posts: plaintext-accounting: add motivations

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Bruno BELANYI 2021-01-18 14:04:23 +01:00
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@ -47,22 +47,42 @@ my student job allowing me to avoid explicitly budgeting my money.
## Why do I want an actual accounting solution? ## Why do I want an actual accounting solution?
* some people use their head As you can see from my history, I have spent my whole life until this point
* I used to do that for a long time without using any form of accounting. Some people keep going their whole life
* I want more fine-grained control and analysis of my habits without ever explicitly using any accounting solutions, having a ball-park idea
* I'm somewhat of a airhead, suffer from one-click-purchase-syndrome of how much they have spent and how much they can afford to spend later.
* some people use a spreadsheet
* bothersome This, however, does not accommodate me anymore. I want to have more fine-grained
* easy to mess up control over my money, and be able to track and analyse my spending. I also know
* hard to version that I am somewhat of an air-head, and tracking my money explicitly will
* I like `git` probably allow me to avoid, or at least reduce, lifestyle inflation once
* I want I finish school and enter the work-force.
* foolproof
* exhaustive To that end, some people use a spreadsheet and simply keep track of their
* powerful analysis, and trivia transactions as a row of in-n-out flow of money. This is also problematic to me:
* how much have I spent at my neighbourhood bakery in the last semester ? it is bothersome to come up with a useful template for budgeting, easy to mess
* pretty interface up my reporting, especially with transactions that are harder to model using
* FLOSS and forward compatible a simple template. Furthermore, it is very hard to version a spreadsheet, being
a programmer, and lover of the command line, I want to be able to use `git` to
keep track of my budget through time.
The perfect system for me has to be:
* foolproof: it is hard to mess up my reporting, and easy to know when I make
a mistake,
* exhaustive: I can use the same system to keep track of my money, my
investments, my debts, and anything that I would like to track,
* data-oriented: it should allow me to process my data and do some powerful
analysis on my past transactions: I want to be able to know how much money
I have spent at my neighbourhood bakery in the last semester.
* have a pretty interface and export abilities: this allows me to talk with
a banker or an accountant without them having to know how to use my accounting
system,
* be [Free and Open-Source Software][foss]: I can tinker with the sources if
something isn't to my liking, and more easily ensure that my data will still
be usable 20 years down the line.
[foss]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
## Beancount ## Beancount