I want to love the plain text accounting tools. I used them for over a year on all my finances. They’re incredibly expressive and exact, and they play well with vim and git.
The trouble is ingesting transactions. You do your best—save receipts, try to note things in your phone. Then some auto-pay thing blindsides you. Or, that separate tip charge from Uber Eats. Yes, you can capture all of these things, but it will require hours of weekly time investment to counteract financial entropy.
I ended up just buying Banktivity. I do miss the perfection offered by plain text accounting. I miss nothing now because they’ve contracted with teams that write scrapers and API clients for banks I would have otherwise had to write myself. Reconciliation is now the work of minutes. It’s not perfect, but everything is a tradeoff.
The trouble is ingesting transactions. You do your best—save receipts, try to note things in your phone. Then some auto-pay thing blindsides you. Or, that separate tip charge from Uber Eats. Yes, you can capture all of these things, but it will require hours of weekly time investment to counteract financial entropy.
I ended up just buying Banktivity. I do miss the perfection offered by plain text accounting. I miss nothing now because they’ve contracted with teams that write scrapers and API clients for banks I would have otherwise had to write myself. Reconciliation is now the work of minutes. It’s not perfect, but everything is a tradeoff.