Visualizing personal finances

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Aaron Stacy

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Jan 24, 2023, 9:22:35 PM1/24/23
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Whatup bean counters, I wanted to share something I've been working on that's possible because of how nice and scriptable our favorite plain text accounting tool is.

I've worked on a few iterations of this "dashboard" over the years, and I finally broke down and did it all in HTML + D3.js.

I'm really interested in how people visualize their finances, so please share your approaches too! In my experience this is less turn-key than something like Fava, so it's harder to use other people's scripts, and I think there's 2 reasons:

1. Assumptions get baked in (I assume USD, I assume you don't need prices more than once a week, etc). We're all busy.
2. Good visualizations depend on how your ledger is organized, accounts are named, etc.

But I still find it really helpful to see what other people are coming up with, so whether it's a complicated Excel sheet, Jupyter notebook, or whatever, please share!

c79m...@gmail.com

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Jan 25, 2023, 11:49:19 AM1/25/23
to Beancount
Thank you!   This looks like a really neat framework to get finance data into an easily digestible format.   I'm still in the early stages of trying to implement some sort of monthly "state of our finances" report I can send to or share with my wife.   (She's not a nerd, and doesn't need or care about many of Fava's features.)   Something like this looks just about perfect.

Aaron Stacy

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Jan 25, 2023, 4:55:14 PM1/25/23
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Please share if/when you put something together!
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