PlainBudget – Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

I love budgeting and I love plaintext, doing more with textfiles than most people. I&#x27;m going to give some quick feedback as someone that should be in the target audience, but doesn&#x27;t find this particular application interesting.<p>* Setting the budget is one thing, but you never actually spend exactly the budget. There is no way import transactions which is crucial. It&#x27;s a good habit to compare actual expenditures to projected budgets.<p>* One of the major problems that successful budgeters run across is how to track savings over time. Savings are shifting in nature. In bank accounts or bonds the interest the occur is predetermined. What if the savings is in stock, crypto, precious metals or collectables? It&#x27;s a shame that my tool for tracking the value of my retro game collection doesn&#x27;t communicate with my tool for tracking my savings accounts.<p>* I&#x27;m concerned about using your GUI tool to edit a text file instead of my own primary text editor. The nice thing about my text editor is that my font is set how I like, my keybindings are set how I like, and I know a ton of useful shortcuts. I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d want to spend the time to configure your tool, and even if they have the configuration options I&#x27;d want.<p>* Honestly there are a ton of budgeting apps with more features. Some good ones are even free.

I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;re aware of the plaintext accounting&#x2F;budgeting options, but for others that might be interested, here&#x27;s a list: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaintextaccounting.org&#x2F;#pta-apps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaintextaccounting.org&#x2F;#pta-apps</a><p>I personally use hledger, but beancount is also popular.

Pity this doesn&#x27;t follow the PTA (Plain Text Accounting) &quot;standard&quot; but invented its own DSL.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaintextaccounting.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaintextaccounting.org&#x2F;</a><p>Especially because there is a wide range of apps, ranging from CLI to web and even mobile, which can be used for PTA and due to the fact that they acknowledge the same standard are interoperable:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaintextaccounting.org&#x2F;#software" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaintextaccounting.org&#x2F;#software</a><p>The most well known ones being<p>- hledger (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hledger.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hledger.org&#x2F;</a>),<p>- beancount (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beancount.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beancount.github.io&#x2F;</a>),<p>and<p>- ledger (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ledger-cli.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ledger-cli.org&#x2F;</a>)<p>Important note: All free and open source

This is interesting. I really like the DSL. It is a little limited though, just because it works on the month-level only.<p>One thing that I think is missing is having different dates for transactions to occur. So like some things happen just once ever, or transactions on the last day of the month which shifts.<p>This just means the stats that are given by this app are a bit rough. Looking at the source it seems to estimate the projections. Not a bad thing, just something to note.<p>I recently translated my own script-based cash flow simulator to a web app as well, which might be interesting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nicktrevino.com&#x2F;tools.cashflow-simulator.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nicktrevino.com&#x2F;tools.cashflow-simulator.html</a><p>One last thing, if you haven&#x27;t heard of Wails, and you like Golang, I recommend it when thinking about making a desktop version of a web app: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wails.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wails.io&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m interested but I have more questions than answers.<p>It might make sense to provide some system for figuring out how to create the budget, and then how to track your expenses against it.<p>In my mind the simplest form of budgeting is so-called &quot;Envelope Accounting&quot;, where you have physical envelopes full of money where you pull money out when you spend it.<p>There are electronic envelope accounting systems which retain the simplicity.<p>I&#x27;m a bit unsure of how this system works, where it differs, etc.<p>In summary, I&#x27;d love to see:<p>1. An explanation of how to construct a budget using your system.<p>2. An explanation of how to compare your spending to your budget? (bonus points if I can use my existing plain text accounting system, or at least a csv file)<p>3. An explanation of how to track my budget over time.

I read a fair bit of criticism here in the comments. I think I understand where they are coming from. From my point of view, I like the simplicity of the DSL. I also love long-term projects. Great to see that you are working on it since 2018! And I think, from a western perspective, 10 bucks is a fair price to support you.<p>Some observations and bugs I encountered:<p>- A license added to Github: Currently, I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m allowed to build an application using the package, say an integration to Obsidian or whatever.<p>- The example in your readme features the wrong group name (&quot;<i>Housing</i>&quot; vs &quot;<i>Main</i>&quot;)<p>- Your DSL does not like comma-values. :)<p>- The DSL also does not like to see groups being used multiple times. So, what I wanted to try was:<p><pre><code> = Housing - 2000 Rent - 1000 Utilities - 500 Leisure # 2025-05-09 = Groceries - 10 Coffee x 12 - 10 Milk x 12 - 20 Cereal x 6 # 2025-05-10 = Groceries - 2,60 Bread = Income - 5000 Salary - 1000 Side hustle + Income - Housing - Groceries </code></pre> - The CLI will crash if it does not find a file. A better way to handle that would be to create an empty file.<p>- You are using Electron, so a Windows build would, of course, be nice.

I guess it&#x27;s obvious that a plain spreadsheet does this job nicely. I use one row per day and one column for each account, e.g. rent, utilities, each credit card, savings accts etc. I make a new tab each year. Very easy to see in advance the low point in your bank balance each month&#x2F;pay period.

I use Soulver with a file for each month’s expenses as well as a file for overall assets and liabilities. If you already have that app, it’s a great solution. It supports (global) variables and has natural language support.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soulver.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soulver.app&#x2F;</a><p>It’s not plain text, but it feels like plain text.

This is great. Having been in and out of paycheck-to-paycheck living several times, I find that during transitions to stability individual transaction tracking is useful for understanding what’s even happening to you financially. But once you understand that do you really still want to micromanage spreadsheets every day of your life? Would much rather leave my accounting rules on autopilot and base my spending decisions off of a tool like this instead.<p>Tried out the Mac app snd didn’t encounter any obvious bugs. looking forward seeing some functionality around annual expenses and potentially dating entries to create some sort of anticipated distribution across a date range

I also wrote a small napkin buget calc script with my Python `reaktiv` library so I can use REPL and commit it to GIT. Here is a small example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;buiapp&#x2F;reaktiv&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;examples&#x2F;napkin_calc.py">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;buiapp&#x2F;reaktiv&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;examples&#x2F;napkin_...</a>

This is great. I’m gonna try it out but just looking at screenshots, this was really close to something I was going to try building not that long ago. I’m glad someone else did because I didn’t&#x2F;don’t have the time right now (and don’t need another project for my ADD brain to hyper focus on )

The wording on the site&#x2F;blog was confusing. The homepage says &quot;Download Beta&quot; and the blog says &quot;purchase&quot;. Sure enough, when you click &quot;Download Beta&quot; you&#x27;re asked to pay $10.

I love this, could you add a licence for the cli code?

I expected ncurses :)

It’s wild to me that people would rather build their own apps than use excel.