Show HN: I wrote an eBook on tracking personal finances using Python

Show HN: I wrote an eBook on tracking personal finances using Python(personalfinancespython.com)

30 points by siddhant 4 years ago | 12 comments

siddhant 4 years ago |

About 4 years ago I started looking for a privacy-friendly way to keep track of my money across different accounts.

While searching, I found Plain Text Accounting [1], which means keeping financial records inside plain-text files. This method really appealed to the developer in me and I started digging deeper.

4 years later, I now have a stable workflow using Beancount [2] that lets me import all my financial activity into a plain-text file that lives inside a git repository on my disk. Needless to say, I'm super happy with this workflow!

So this ebook is my attempt at helping more folks get into the world of PTA and Beancount! In my experience, the documentation can be a bit tricky to get into, so I hope this ebook lowers the barrier to entry!

Open to answering questions!

[1]: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

[2]: https://beancount.github.io/

thy77 4 years ago |

Will check it out. I'm about 4 years into hledger with manual entry since few of my banks and cards have csv instead of pdf only statements. Hope to see some good features in your book. Thank you for the effort that went into this and for documenting and sharing your work. Are there good quarterly reports that follow sensible standards? Do you have good examples of collapsing our super detailed sub-accounts into just the right level of detail for the reports? Re: expenses:gas:Exxon and expenses:gas:BP

snthpy 4 years ago |

Thanks. I've been wanting to get into Beancount for a while but my bank only sends me pdf bank statements which has been holding me back. Does your book address that?

Also, I went to your landing page and then clicked on "Click here to download your ebook" and straight away was taken to a credit card form with no indication of how much I would need to pay or that I would need to pay at all and the book wouldn't be free!

siddhant 4 years ago | |

This book mainly focuses on extracting data from CSV files. Generally speaking though, if the PDF statements your bank sends have a deterministic format, extracting data should be possible using some PDF parsing library.

Thanks for the feedback about the website! I've changed the button text so the price is displayed inline.

siddhant 4 years ago |

And here’s a sample chapter: https://personalfinancespython.com/files/sample.pdf

(I couldn’t modify the original comment or add replies to it anymore, hence posting a new one.)

dr_kiszonka 4 years ago | |

I would add the ToC and one of the later chapters or sections to your main website. Later chapters are more informative than an introduction because the demonstrate how good you are in explaining new concepts.

oulipo 4 years ago |

Nice, perhaps you should put an index, and show the kind of requirements from your bank account export methods that allow someone to use this

siddhant 4 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback!

You can find the TOC here: https://personalfinancespython.com/files/toc.pdf (will try to link to it from the website later during the day).

andsko 4 years ago |

Hi! You've got some extra text in the url and it gives 404.

siddhant 4 years ago | |

Thanks for the heads up!

I’m trying to change it but apparently it’s not possible to adjust URLs after submission?

Hoping one of the mods could help with this!

dang 4 years ago | | |

Fixed now. That was a bug in our software - sorry!

Btw, for a Show HN that's a book, the convention is to provide a sample chapter (or something similar) for free. Otherwise there's no way for users to "try it out", which is the necessary condition for a Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.