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)`
forum.plaintextaccounting.org
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](https://fosstodon.org/tags/plaintextaccounting), [#hledger](https://fosstodon.org/tags/hledger) and others ([https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-follow-hashtags-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/](https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-follow-hashtags-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/)) \- follow account [@plaintextaccounting](https://lemmy.world/c/plaintextaccounting) to follow posts in the PTA Lemmy Community [https://lemmy.world/c/plaintextaccounting](https://lemmy.world/c/plaintextaccounting)
Experiences of PTA and personal budget? There are many options for a [#plaintextaccounting](https://fosstodon.org/tags/plaintextaccounting) budget: [#hledger](https://fosstodon.org/tags/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](https://lemmy.world/c/plaintextaccounting)
The last version [1.31](https://hledger.org/release-notes.html#2023-09-03-hledger-131) of hledger came with an [improvement](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/pull/2069) 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](https://plaintextaccounting.org/) (PTA) community in Lemmy! A community to talk, ask and learn about accounting with tools like [ledger-cli](https://ledger-cli.org), [hledger](https://ledger.org) and [beancount](https://beancount.github.io). I am /u/zakozazz at Reddit now /u/zako at Lemmy. This community issues from discussions ([1](https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/14egq7t/our_reddit_strategy/), [2](https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/14m7ni5/poll_to_select_server_in_fediverse/)) 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!
