How do you track your personal budget? - eviltoast

Do you track your expenses monthly? Annually? Do you have an app or do you use an excel spreadsheet? Any suggested tools?

I use a spreadsheet and track monthly.

    • ahal@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Would you mind elaborating on your import pipeline? I was thinking of using email as a trigger as well, but thought it wouldn’t work too well.

      • TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub
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        1 year ago

        No problem. I’ve got every account set to send me an alert on the lowest monetary value it supports (stupid AMEX with its $10 minimum), and I’ve got rules in my email to move those alerts into an Actual folder.

        Then, I use my transaction fetcher to import the transactions from the email alerts into Actual. I look at Actual periodically to categorize the transactions.

        It works pretty well for me at this point. I haven’t published the image to DockerHub yet, but i think it’s ready for an alpha image. Let me know if you have questions or need help (or want to contribute)!

        • ahal@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Thank you, that looks awesome!

          Do your institutions send alerts with data in a consumable format? I’m in Canada, land of the shitty bank software and it seems I can only get PDFs from most places. I have one that doesn’t even let you download transactions outside of the monthly statement :(

          • TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub
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            1 year ago

            I mean, for a given level of consumable. You can see in the TransactionFetcher.Readers.* libraries how I’m parsing the data out of HTML emails, which is less than optimal, but it works, at least until they change email formats and I have to make changes.

            Your neighbors to the south also have shitty bank software, unfortunately.