I organize my personal finance with ledger-cli which supports a myriad of basic features that can be used to build workflows for your financial needs.
One particular useful feature is monthly budgeting. It helps you to get a feeling how much you already spent on a particular expense in the current month. However, not all expenses can be pressed into the form of a monthly budget but they are part of a larger investment vision. For example, if you save your excess money at the end of the month to go on vacaction once a year. How do you track your current level of savings for your vacaction.
In this example ledger file, I present you a method to use funds
alongside the normal monthly budgeting. Funds are virtual accounts
that are filled manually with money by you. Expenses to certain normal
Expenses: accounts automatically drain money from a fund.
Please open the ledger.dat file for the coming details.
First, we define a few funds that we want to use to track investements plan that span multiple months.
account Funds:Travel
account Funds:Saving
account Funds:Sporadic
At the end of the month, or whenever you feel like it, you transfer money virtually to these accounts. These transfers are accounted in the ledger monthly budget and you see that you "spent" money on your funds.
2019/01/31 Closing
(Funds:Saving) 200 €
(Funds:Sporadic) 25.59 €
If we want drain money from a fund, we want to do it automatic. Furthermore, these drains may not influence the current monthly budget as they were already considered in another month in the budget.
Therefore, we specify some accounts that are automatically connected to a fund. Furthermore, all transactions in these accounts are marked as 'automatic', which we will consider in the budget expression.
account Expenses:Travel:19:San Francisco
account Expenses:Travel:19:35C3
= /Expenses:Travel:/
(Funds:Travel) -1 ; :automatic:
In order to get a proper budget, we have to exclude the automatic tagged transactions:
ledger -f ledger.dat -p "this month" budget \( expenses or funds \) and not %automatic
As a companion for the fund mechanism, this repo also containts a
main.py file that displays the development of accounts (also fund
accounts) for this month and the last month.
=================== Register (register this month) ========================
01.01.2019 My Corporation Income:Salary -2,000.00 € -2,000.00 €
02.01.2019 Rent and Electricity Expenses:Flat:Rent 630.00 € -1,370.00 €
Expenses:Flat:Others 50.00 € -1,320.00 €
12.01.2019 Travel to San Francisco Expenses:Travel:19:San Francisco 325.00 € -995.00 €
(Funds:Travel) -325.00 € -1,320.00 €
31.01.2019 Closing (Funds:Saving) 200.00 € -1,120.00 €
(Funds:Sporadic) 25.59 € -1,094.41 €
=================== Balance =======================
5,995.00 € Assets
=================== Funds =======================
Total This Month Last Month
200.00 € 200.00 € 0 Funds:Saving
25.59 € 25.59 € 0 Funds:Sporadic
350.00 € -325.00 € 675.00 € Funds:Travel
=================== Budget (this month) ========================
680.00 € 1,774.41 € -1,094.41 € 38% Expenses
680.00 € 704.95 € -24.95 € 96% Flat
50.00 € 74.95 € -24.95 € 67% Others
630.00 € 630.00 € 0 100% Rent
0 1,069.46 € -1,069.46 € 0 Misc
225.59 € 225.59 € 0 100% Funds
200.00 € 200.00 € 0 100% Saving
25.59 € 25.59 € 0 100% Sporadic
0 0 0 0 Travel
------------ ------------ ------------ -----
905.59 € 2,000.00 € -1,094.41 € 45%