Short

I’ve been tracking personal finances for more than 7 years now, and my workflow survived multiple approaches, applications, and country moves. I’ve started, as usual, with Google Sheets and manual entry, but, as I’m quite a lazy person, that did not last long. I tried several mobile applications, that were reading the SMS logs to gather the transaction log, and I’ve settled upon using the ZenMoney app, as it had a neat interface, had quite a lot of features and used GoCarldess API’s to do oauth2 flows with banks and export transactions automatically, which worked way better than SMS parsing. SMS parsing led to multiple issues with out-of-order delivery, which disrupted transaction order and account states. It also did not work particularly well with currency exchanges and cross-account transfers. ...

If you’re looking for a way to spend several evenings I have something to recommend to you. There’s an awesome TV-series slash documentary on HBO called How To With John Wilson. The premise is quite simple: the narrator asks the question “How to do X”, for example, “How to make small talk?” and goes to the in-breadth exploration of the topic, meeting various people, getting into all sorts of bizarre situations and acquaintances. ...