This is what I’m trying to do right now. The crux of the problem is in the categorization. Presently I clean the comment of the expense and manually set it to a specific category. Pretty tedious for thousands of expenses. Using regular expressions (what hledger does) is easier, but categorizing mistakes are common and edge cases are hard to predict (e.g. r"cafe" pointing at a TeaBreak category for a "Cafe Bar" comment).
I agree that it would be a lot more complicated. If there is no need for it to be more complicated it’ll stay at it’s simple status.
What this makes me realize is that none of those programs has really solved the problem of categorizing the expenses. It would be awesome to some how link these 3 entities:
- The comment (String) banks stick on each expense they register on our personal accounts.
- The business the expense was payed to.
- A list of categorization labels that business is associated with.
The labels in #3 come from some community curated list of hierarchal categories, something like:
expense
|
| food
|
| groceries
| restaurant
revenue
|
| salary
It will be impossible to get everyone to agree on what categories should exist, or which business should be associated with which categories, but something is better than nothing.
I mean, we’ve managed to do something very similar with music and genres, why not with expenses and categories?