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Dmitry Astapov edited this page Feb 24, 2019 · 18 revisions

Goals

I wanted a setup that would satisfy three major requirements:

  • Tracking expenses should take as little time, effort and manual work as possible.

  • It should be easy to work towards eventual consistency. Large and danting tasks (like "I will process 10 years of paper mortgage statements" or "I want to import 5 years of paypal payments") should not require one big push and perfect planning to finish them. Instead I should be able to do them bit by little bit, leaving things half-done, and picking them up later with little (mental) effort. Eventually my records would be perfect and consistent.

  • Ability to refactor is a must. This is the natural extension of the previous point. I want to be able to go back and change the way I am doing things, with as little effort as possible and without fear of irrevocably breaking things.

I believe that have a setup that allows you to do all that, and more.

Structure

It is relatively easy to describe what I am doing, but it is harder to descibe why. The easiest way to to answer all the why questions is to illustrate how one can grow a setup from scratch, gradually introducing problems and solutions.

This repository contains a number of directories (01-getting-started, 02-getting-data-in, ...) that represent evolution of the setup, starting from the bare minimum and adding one new feature at a time. This allows you to choose the starting point that is more suitable for you or compare/diff various setups and see what exactly has been changed at every step : diffs between the steps are in the diffs directory.

Suggested reading order

If you are fairly experienced with ledger, hledger, beancount or any other plain-text accounting tool, you might want to quickly check out Directory structure to see how things are laid out and then head directly to the most featureful (most-highly-numbered) directory and take a look around to see how everything is done. Run ./export.sh to generate all reports and see what is being processed and how. If things dont make sense, start at the beginning.

Full guide reads in the following order1:

  1. Directory structure
  2. Getting started
  3. Getting data in
  4. Getting full history of the account
  5. Adding more accounts
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Home

  1. Key principles and practices
  2. Getting started
  3. Getting data in
  4. Getting full history of the account
  5. Adding more accounts
  6. Creating CSV import rules
  7. Maintaining CSV rules
  8. Investments - easy approach
  9. Mortgages
  10. Remortgage
  11. Foreign currency
  12. Sorting unknowns
  13. File-specific CSV rules
  14. Tax returns
  15. Speeding things up
  16. Tracking commodity lost manually
  17. Fetching prices automatically
  18. ChangeLog
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