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Tracking Personal Finances using Python
In this ebook, we'll work on building your personalized "multi-banking" application powered entirely using Python and a bunch of plain text files.
The Python ecosystem contains an excellent package called Beancount which provides the foundations for working with money. At its core, Beancount provides a collection of command line utilities to manage and perform different kinds of analysis on financial transactions stored in plain-text files.
We'll take Beancount as the starting point to build your multi-banking application. This application will act as the single point of contact for your entire financial history, and:
1. store every single piece of data from all your bank accounts (only on your machine)
2. act as the the first point of contact if you want to look up anything related to your finances (questions like "How much did I make from that consulting work last month?" or "What did I spend on that vacation last year?")
3. import new financial transactions from your bank accounts on a continuous basis
4. use customized tools to interact with your financial ledger, analyze your past financial behavior, show your spending patterns, income sources, current liabilities, and more
The final result will be a Git repository on your computer where you can view / edit everything related to your money.
The Python ecosystem contains an excellent package called Beancount which provides the foundations for working with money. At its core, Beancount provides a collection of command line utilities to manage and perform different kinds of analysis on financial transactions stored in plain-text files.
We'll take Beancount as the starting point to build your multi-banking application. This application will act as the single point of contact for your entire financial history, and:
1. store every single piece of data from all your bank accounts (only on your machine)
2. act as the the first point of contact if you want to look up anything related to your finances (questions like "How much did I make from that consulting work last month?" or "What did I spend on that vacation last year?")
3. import new financial transactions from your bank accounts on a continuous basis
4. use customized tools to interact with your financial ledger, analyze your past financial behavior, show your spending patterns, income sources, current liabilities, and more
The final result will be a Git repository on your computer where you can view / edit everything related to your money.
98 pages, ebook
Published January 1, 2021
6 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 5, 2022
Even at 96 pages it's a bit padded out, but I had been struggling to get started with an importer and this book got me on track. All the other help I could find online basically just says "if you want to import your bank transactions, just write an importer in Python." This was the only resource I could find that actually walks you through how to do that and provides sample code. I've never written a python program before, but the concepts were straightforward and I got a year's worth of financial transactions imported in a day thanks to the leg up this book gave me.
September 12, 2021
`beancount` is cool and this book makes approaching double-entry accounting a matter of minutes if you have basic python and accounting knowledge.
It only misses a chapter on using the `include` beancount directive which allows you to refactor your codebase with modular files.
It only misses a chapter on using the `include` beancount directive which allows you to refactor your codebase with modular files.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews