[thomascountz]

I began with PTA recently. I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already) and then you need to decide between ledger-cli, hledger, or beancount, with the differentiators being on the margins and with some promise of being able to switch later. The choice really comes down to which tool has the documentation/community that makes the most sense to you at the time.

Then, there's the import workflow: which "accounts" should you start with? How much history do you pull in? How do you set up an automatic importer? Hledger has a DSL. Beancount uses Python. Either way, an OP says, much of your time is spent manually editing text.

And finally, then what? Can I make a budget now? Will this thing do my taxes? Am I more financially responsible? How do I explain this to my spouse? My pension is kind of like a commodity, but I don't know what the unit price is, and I don't sell units, but what's a virtual PnL and what if I only have a quarterly PDF!?

It may sound like I'm ranting, but I have found that realizing I don't know the answers to these questions (or even that they exist) is the true benefit of PTA.

Every year, I'm asked if I want a different pension investment mix or if I want to change my car insurance. Or, I might wonder if I'm getting a good deal on my internet plan or if a new job offer's total comp is actually better. Am I "on track" for "retirement," how long until I have enough for a new roof, am I keeping up with inflation, did I spend too much on gifts this year?

There's immense privilege in not really needing to know the answers to these questions; getting them "wrong" won't really hurt you. But, being familiar with the routine minutiae of your economy by way of counting every cent, is rewarding, enlightening, and empowering—even if it's also finicky and brittle sometimes.

I may have to try beancount again. OP's importers look promisingly robust compared to my hledger scripts.

[mbork_pl]

Besides being a mathematician and a programmer, I have a degree in finance and banking, so I learned double-entry accounting pretty early. As a mathematician, I appreciate the beauty of this very clever, very general and very abstract system. As a geek, I've been using ledger-cli with Emacs for a decade now, and Gnucash earlier.

Re: learning curve, it's not that difficult. Shameless plug: I wrote a textbook (actually, a textbooklet, if that is a word;-)) about the basics of DEA, focused on personal finance and using ledger-cli: https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/

[djhworld]

I think there's definitely something in it around there's a huge learning curve.

Double entry book keeping isn't that difficult but that's easy to say once you've been doing it a while

I've been doing PTA since around 2018 and there's definitely lessons I've learned along the way along with plenty of mistakes.

I think the main benefit for me is just the system gives you a complete picture of your finances. The commercial services you can pay for just give you a view into a certain slice (e.g. open banking in UK/Europe to see your current account(s)) - I think mint.com did something similar in the US but it never came over here, I don't know if it still exists. Maybe that's enough for most people, but for me I want everything, investments, liabilities, assets etc. None of these commercial offerings have that because it's so complex and niche, e.g. your open banking provider won't tell you how your pension is doing.

It's also just nice to have the provenance of transactions, e.g. if you receive some shares from work, and you sell the shares and the money ends up in your bank account - the incoming transaction will just be the net proceeds but it won't tell you if you paid any tax prior to that - PTA gives you a more of a complete picture that tracks the whole chain of events that led up that transaction into your bank happening. Overkill for most people? Probably.

[cyberlurker]

FYI, Mint shutdown as a service in early 2024.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/budgeting-app-mint-is-shutti...

[chrisweekly]

I have no experience w/ PTA, but was a Mint user for a couple years before it got killed, and recently discovered Monarch which has similar features. But just this week I got set up w/ eMoney thanks to a friend who works in wealth management. It provides a centralized dashboard (like Monarch), but also the ability to run forecasts / projections, which will be helpful as things have gotten more complicated for us as a couple (running two S-Corps, paying for daughters' college tuitions, etc).

[stackghost]

>I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already)

This. Accounting seems easy if you already know accounting. Learning accounting is difficult because the literature is dense, contradictory, and it's not helped by the fact that most accountants don't even seem to understand it at a fundamental level, they've merely memorized false-but-workable ideas like "debits increase assets because debit means left", or the silly idea about viewing it from the perspective of a bank.

Even accounting profs are surprisingly bad at at this, at least in my experience.

[djhworld]

ehhhhhhh I don't think you need to go as far as reading dense accounting literature, I never have and I've been maintaining a beancount files for 7+ years.

I just followed the documentation in here https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... - it gives you the general principles to follow and you can just pick it up from there.

[coliveira]

If you're running a business, double entry BK is essential. If you're doing personal finances it is completely overkill. I think the perfect tool is just excel or any similar spreadsheet, and track what matters for you. I usually add numbers weekly to my spreadsheet.

[stvltvs]

Double-entry bookkeeping is a transformational way of thinking about money. There's a reason it took over the world. Even if I just tracked expenses in a spreadsheet, it would help that I know double-entry.