Sunday, 19th February, 2023

Sorting out books on various shelves about the house. Lots of university textbooks that I don’t need and will never look at. They’re a pain to sell though and I can’t be bothered to take them some place to give away.

I got Firefly iii and data importer setup - no data in it yet. I think if I put in the time with the rules and such, and importing from my banks’ CSVs it should be okay. However, I’m not sure I really want to do all this though. It calls itself “double-entry bookkeeping”, but as soon as I started looking into credit cards in it then it quickly diverged as that’s what the creator wanted to do. It also has a lot of stuff I don’t care about.

I currently use MoneyDashboard which links to my accounts, categorises itself (or I can override with the phone app) and displays graphs etc. I really like it for expense categorisation, and generally it learns well. It’s handy having the app on my phone to periodically check what’s going on and set the categories. I don’t find the graphs particularly useful, although I’m not sure I’ve spent much time looking at them. Mostly what I do is export all the transactions to a csv and then do a pivot table on them in Excel. I write down the monthly summary into my master Google Sheets Money file and leave it at that. When I get round to it, I’ll look at a month and sort by amount and remember what we bought. To be honest, that is probably enough for me. I have a category that I put all my buying and selling against, to try and keep an eye on it, and encourage me to sell more stuff if I buy things.

Sometimes I think I want the ability to add more tags or meta data to transactions. I’m not super attentive on categories, and a lot of things just go under Shopping, when strictly speaking it could be for the car, or kids or gifts etc. but it’s more hassle to figure it out than it’s worth. I guess I could keep a saved copy of the transactions somewhere, and maybe tidy them up or add a few notes, or meta data. This is what I used beancount for before, but I wonder if I just add another tab in Google sheets and paste them in there. I’ve had the same Sheet since 3rd December 2010 and it hasn’t failed me. Google has a nice Query formula which I can use to generate the tables. I think it’ll be a lot faster than Firefly or some other thing.

I waste so much time.

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