I can really recommend doing this for your personal finances! Tools like ledger are really powerful, and properly accounting is a great way to save on money. I can very easily go into my personal ledger and (say) get a report on "How much money did i spend daily on groceries last month" or "List all subscription services i pay for and how much they cost each month" or whatever. It gives you a great view into where your money is going and helps you plan for the future. It's very satisfying to run the command "ledger reg -Mn Assets Liabilities", which is "show me my net wealth (i.e. the sum of Assets and Liabilities) for every month in the ledger", and see your personal wealth grow over time.

But almost more importantly: if you're a programmer, it's really very fun! Like, i have my own system where I download my bank statement as a CSV and process it in AWK together with an org-mode table of payees that map each line on the bank statement to an account, which then generates a ledger file. Since it's just you using it, you can make it so it works however you like, and it quite satisfying to see it all come together.

It's also a great way to learn about accounting. Turns out, I really kinda like accounting! It has many of the same pleasures of programming or math, and seeing everything balance is very satisfying. In short: if you're a programmer who feels like they haven't quite got a handle on their finances, I can't recommend plain text accounting highly enough.

I think myself and many others could have written the same comment.

I’ll add that it’s also delightfully easy to get started.

As an application, Accounting is kind of like Vim or Excel or other tools with steep learning curves and nirvana at the end of them.

You can start by just tracking one bank account by hand which is easy enough and fun, because you’re still learning how this accounting thing works.

Pretty soon you’ll be tracking your investments, ISOs, taxes, credit card points, and so on as absurdum. You’ll be the person who finds the bug in your employer’s W-2 generator...

It’s a steep time investment, but once you’ve written the automations, it’ll take you maybe 30 minutes each month. And you’ll never experience the feeling of “not being in control” of your finances again.

Do banks have anything you can use to automate getting data off their websites? My annoyances lie in generating the csv files. My checking account outputs an arbitrary range of dates, however many transactions fit on pg 1, while my credit card from the same bank outputs csvs by billing cycle. It makes it a little annoying going into the bank website and generating these files across relevant date ranges.

There's an Open Financial Exchange (OFX) standard that's supposed to be for this, I think. I came across it when someone mentioned the ledger-autosync [1] tool that tries to use it to get your data from your bank automatically. If I understand correctly (no guarantee on that), this automation would work for institutions listed here [2].

[1] https://github.com/egh/ledger-autosync [2] http://www.ofxhome.com/index.php/home/directory/successfulRe...