from Hacker News

Show HN: I wrote an eBook on tracking personal finances using Python

by siddhant on 12/13/21, 8:48 PM with 12 comments

• by siddhant on 12/13/21, 8:48 PM

  About 4 years ago I started looking for a privacy-friendly way to keep track of my money across different accounts.

  While searching, I found Plain Text Accounting [1], which means keeping financial records inside plain-text files. This method really appealed to the developer in me and I started digging deeper.

  4 years later, I now have a stable workflow using Beancount [2] that lets me import all my financial activity into a plain-text file that lives inside a git repository on my disk. Needless to say, I'm super happy with this workflow!

  So this ebook is my attempt at helping more folks get into the world of PTA and Beancount! In my experience, the documentation can be a bit tricky to get into, so I hope this ebook lowers the barrier to entry!

  Open to answering questions!

  [1]: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

  [2]: https://beancount.github.io/

• by thy77 on 12/14/21, 4:21 AM

  Will check it out. I'm about 4 years into hledger with manual entry since few of my banks and cards have csv instead of pdf only statements. Hope to see some good features in your book. Thank you for the effort that went into this and for documenting and sharing your work. Are there good quarterly reports that follow sensible standards? Do you have good examples of collapsing our super detailed sub-accounts into just the right level of detail for the reports? Re: expenses:gas:Exxon and expenses:gas:BP

• by snthpy on 12/14/21, 8:16 AM

  Thanks. I've been wanting to get into Beancount for a while but my bank only sends me pdf bank statements which has been holding me back. Does your book address that?

  Also, I went to your landing page and then clicked on "Click here to download your ebook" and straight away was taken to a credit card form with no indication of how much I would need to pay or that I would need to pay at all and the book wouldn't be free!

• by siddhant on 12/14/21, 6:56 AM

  And here’s a sample chapter: https://personalfinancespython.com/files/sample.pdf

  (I couldn’t modify the original comment or add replies to it anymore, hence posting a new one.)

• by oulipo on 12/14/21, 9:56 AM

  Nice, perhaps you should put an index, and show the kind of requirements from your bank account export methods that allow someone to use this

• by andsko on 12/13/21, 9:00 PM

  Hi! You've got some extra text in the url and it gives 404.