Skip to content

Comment on PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgetingparent

Comments

I was just checking it out.

         $2145.00  Assets:Checking
        $-1000.00  Equity:OpeningBalances
          $192.00  Expenses
           $65.00    Food:Groceries
          $127.00    Unknown
        $-1337.00  Income:Salary
  ---------------
               0
Nice, I missed that. I'll consider making it PTA-compatible!

Only issue I have is with the indentation-based subitems.

I'd rather keep it restricted to top-level groups for clarity.

PTA is more or less a collection of formats. Beancount, for example, uses a colon-separated account name per transaction line, such as "Income:Work:PrimaryJob:HolidayAllowance" (excluding the quotes). There are a couple of fixed main accounts (such as "Income"), and the user can arbitrarily define subaccounts (in this example "Work:PrimaryJob:HolidayAllowance").

Although I see your point in wanting clarity, if the format supports arbitrary subaccounts, you can use the tool itself to limiting the number of subaccounts to show (e.g. with 1 you would only see the accumulated amount in all accounts in the "Income:Work" hierarchy). This still fits your use case for clarity, but allows other users to expand the budgeting tool to their needs.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.