Small CLI application to categorize and summarize spending and revenues
Most of these personal finance/budgeting applications have one big problem (for me):
- They require you to import balance statements, and either map expenses to categories beforehand or manually afterwards.
- What if I there was a problem with an import?
- What if I later want to reassign categories, or rename them?
My solution: Don't import into a custom format! Instead, just always parse the source! Why?
- Custom format means custom fiddling, what if the app dies? The source files are most likely CSV and will be human-readable in any number of years in the future
- I don't actually want to edit the imported data! I just want to assign categories to certain matching statements.
- I will never have to edit imported data, as all my category-assignment will be done for all statements.
- Is this going to be slow? Are you kidding me, unless you got billions of statements, you won't even notice it!