I'm looking for a more web-like accounting system. Accounting is peer-to-peer by nature: my bank and I jointly maintain the balance of my checking account. Either of us could make a mistake, and neither of us has absolute authority over the other. There are some natural reconcilliation rituals: if they send me a statement and I don't dispute it for 90 days, that becomes binding. And my bank is just one of the many, many parties in this fractal system. I use the annual federal tax ritual as the dominant reconcilliation ritual for my financial records.
A 1992 study by political scientist James L. Payne estimated that Americans spend roughly 5.4 billion man-hours computing their taxes.(15) This is more man-hours than used to build every car, van, truck, and airplane manufactured in the United States. It is more than the total number of hours worked in a year by every resident of the state of Indiana. The deadweight economic loss is estimated by Dr. Payne at well over $200 billion. -- The Economic and Civil Liberties Case for a National Sales Tax Stephen Moore Director Fiscal Policy Studies Cato InstituteBefore the Hoover Institution conference "Frontiers of Tax Reform" National Press Club Washington, D.C.
May 11, 1995
Quicken (on WinFourLinOnDebian) works pretty well; I love using Quicken across an X-windows connection! But it's not fractal at all: there's a very hard border around quicken; it does import/export, but it's not scriptable, and transaction ids, if there are any, are not exported, so it's hard to build a sync infrastructure around it. Maybe I can set up my own OFX service or something. Meanwhile, I'm developing quacken which lets me at least keep a parallel set of records in one of the few formats I trust: CVS-backed text files.
(confidential FamilyRecords thingy didn't really work out. but notes on WearableGizmo does.)
hmm... ConfidentialityVersusAvailability... I keep an rsync backup on dm93qdata on mmac in addition to the CVS-backed text files. ToDo: I'd like to make it more available, so that I can search the text files from my WearableGizmo (made some progress 29Dec2003).
hmm... paper statements are sometimes handy; when are they critical?
ToDo: notarize tax records, ala Mark Manasse's Why Rights Management is Wrong (and What to Do Instead) paper at the DRM workshop , 2001 in Sophia-Antipolis, France. (among my 2001 trips)
stamper digital time stamp service
2Oct2004: looked at switching to gnucash again; still can't find budget support. Begged a bit in GnuCashUsing
13July2004: labcorp billing got it right. I got a bill in the post; keyed in the address from the bill, used some of the details from the bill to authenticate myself (no password to manage!) and paid the bill. Hmm... I can't remember if they allowed me to schedule it for later payment. One of the reasons I don't use discover's online bill payment is that it doesn't let me schedule payments right before the due date like my bank does.
17Mar2004: hmm... Kurush looks simple and clean... based on mono... hmm...
Nov 2003: working with an American Express financial advisor.
Oct 2003: Greenspun likes Vanguard. Interesting... so does Mary's sister.
Aug 2003: Community Currencies: A New Tool for the 21st Century Bernard A. Lietaer. money that leaks. He makes a pretty good argument that stored-value financial instruments are harmful. My buddy Mark Schreiner says this is bunk. Gotta study the situation more.
3Mar2003: hmm... moneydance on OSX moneydance 2003 on slashdot nifty... integrated python interpreter. dev docs
2003-02-27: WebFile - Kansas Department of Revenue
16Feb2003: reviewing Edward Jones statements, there's an article John W. Bachmann, Manging Partner, thought all his customers should read; I figure I'm not going to invest the time to read it unless I can cite in in the web and such; google is my friend:
Warren Buffett on the Stock Market What's in the future for investors--another roaring bull market or more upset stomach? Amazingly, the answer may come down to three simple factors. Here, the world's most celebrated investor talks about what really makes the market tick--and whether that ticking should make you nervous. FORTUNE Thursday, December 6, 2001 By Carol Loomis
Hmm... in ej accountlink, no option for snail-mail preferences. I'd prefer that for anything in the public web (e.g. prospectus for this new perspective fund ) they'd just send me email with a pointer. As to personal stuff like statements, I don't find .com web site sufficiently reliable, available, and WaiHappy to replace paper yet. Annual report seems to come in hardcopy form only. Very glossy.
Holy cow! the fund's #1 holding is AOL-TW! Eek! And I'm indirectly investing in Philip Morris. Eek. Hmm... didn't I see some options for christian mutual funds at PromiseKeepersStLouis?
wow... gnuCASH looks quite good... perhaps worth trying. 28Jul2002: looked it over carefully. 2 things I can't figure out how to transfer from Quicken: classes (not categories), and budgets.
29Jul2002: Aha! "# In the Quicken Account to Export from field, select the Quicken account you want to export. To export all accounts, select the All Accounts option."- converting Quickent from Windows to Mac
12 Jul 2002 chat with xover
Dec 2002 Hmm... reviewing medical expenses has been stressful lately (). MedicalOrthodoxy.
upgrade quicken:
11/19/00 Citi Visa HI S OFFICE MAX 00005298 OVERLAND PARKKS Quicken 2001 Basic Stuff:Media R -29.95
ToDo: find record of first quicken purchase.
saCASH seems to have matured a bit since I discovered it (@@when?). Hmm... more recent designs seem over-engineered... enterprise Java buzzword fest.
Mike Dean's DAML Expense Reconciliation
older notes: Personal Finances, Small Business Accounting
reconsidering Moneydance --connolly, Tue, 11 Jan 2005 01:25:41 +0000 reply
Quicken reminded us that their sunset policy means they're discontinuing support for quicken 2001 and 2002 online services as of April 2005, so I looked at Quicken 2005 for Mac; it would be nice to eliminate the dependency on WinFourLinOnDebian. They claim to offer chat technical support, but I waited for over 10 minutes and got no response. Bzzt.
So I'm looking at Moneydance again... nice mailing list, new wiki. Python scripting interface... hmm... how does it work? ahh... finally! found discussion of python examples
Is it smart about importing QIF files? Yes... matching interface is better than Quicken's.
My quacken stuff solves the duplicate transfer problem, but... hmm... what about classes? 4 oct 2004 question about classes went unanswered. Eek... cut/paste problem report went unanswered too. Hmm... lots of important report features missing: multi-column report (e.g. quarterly net worth), subtotal-by category/class/payee/etc., quickzoom.
Taxes on 43 Things --connolly, Wed, 16 Feb 2005 17:11:21 +0000 reply
We got our taxes done, thanks to webturbotax. They still claim to not support firefox on linux, though I haven't tried just chaning the user agent string. I used firefox on a Mac.
I just found file taxes on 43 things. Cool. Architected for participation, ala Tim O'Reilly at W3C10
glom: postgress, python, XSLT, CSS... --connolly, Sun, 15 May 2005 06:04:09 +0000 reply
see advogato diary entry
recurring transactions done right --connolly, Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:37:06 +0000 reply
I just paid the gas bill. The current workflow is:
- Gas bill comes in the mail. Open it; find due date; write "due DD MMM" on the envelope and file with other current bills, sorted by due date
- go to bank web site; authenticate; open billpay interface; choose gas payee; enter amount; yes, schedule payment. write "paid DD MM YYYY bankbv/CKF" on the bill. file with current checking account stuff
- reconcile bank statement in quicken: download bank statement; convert to qif with perl/python; import into quicken; confirm bank statement item for gas bill against paper bill. file bill with utilities bills
- export all the quicken data as a tab-separated file; review diffs from last time, and hg commit, and hg push to peers
Meanwhile, we have our budget in a spreadsheet. What I'd like to do is:
- digitally sign the spreadsheet
- once a week, an agent logs into the gas company web site and looks for a new bill.
- If it finds one, it generates a proof that the bill should be paid: yes, there's a line item in the budget; yes, it's within 30% of a typical bill [for this time of year?]?; yes, the balance from last time and the payments since then match.
- it posts a request to pay the bill
- another agent checks the proof, archives it, and schedules the bill payment
I'm not sure how much of the papertrail goes in an SQL database and how much goes in cvs/hg change history. I know there should be an ajax interface to the whole thing.
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