I have an account called Expenses:Food:Coffee:OatMilkUpcharge. It has 47 transactions in it. I know because I checked, at 11pm, which is when I do this — maybe 35-40 minutes a week, most nights, reconciling and splitting every $4 latte into its component parts.
Here’s what broke me: I sat down to justify it and couldn’t name one decision I’ve changed in months because of that granularity. Not one. The annual analysis I still love. The nightly itemizing has just gone hollow.
So, honestly: has anyone deliberately coarsened — fewer accounts, stop splitting the small stuff — and found they lost nothing? Or did the discipline matter more than you expected once it was gone?
i folded all my food tracking into one Expenses:Food back in the spring. haven’t missed the granularity once.
found they lost nothing
The lattes, sure, fold them together and never look back. But that phrase is where I get nervous, because “nothing” is only true until the deductible categories get swept up with the personal ones. I had a client, a freelance photographer, who ran everything through one Expenses:Business bucket, gear and meals and mileage and software all in a pile. When he got examined, he could show the total but couldn’t prove which meals were client meetings versus his own dinners, so the examiner disallowed the whole meals line and he wrote a check for $6,200. He had spent the money legitimately; he simply couldn’t substantiate the split after the fact. Coarsen the lattes all you want. The categories the IRS might ask about are the ones that have to stay separate.
Meals, mileage, travel live under IRC §274(d) — they demand contemporaneous records. Coarsen those lines after the fact and no amount of real spending saves the deduction. Reconstruction fails on exam.