Comment by wruza

Comment by wruza 5 days ago

4 replies

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Systems that use immediate strict categorization don’t work for some people. At a company I worked at we went with a two-phase approach. A person would write notes (literally iphone notes) in the following format:

  Apr 5 24
  -50 Alice tools
  -220 Bob home project

  Apr 2 24
  +20 Bob returned loan
Note that time goes “up” to avoid scrolling too much on open. Later we loaded it into a script which would parse dates, detect keywords and make templates for proper double-entry. It would detect both the outer “agent” and the internal analytics and also put the original text as a comment. What it couldn’t detect had to be manually categorized and (sometimes) added to the script. Of course the script used editable lists for correspondence, not only hardcoded values. These lists were person-specific, so that Alice and Bob wouldn’t have to sync their vocabularies.

I cannot imagine any of the people at that company filling this

  9/19 (1234) comment here
    Cat1:cat2:cat3
    Cat4:cat5
every time money moves and they are in a queue, in the car, talking to someone, etc. They’d simply resort to smaller notes again in the notes app or in the chat, or would try to “remember” it, to fill properly at the end of the day (more likely week).
BeetleB 4 days ago

It sounds like what you are doing is plain text accounting!

> Later we loaded it into a script which would...

I too do not manually enter things in the ledger file (well, rarely). I actually enter it into KMyMoney, and have a script to convert to a ledger file.

Overall, your comment is coming across as a fairly weird complaint. It's a tool, and given that its in text, you're free to build whatever workflow you wish around it - including having people take notes on their iPhone and using a script to convert to the ledger format.

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  • wruza 4 days ago

    It’s not a complaint, just an observation that anything non-natural language simply didn’t work for almost 100% of my “patients”, including myself. This format isn’t even a format. It’s how they write notes for themselves with a little agreement on regularity to simplify the parser.

    Btw, we tried everything: appstore apps, web forms, our own app. Everything sucks irl except just text. I still use this entry despite not having a database anymore for a script to load my data into.

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speleding 4 days ago

We also don't type in the ledger files directly, but rather than convert it from a free format note we use the comment field of the banking apps, and the comment field of the expense report app (we use Zoho), to indicate what account it should apply to.

Once a quarter I download CSV files from our bank account, credit card and Zoho app, and we have a set of ruby scripts that parse the CSV files into ledger files. They infer the correct accounts from the comment fields. Of course, the script and the ledger output tends to need a few tweaks, but it's >95% automated that way.

As a bonus the scripts also add a few sanity checks to the ledger file, e.g. ensure the balance matches what is downloaded from the bank and entries fall within the current period.

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