A few years ago, I found Beancount and very quickly understood how well it solved many problems in personal finance software that I'd faced for years prior. Beancount's extensibility was a core attraction for me, and it was clear the software was worth investing in. I started writing automation around it for my needs. Today, a bunch of that automation works surprisingly well, though it's taken effort to get here.
I've started writing up some of my Beancount workflows in the hope that it saves others tons of time. The first in this series is ledger updates. I'd previously posted this in a thread somewhere, but am creating a separate thread here, so I can post updates and such. Link to article series: *The Five-Minute Ledger Update <https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/the-five-minute-ledger-update/>* Extract follow: * Problem: Updating Your Ledger is a Pain! * *That’s right, updating your ledger with data from your financial institutions is the most laborious and frustrating part of personal finance. It doesn’t need to be so with Beancount, which is the point of this series of articles.* *With a little bit of effort upfront, open source tooling can actually be way better than commercial solutions, and far more flexible and extensible.* *Zero Effort Updates* *The ultimate vision of this set of articles is to have your ledger updated automatically with zero effort from you. How close can we get to that vision? When I started out, each update would take hours of frustrating effort and reconciliation across 60+ accounts at institutions. So much so, I only did updates once in a few months. After understanding why, and developing solutions, I am now at a point where my ledger updates take well less than five minutes.* *Bringing it down to under five minutes was critical to making personal finance productive and fun, because it lets me get away from tinkering, and enables me to focus on the actual finances.* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/992cd8dd-0ed1-45bf-a9f5-b641bacd6d2an%40googlegroups.com.
