Hledger: Support for budgets

Created on 31 Dec 2015 · 7Comments · Source: simonmichael/hledger

Are there any plans to add support for budgeting with periodic transaction, similar to what ledger currently has?

A WISH

Source

hackeryarn

All 7 comments

Hi.. no. I have some notes somewhere towards a different approach. Currently I do budgetting manually, using virtual subaccounts to divide funds into spending "envelopes".

Closing this, feel free to bring it up again on #hledger or the mail list.

simonmichael on 7 Jan 2016

👍1

IMHO, ledger-cli's budgeting was pretty weak anyway and compares poorly to other budgeting-focused solutions like ynab.

rstacruz on 7 Jan 2016

👍1

Right. Here's some recent chat about emulating YNAB:

<sm> I try to replicate YNAB's method with subaccounts
<sm> virtual subaccounts, of checking
<sm> I have checking:available, checking:month:food,home,..., checking:year:vacation,... etc.
<sm> income lands in available. At the start of each month I transfer funds from available to the various "envelope" accounts and try to keep them above 0 during the month. At month-end I refill any that went negative, bringing them to 0 before the next budget.
<sm> it's getting more effective over time.. working out a process and getting efficient with it is a slow process, I imagine it would be a bit quicker with YNAB which has it all laid out

simonmichael on 7 Jan 2016

👍1

interesting, @simonmichael. can you give us an example ledger file of that?

I've been thinking about this myself and I'm thinking it's probably better done on a separate ledger than your main one.

rstacruz on 15 Jan 2016

Here's one: https://gist.github.com/simonmichael/a1addcb652da4e78b183

simonmichael on 15 Jan 2016

Virtual postings approach is nice. But only when you write a few transactions. Otherwise without having #99 implemented this is very painful. It doubles the size of a journal which is pretty hard to keep already for lazy people.