January 2, 2026
Counting beans, spilling tea
10 years of personal finances in plain text files
DIY money tracking sparks love, eye-rolls, and a ‘book ad’ callout
TLDR: A developer logged 10 years of finances in plain text with Beancount, spending 30–45 minutes monthly. Fans praise control, privacy, and power-user flexibility, while critics call it a time sink and question possible book-promo vibes—classic DIY versus convenience showdown that matters if you’re choosing how to track your money.
Ten years of money tracking… in plain text! The OP logs every dollar with Beancount: 45,000 lines, nearly 10,000 transactions, and a monthly ritual of 30–45 minutes balancing entries. It’s the ultimate DIY ledger: CSVs (spreadsheet-like files) in, double-entry bookkeeping out (every transaction balances to zero), receipts attached, and 1,086 virtual “accounts” for everything from groceries to streaming.
The crowd? Split. Plain‑text romantics cheer. yanis_t gushes about the joy of files you can search and edit anywhere, while skwee357 flexes 14 years of data and even tracks stock grants and vacation hours—power user energy. But the spice hits when zahlman accuses the post of being a stealth ad for a book, questioning the author’s ties to the project—cue the open‑source purity police and contributors receipts. On the practical side, jayfx runs the math, turning “30–45 minutes” into “60–90 hours over a decade,” sparking a time-vs-control showdown. djhworld adds comic relief: a single file “like 2 million lines” choking his editor, prompting a switch to one file per year. Memes fly about “1086 accounts” (“Do you have an account for coffee smells?”), while privacy hawks clap for offline control and cloud‑app skeptics shout “No subscriptions, no tracking!” The vibe: bean‑counters vs time‑savers, with a side of book‑promo drama.
Key Points
- •Ten years of personal finance tracking in Beancount from January 2016 to January 2026.
- •Ledger totals: 16 .beancount files, 45,011 lines, and approximately 507 attached PDF documents.
- •bean-query results: 12,466 directives, 9,895 transactions, and 19,743 postings, with 1,086 virtual accounts.
- •Annual posting counts show 2023 as the busiest year (2,651 postings), followed by 2024 (2,602).
- •Monthly workflow: download statements as CSV, import via an importer, append to ledger, and balance transactions; balancing consumes most of the 30–45 minutes.