Missing a practical and easy-to-learn solution to keep track of your finances? Use tagcash to do it with simple text files!
TagCash is a little hack that I'm currently using after trying several solutions like GnuCash and Financisto. These are some of the features that I was missing and that are found in TagCash:
- As simple as editing text files;
- Text files are easy to sync between devices and people;
- Simple CLI;
- Quickly copy and paste statements from CLI to e-mail;
- Simple and short Python source code.
Let's choose 2 tags: wallet, and bank for your checking account. Now, write the following in a file (e.g.: finances.txt):
2018-01-13 100 Starting balance bank 2018-01-14 40 Withdrawal wallet,-bank
As there's no starting balance for wallet, it will be $0.00. In the second line, there is a - (minus) sign next to the bank tag to make it -40 in the bank ledger. Now, let's see what tagcash does without any option:
~$ tagcash finances.txt ┌bank────────┬────────┬─────────┬───────────────────┐ │ Date │ Amount │ Balance │ Description │ ├────────────┼────────┼─────────┼───────────────────┤ │ 2018-01-13 │ 100.00 │ 100.00 │ Starting balance │ │ 2018-01-14 │ -40.00 │ 60.00 │ Withdrawal │ └────────────┴────────┴─────────┴───────────────────┘ ┌wallet──────┬────────┬─────────┬───────────────────┐ │ Date │ Amount │ Balance │ Description │ ├────────────┼────────┼─────────┼───────────────────┤ │ 2018-01-14 │ 40.00 │ 40.00 │ Withdrawal │ └────────────┴────────┴─────────┴───────────────────┘
- The parser is flexible. Just don't use space in tags and separate them by comma;
- Align as you wish. Use 1 or more spaces between fields (date, amount, ...);
- You can use as many files as you want;
- There's no need to keep the lines sorted by date. Thus, you can keep together all the monthly installments of a payment;
- To choose tags, use for example
--tags wallet(-tfor short).
Tested with Python >= 3.5: pip3 install tagcash.
To know how much money you have in total, including all specified tags, add the --all option:
$ tagcash --all finances.txt (...) ┌All Tags────┬────────┬─────────┬───────────────────┐ │ Date │ Amount │ Balance │ Description │ ├────────────┼────────┼─────────┼───────────────────┤ │ 2018-01-13 │ 100.00 │ 100.00 │ Starting balance │ │ 2018-01-14 │ -40.00 │ 60.00 │ Withdrawal │ │ 2018-01-14 │ 40.00 │ 100.00 │ Withdrawal │ └────────────┴────────┴─────────┴───────────────────┘
As expected, because you withdrew money to your own wallet, the last table shows that you have $100 in total. To keep this overall balance consistent, adopt the simple rule: use negative numbers (or tags) whenever you spend money, and positive when you earn it.