This is a brain storming I want to share with you 😆 .

I feel that PTA is very good to track every transaction but sometimes it is difficult to "understand" the evolution or if I am in the right path of my finances. It easy to know your expenses one month, year... (hledger bal expenses -p 2023 or hledger bal expenses: -M -p 2023). But it does not provide a good and quick picture if I am expending more or not.

I think that many use graphics to try to understand the trend of our personal finances. But I think it could be also achieved with text reports. I am thinking in two kind of reports:

• Balance Report to compare the same period of time in the last years. For example, compare the Q1 (or months, or weeks...) of the last 3-4 years

hledger report-type-1 --period-report q1 --period 2020..2023 "expenses:"

                ||   Q1-2020   Q1-2021   Q3-2022
================++==============================
 expenses:...   ||  

• Moving Average Report. For example, I can obtain the average expenses in the last 12 months with hledger bal expenses: -MA -p 2022.01..2023.01 and I could obtain the average 12 month expenses of the previous month with hledger bal expenses: -MA -p 2021.12..2022.12. The idea would be to have a report to know if I am spending less in average in the last X months and, not exactly month to month or quarter to quarter.

                ||   2022.11-Average-12m   2022.12-Average-12m   2023.01-Average-12m
================++==================================================================
 expenses:...   ||  

These are a bunch of ideas. Perhaps it should not be directly linked with the reporting capabilities of PTA. Perhaps it should be scripted with bash, with org-mode...

What do you think? How do you analyze your PTA data?