YNAB (https://www.youneedabudget.com/) was the trick for us-- while I am totally comfortable with these kind of tools or even just a spreadsheet, the app and functionality from YNAB made it accessible to my significant other. We also like the "envelope" method for budgeting, so this made it a natural fit. I recommend everyone at least try it if they're not budgeting already.

(If this is what you meant by family finances-- as others have pointed out, there's a difference between budgeting and accounting. YNAB has met all of my family's needs in the financial realm.)

People will disagree with me, but.. don't?

I keep track of my expenses by CC and cash account, by the month. I don't care that I spent $5 on a coffee. I do care that for the month of January I stayed within my $X amount, and that for the year I'm on track for my savings goal(s), retirement, etc.

So I keep 2 spreadsheets, 1 is monthly, to ensure the bills get paid and the 2nd is my NW that tracks my retirement and savings goals.

This is what I do as well. Everytime I've looked into the whole personal finances thing, it just turns into a lot of setup work to not usefully change anything about my life, and a significant amount of ongoing work to... Also not change anything.

I think there IS a useful reason to count the pennies, if you are one that needs help staying within self-imposed spending limits. But even tracking it doesn't solve the actual problem, which is behavioural, it might help enough to be useful.

I enabled notifications on all our cards and bank accounts so whenever a transaction happens I get an email.

From there I just use gmail filters to put all of those in a folder and then wrote a script to download, parse and enter those transactions on my ledger with “Expenses:FIXME”

Once a week or so (when I have around 10-20 transactions) I import them and go through them, asking my SO if there’s any transactions I don’t know of.

Alternatively I also just make one transactions to put in an account that is fully my SO’s and one that is mine (mostly for both of our hobbies) and those I don’t track, except for the monthly deposit to those

This is where I’d like to go. Manually logging into each bank and downloading CSVs every month is just too much of a burden.

I have email notifications for all transactions and a maildir on my dev machine. I just need to write some code to make it all happen.

I use hledger-flow [1]. It's an opinionated way of importing csvs into the hledger format. Works really well for me, just export the csvs, write a mapping and you are good to go.

It supports preprocessing the csvs if you need to clean the data or compute some new fields which is really powerful. Once you are up and running it only needs some minor updates each month to map unidentifiable transactions I can do this in under an hour these days.

[1] https://github.com/apauley/hledger-flow

I use homebank. Download all your various transactions, load and tag them and you're done.

You can build rules too so the more you use it, the more automated it becomes.

Wow, I can't believe I haven't heard of Homebank [1] before. This looks very much like what I've been wanting. Thank you for the recommendation.

[1] http://homebank.free.fr/en/index.php

How does the system 'kind of break down' when you have a family?

Once you add parallelism to your transaction processing, all manner of untoward things can happen. For example, two parent processes may attempt to execute the same transaction to acquire the same resources at the same time, having failed to exchange messages to ensure their internal household state is fully synchronized. And sometimes child processes will fail to acquire permissions but silently commit transactions anyway!

This week my toddler spent $60 on a 11x14 inch canvas print of himself getting a bottle of ketchup out of the fridge. $20 was for priority shipping to ship it to our former address in a different city.

I thought the photos app was a fairly innocuous form of screen time, not realizing that it was so easy to make a purchase! No password confirmation or anything.

Fortunately support made a one-time exception and refunded the payment even though it was well past the cancellation window.

I still removed all the payment methods and addresses from our Google Pay account because I couldn't figure out any other way to guarantee that this doesn't happen again.

Frictionless payment flows do not mix well with toddlers.

Oh come on, that would have been awesome as a pic :)

I understand that concurrent edits to the ledger will become problematic. If this really is a requirement, a distributed ledger solution (cloud based tool) may be needed

Though is the root issue just communication? At some point transactions need:

1. Recorded

2. Categorized (optional, but desirable)

3. Reconciled (This can only happen as often as bank statements are issued)

With multiple spenders, communication (to answer the question "what is this transaction for?!?!") is paramount and fits naturally at the reconciliation step or more frequently if desired.

The workflow described is synchronous, centralized and simple

What's the problem? Just track all transactions.

The short answer is that my wife and I have different opinions about how to track data.

...and? How is that directly relevant?

We gather our own data without any conflicts. Sorry, I thought that was apparent.

It just seems like an out-of-context statement.

The entire thread was about accounting, then a sub-thread on family accounting, then you pop in to just say 'I do my accounting solo, as does my wife" which may be on-topic, but just not relevant.

My wife and I are a family. In a sub thread about family accounting, I said how this family does accounting. I don't know what to tell you.

Technically yes you are correct.

But the intention of your parent was "when funds start to co-mingle or you get more complicated accounts" and saying "Don't co-mingle" doesn't help answer the question for those who do co-mingle and asked for help in this thread.

"you don't have to comingle" is a fine solution to the comment I replied to

>The short answer is that my wife and I have different opinions about how to track data.

I went through the same thing. I used to use hledger. Now I use lunchmoney so my wife can use the tool. TBH I'm thinking about going back to hledger. Don't get me wrong lunchmoney is amazing but it's not as well suited to me. My wife has little interest in looking at the budget so there is not much point.

It really depends what your arrangement is. Is everything shared between you? Then you need to track all accounts. You should look into automating ingest of your accounts data. Most banks/credit cards etc. should allow some kind of statement export. If not, consider switching provider.

I would advise not to worry about petty cash. Don't get pedantic. Worry about the big things. Just make a cash account for petty cash.

If you don't share accounts then just track your stuff and set up reimbursement account(s) for your family. You'll only know the net amount you need to transfer between yourselves to square up at the end of the month or whatever you agree to do.

Me and my wife have been using EveryDollar. It's simple and pulls in transactions, which is good because I despise finance (despite being reasonably thrifty) and I'm also lazy.

I'm married and do envelope budgeting with Beancount. We share a bank account, and it's my job to update the budget every day. I manually enter all transactions, except for monthly expenses that are scripted to come out automatically. My wife just wants to look at the reports. I keep it up to date.

It's not perfect but it's the best system I've tried, including YNAB, because I get paid biweekly and YNAB forces you to budget monthly.

For my family I use ledger and a bunch of little programs I've written over the years to import data and generate reports. I've tried every other tool and system over the decades, and nothing beats PTA (and ledger, in my case).

> PTA

Parent-Teacher Association??

Plain text accounting

lunchmoney.app is pretty cool and strikes a good balance of offering powerful features without forcing too much complexity on the average user.