Comment by conradev

I use it primarily to categorize spending to know things like “how much money did I spend on electronics doodads in the last year”.

The double-entry part is a fanciness for checking that all money in (paychecks) equals all money out (spending, taxes). You can selectively disable it by “padding” balances.

I have it on for my checking account and it catches duplicate postings for transfers between my Venmo and my checking account. I can also put the initial/final balances from the bank statements as “guards” to verify that it all adds up.

This sort of structure is really helpful for a human or language model. You can break the translation work down into subunits with fast correctness checks.