How I'm doing plain-text accounting

It finally happened. It’s time for me to dive into plain text accounting.

My one requirement for bookkeeping apps: automatic categorization. They all support it for new transactions, but not initial imports. Have to manually tag years of transactions. Feels antiquated when LLMs exist. tweet

Here are the tools I’m trying right now:

1. hledger
2. plaid2qif
3. hledger-flow

The process will start with plaid2qif, which will pull all my bank records from all my accounts, on a month-by-month basis. Those go into an import folder, which is ingested by hledger-flow into hledger. Then, I’ll write rules using hledger’s categorization engine so I can automatically tag my previous transactions, as well as any new ones.

I’ve been interested in PTA for a long time, but I’ve put it off because it seems like a huge investment of time.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s worth it. I want to be able to answer questions like “how much did I spend on groceries last year?” or “how much did I spend on travel last year?” and I want to be able to do it quickly and easily. And I want to be able to do it without having to log in to a bunch of different websites and download a bunch of different CSVs.

So I’m going to give it a shot. I’ll update this post with my progress as I go.