# Personal Finance package?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/personal-finance-package/12597>\
**Category:** Finance and Economics\
**Tags:** package, proposal\
**Created:** [July 23, 2018, 8:01am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/personal-finance-package/12597 "2018-07-23T08:01:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

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**Author:** ![yakir12](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/yakir12/32/297_2.png) [@yakir12](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/yakir12)\
**Post date:** [July 23, 2018, 8:51am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/personal-finance-package/12597/3 "2018-07-23T08:51:10Z")

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> [@Tamas\_Papp](#):
>
> import data as a `DataFrame` (most banks allow you to export CSV), and make the plots I want by month, spending category, etc.

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).

> [@Tamas\_Papp](#):
>
> Recreating anything more complicated, approaching the tools you linked, is a significant undertaking. And more importantly, I am not sure Julia has a competitive advantage there.

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:

1. The comment (String) banks stick on each expense they register on our personal accounts.
2. The business the expense was payed to.
3. 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:

```julia
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?

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