Comment by fluffyllemon
6 hours ago
Do folks any recommendations for automation around banking? We use a sort of "envelope system" across many accounts, and it would be helpful to have some timing to help automatically move and rebalance funds across the accounts.
My bank has some very limited options to move specific amounts of money on a weekly schedule, but I'm looking for something more powerful then that.
Should I look at like ~Stripe~ Plaid or something? Or are there more pre built tools?
Accounts don't have to be physically "real" with your Bank. That's one of the insights of the "envelope system" that isn't always obvious.
One of the benefits to specifically using a double-entry system (including most of the PTA space) is that it makes it easier to build your "envelopes" as hierarchical sub-accounts. Instead of having just Assets:Checking you could have Assets:Checking:Grocery and Assets:Checking:General and Assets:Checking:Entertainment and so forth. The Assets:Checking sum of all of Assets:Checking:* will still reflect your total checking balance for situations when you need to know that information, but the sub-accounts in your double-entry system become your "envelopes" to check on your budget spending and to transfer between.
Automating your budgets can be just a matter of when you get your Income:Salary transaction you split it appropriately between the various Assets:Checking:* sub-accounts you want. You could automate other transfers between them as necessary as well.
You can also automate things like verifying your Expenses:Grocery account always takes funds from Assets:Checking:Grocery rather than any other "envelope" account when paid for by your debit card. (With Credit Cards potentially needing a different level of automation, and maybe a bunch more Liabilities:* sub-accounts.)
Your bank won't have any idea of those sub-accounts and nothing will physically prevent you from overspending those sub-accounts, of course, but also you can automate warnings for that and you would have visibility of that in your sub-accounts "going negative" when you spend too much from the same envelope.