95 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
95 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Plaintext Accounting, beancount, and fava"
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date: 2021-01-15T15:54:51+01:00
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draft: false # I don't care for draft mode, git has branches for that
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description: "Or the story of my fall into systematically logging my expenses"
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tags:
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- accounting
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- cli
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categories:
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- software
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- slice of life
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series:
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favorite: false
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---
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[Plain text accounting](https://plaintextaccounting.org/) is a way of tracking
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your finances using simple text files and command line software.
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Being about to work on my end-of-studies internship, and therefore enter the
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*adult*, *professional* world, I decided that I needed a better way to track my
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income, expenses, and net worth.
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<!--more-->
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## My accounting journey
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I went through most of my life without having to account for my money
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explicitly, making use of the "dad bank". I received small sums of money at
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Christmas and for birthdays, most of which went straight to an envelop that my
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dad kept for me. This is the money that I used to buy myself books, games, and
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other small things during childhood. My father kept track of the money and told
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me how much I had left whenever I asked him.
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During high school, my parents opened a bank account for me, and handed me
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a credit card to allow me to buy lunch, make gifts, and other discretionary
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spendings without having to explicitly go through them. It was regularly checked
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on by my parents to make sure I always had some amounts of money to my name in
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case I needed it, which they did up and until my engineering school. At this
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point I had a pretty good idea of how much I could spend and when I could spend
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it. This information could fit entirely in my head without any problems.
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Once I had spent a year at EPITA, I decided to apply to the team of teaching
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assistants. Between the money that I earned during my internship and what I
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was earning as an assistant, I was finally gaining some financial independence.
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Until very recently I was still mostly keeping track of my spending in my head,
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my student job allowing me to avoid explicitly budgeting my money.
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## Why do I want an actual accounting solution?
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* some people use their head
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* I used to do that for a long time
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* I want more fine-grained control and analysis of my habits
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* I'm somewhat of a airhead, suffer from one-click-purchase-syndrome
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* some people use a spreadsheet
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* bothersome
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* easy to mess up
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* hard to version
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* I like `git`
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* I want
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* foolproof
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* exhaustive
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* powerful analysis, and trivia
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* how much have I spent at my neighbourhood bakery in the last semester ?
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* pretty interface
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* FLOSS and forward compatible
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## Beancount
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### What is it?
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* python
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* inspired by ledger, hledger
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* simple
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* *double entry accounting*
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### Why did I choose it ?
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* plain text accounting
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* wonderful documentation
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* first real introduction to double-entry accounting
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* author's comparison with ledger and hledger
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* I *grok* python
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### So how do I use it?
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* backlog of transactions
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* fava
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* simple makefile and git hooks
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* mobile phone app
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## What's next?
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* not accurately tracking my taxes from my pay check
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* not tracking my livret A, PEE, future PEL and AV
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