clipf: Cryptic, but powerful

From the customer suggestion box comes clipf:

clipf is a personal finance manager, and one that takes a little getting used to. Of course, that might just because I do my finances in a spreadsheet. With sc. Because I am an action movie star. 🙄

I have relatives that swear by Quicken or whatever le app du jour is. A spreadsheet usually does the job for me.

So shifting to clipf is a bit like learning to park a boat. It requires a change in your approach. I fear change. 😯

Not really. But there doesn’t seem to be much documentation on actual use of clipf, aside from what’s here.

My advice is first to set the account with whatever name you like (I chose “Home” in the screenshot there), then start adding categories with prod add.

clipf allows you to declare subgroups via dot-names, which means you can group milk and cheese and so forth under dairy., if you like.

Convenient in that sense. Because later, when you make reports, you get a breakdown by category.

Make adjustments against your account with the op add function. Use can use tab completion (thank goodness).

Finally reports with rep. There are some other functions, and you can set dates and so forth with flags against each command.

So really, clipf is a lot like a specialized shell, that works primarily as a financial manager. Kind of cool.

One thing I should mention is that this is a python2 program. I tried to run it against the current python3 package and got errors. (Also, for Arch users, the AUR package seems somehow empty. It installed nothing that I could find on my computer. 😕 )

The only other quirk I should mention is that once you enter an operation, you can’t delete it. You have to reverse the operation to nullify it.

So if I make a typo I have to make a step backwards to zero it out, then start again with the error still in my report? Seems odd, and slightly inconvenient. 😐

Probably I would just hand-edit the database file, to get it out.

Regardless, I think I will spend a little more time with clipf, and see what it can do for me. That a 30-year-old spreadsheet program can’t, that is. …