Ideas for text based budget management and software

Question

I'm looking for suggestions for text-based software or just basic scripts for tracking expenses.
For the last six months I've been recording my purchases in text files, one file for each month.
An entry looks like this:
01/01/2013,Schnucks,banana, groceries,1.00,cash
It works pretty well for recording info, no alternative system could be much faster than just adding a line to a text file.
Now that I've been recording data for about 6 months, I'm more interested in parsing through it to see what I'm spending in each month and in various categories. At the moment, I just run the files through grep and awk to get what I want. I'm contemplating writing a python program to let me filter and calculate totals and do whatever else comes to mind: importing credit card statements, generating graphs, etc. But at that point, I feel like I'm probably just re-inventing the wheel.
Does anybody want to share how they are handling a similar case?
I'm ok with changing my entry format, but I'm pretty attached to handling things as text files. I don't need anything more complex if it adds to the overhead of creating an entry.

Answer 1

Hey, I been doing something very similar!
Except it also will measure income, so I can know how much I have done/expend this month, week, etc.
I don't have it at hand atm, but I use : to separate the fields, and use slashes to escape it (like \:)
Yes, that is a DSV file.
I haven't dedicated time to work on it lately, but I was writing a perl script to do the calculations.
One idea I have is to create an additonal file for a list of expenses names, like this:
milk-z:Milk brand Z:milk
milk-y:Milk brand Y:milk
the first field is an unique code for the product, second field a description, and third field is a category.
That way I could see how much I have expend on milk, no matter the brand.
On the expenses file, an expense would be similar to this:
2012-12-20:expense:milk-z:5.0
The first field has the date, in the format YYYY-MM-DD; that order is important to be able to sort the file if is necessary
Second field has "expense"; it could be "income" if it was an income
Third field is the product code - if its something I don't buy regulary, I could be only a name (like "new led tv" or something), if is an income, the reason behind the income.
And fourth field is just the amount of money.
Oh, I think I'll dedicate some time to the project again