Comment by NoboruWataya 5 days ago
Exactly my experience but with GnuCash. I used to do it weekly, if you miss one or even two or three weeks it's not too bad, but beyond that the effort required to catch up just snowballs. It's also been about a year since I've imported. I've been meaning to get around to reviving it, and the only way I can imagine doing it is to break it up into smaller chunks, like uploading one month at a time over a few days.
Years ago when I helped people with random computer stuff (circa 2002), I had a client who’d run into trouble with Quicken because they had about 20 years of historical data.
It was so weird to me - they were paying me hundreds of dollars so that they could reference their water bill in 1987. I have my own irrational tendencies like this, of course, but still seemed weird.
I agree that data much older than a year is less useful, but to me, historical data going back about a year is quite useful. The main time that my records are practically useful is when I need to file a tax return, which obviously requires a year's worth of data. Beyond that, I find it quite useful to track changes in spending, earning and investments over time.
This was one of YNAB's big "innovations" and wasn't even technical, just social: normalising "starting over" and not fetishing historical data.
Add an "error" account, put transactions there so that your transaction accounts have the correct value, and focus on inputting current data.
If for some reason you care about your historical data enough to import it, you can add new transactions into "error" to subtract whatever part of it they are responsible for. If the account reaches zero, you can even cheat and delete all transactions.
What is the bottleneck in your experience? I have around 100 transactions a month spread across various banks and providers. My experience is this:
I spent about a week defining a procedure to export all statements into CSV, converting the CSV into a Gnucash-friendly format where needed with some GPT3-authored PHP scripts. Once a month I do an import into Gnucash and the process takes at most 2 hours.
There are various frictions. I use multiple different banks, credit cards and investment platforms (partially due to my life being split between two countries). Each of them has their own clunky manual process for downloading statements (including MFA). The statements are in different formats. On the most recent version of GnuCash that I used I experienced weird bugs with the CSV importer which meant it would sometimes crash when I tried to use preset rules.
Classifying transactions is probably the biggest time sink. GnuCash's auto-categorise feature is somewhat helpful but requires a lot of manual intervention and honestly I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what a particular expense related to (often the note on my bank statement is not helpful).
Ultimately, 2 hours per month is probably about what it took me as well. But x12 that's 24 solid hours of importing. And once you go back a few months it probably takes longer because it is more difficult to recall what particular expenses were for.
Or just start over on the day (or month) you decide to import.
As someone who wrote a budgeting app, historical data > 1 year is a lot less useful than most folks realize. I would say at least 80% of folks never look back further than 6 months. It's not even worthwhile for comparing YoY as your lifestyle, the economy, etc change so much.
I ended up adding per-transaction opt-out roll up functionality for this reason, effectively squashing transactions into monthly and yearly budget summary transaction. Saved a ton of space with little loss of granularity.