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Ask HN: Managing Personal Finances with Git

by lildata on 6/2/21, 6:48 PM with 5 comments

I just thought that Git could make a lot of sense to manage personal finance. A little bit in the spirit of Ledger CLI https://www.ledger-cli.org/ I searched & it seems nobody have tried. What do you thing & what would be the best approach?

  • by quantumofalpha on 6/2/21, 7:53 PM

    There's actually wealth of resources on this topic today, see https://plaintextaccounting.org/ for a starting point.

    > it seems nobody have tried

    Probably because it's too obvious of an idea? And you wouldn't just find people's repos on github with their ledger databases for another obvious reason.

  • by snickersnee11 on 6/2/21, 10:55 PM

    I always had a question for people who do such things. Is it really worth the time to configure such things and get into a habit of it?

    It's like a ton of time to get into such framework, much easier to install some app on your phone. What's the point? (Sincere question)

  • by Jtsummers on 6/2/21, 7:05 PM

    Git + Ledger (or other plaintext accounting tools) actually works pretty well. I did that for several years, though the habit/routine broke for me last year. It let me keep the files in sync between my phone and my computer(s).

    I'm not sure it's worth a writeup as anything special, git is (for programmers especially) a conventional way of keeping things synchronized between devices. I also used Dropbox for a time, but I specifically wanted versioning to help keep track of edits and reorgs of my files so I switched to git.