One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household
60 points by lalitm
60 points by lalitm
If you're using double entry accounting for your business, I recommend aligning your accounts with the categories on the tax form.
For example, in the US schedule C tax form for business expenses and revenue, "meals" is on a different line from other travel. So I got rid of expenses:travel:meals and moved it to expenses:meals while keeping the rest of the travel subcategories like expenses:travel:fares.
Come tax time, I just print an income statement with depth=1 and copy the numbers over line-by-line. (I'm using hledger)
I'm actually excited about the new year because...
... I've been using Ledger for a year, and now that I know how it works, I'm starting the year with a better structure :)
I'm going much simpler than the article. I've recorded about 800 transactions during 2025, and it doesn't feel like a significant overhead. The most tedious part is going over supermarket tickets to do some rough categorization. (Learned some org-mode to do this faster.)
I think it's been pretty useful for me. I have multiple bank accounts and it's difficult to keep track of savings otherwise. Also, it's helped me identify my biggest utility bills and work on saving a bit.
What’s the utility or rationale behind itemizing/categorizing grocery receipts, for instance?
Genuinely curious. It’s the overhead of this level of detail that makes me hesitant to adopt a system like this, but I’m also not sure of the benefits.
You can go as deep as you want.
I wanted to know how much we spend on the cat, so I separate the cat-specific items in the supermarket ticket.
Also, because I live with someone on a quite different diet (I must limit sodium), I wanted to know a bit about the costs of the different diets.
Actually, that's not as tedious as it sounds, but I think the normal way to go is to just enter the whole amount for the supermarket ticket and go. It would be fantastic if you could get the supermarket ticket itemized automatically, but that's not going to happen with the supermarkets I buy in.
Basically, you use the structure that allows you to report on what you care about. With one account per bank account, one for income, and one for expenses you could already do a lot.
I do the same, breaking down groceries, and it's because for me "groceries" doesn't seem like a useful (or interesting) thing to track but, say, "food" does. "food" covers food-related groceries, but also eating out and takeaways. For budgeting purposes, I find it much more useful to have a "food" budget than separate "grocery" and "non-grocery food" budgets.
Lumping a bunch of unrelated items under "groceries" feels about as useful to me as having a "supermarket" budget.
It's interesting because for me, "food" is a less useful budgeting category, as what I care about is less "edibility" than "discretionary-ness". Like groceries are 80% stuff I definitely need, and 20% optional stuff. I could maybe cut the optional stuff if I had to, and maybe I could reduce the costs of the essentials by doing more shopping around, but the ROI for that time is low. If I bought all store brand groceries and spent an extra hour going between three grocery stores to get everything, I'd maybe save €5-10/week. It's not nothing but when you look at the costs of takeaways and dining out, it's not where the real savings are to be had if I ever needed to.
On the other hand, a home cooked meal costs me €3-5, a takeaway costs me €15-25 and eating out costs me €20-50. Keeping these numbers in mind, when eating out obviously I'm nearly entirely paying for the whole dining (and usually social) experience, when ordering a takeaway I'm mostly paying for the ability to convert meal prep time to other uses (mostly entertainment). This means in my mental model, takeaways and dining out are more "discretionary entertainment" expenses than "essential nutrition" expenses.
I have "groceries" because it's too tedious for me to do what you mention, but if that could be automated, I'd do it without thought.
I have bought headphones in a supermarket!
It also bothers me that sometimes I buy in specialized shops that get lumped into groceries.
But, I'm not looking to optimize my groceries expenses at the moment. It's all about deciding what you care about and making an effort there. (However, I would love to sate my curiosity and know easily how much I spend on certain items. I do keep photos of every ticket- just learned I've bought 20kg of my favorite low-sodium cheese in 2025...)
I’ve been using hledger for a few years (and gnucash for years before that) but in 2025 i threw in the towel. Around the same time we moved our family banking to one of the UK’s newer upstart banks and frankly the features it offers have eclipsed the value I was getting from DIY, and the spouse-acceptance-factor is much higher.
Great overview and tool recommendations! This area is so vast.
I love seeing people share plaintext accounting wins. I love it. I've been in the ecosystem for around 15 years. Life got in the way, and I'm far enough behind in my ledger upkeep that I should start over from scratch. Maybe that's a good 2026 project. I last started over in 2015!
For those looking for a hand-holding, step-by-step workshop, I built one 5 (!!!) years ago for Codeland: https://github.com/colindean/plaintextaccounting_workshop/releases/tag/2020.07.24.0
If you called the “Salary” account “Widget Co Salary”, in my opinion, it’s completely reasonable that money was subtracted from Widget Co and given to one’s bank account.
Interesting writeup! I learned a few new things.
For example, I had somehow never come across the concept that stock shares are effectively a kind of currency, with price fluctuations being equivalent to exchange-rate changes. Made total sense as soon as I read it, and now I wonder how I never made that connection on my own.
Thank you for this well-written, detailed and interesting writeup. I have jumped around many tools in the past and ended up abandoning them, only to come back to a simple spreadsheet. I wish one day this whole process could be 100% automated with auto-pulls from each account and a nice emailed report weekly.
I was an early user of ledger for many years but could never get my workflow sustainable or my partner engaged with it. After doing nothing for a while I switched to Tiller a few years ago and very happy with it. Transactions show up in a Google sheet, the budget is fully customizable, the reports are exactly what I need, and since it's a spreadsheet I'm never limited for one-offs and sharing options with partner or accountant. I don't track all my accounts (equity, etc.) but I could. Other than the occasional bank issue it's pretty much perfect.
I’m tempted to use this for envelopes budgeting. I could create “virtual accounts” and assign parts of my salary to them but I need to figure out how that works.
The other thing I’m worried about is that it’ll end up being too much when I add the work needed for envelope budgeting (i.e., planning) on top of the basic workflow just documenting what has actually happened.
@lalitm, I don't want to be that guy (again), but I seems your website doesn't even display plain text with JavaScript disabled ;-)
Apologies for this! There's actually very minimal JS in the site but, for this exact post, I introduced a synchronized and scrolling table of contents on the sidebar since it is so long. I might have broken noscript usage somewhere along the way.
Will fix this when I get home this evening!