" category. I'd ideally like to assign account2 in this case to something like "transfers:credit:refunds".

I just created the community but I lack of experience moderating other communities. So, I think it would be advisable to have more moderators, perhaps, two or three additional moderators.

Please apply to mod rights with a comment to this post and let's allow the people to upvote applications. It would be specially interesting to apply for mod rights:

• people who leads projects of the PTA universe (software projects, web pages...)
• people who has experience moderating other communities.

Regards!

Welcome to Plain Text Accounting (PTA) community in Lemmy! A community to talk, ask and learn about accounting with tools like ledger-cli, hledger and beancount.

I am /u/zakozazz at Reddit now /u/zako at Lemmy. This community issues from discussions (1, 2) in the PTA subreddit due to the limitations of Reddit so that third party applications can use the API.

Please feel free to take part in this community!