Everything you described is a great gateway drug for GNUPlot :)
Inspired by your example, here's our rolling monthly sums of food expenses, COVID marked [1].
You can see where we moved (temporarily) to a place with lower food costs, and stopped eating out.
But there's also a dip around the holidays, because we spend a lot of that time with family and our food expenses go down proportionally. That dip happens to be consistent YoY, but we don't realize it because we have other things on our mind.
It's just great fun to have this stuff at your fingerprints.
I’d never used it before using it for ledger, either!
It’s kind of tricky. I have an AWK script that reads a ledger report to compute the X and Y-value pairs. These are written to a temp file that is read by GNUPlot.
It’s a bit of work to get setup, but I’m able to copy paste the idea around my reports.
I’ve also found the GNUPlot manual to be very easy to read!
I’m away from my laptop now, but I’ll add a gist tomorrow.
You can use command-line hledger to produce the appropriate balance report data as CSV, suitable for gnuplot (or drag into a spreadsheet and use the charting tools there).
Inspired by your example, here's our rolling monthly sums of food expenses, COVID marked [1].
You can see where we moved (temporarily) to a place with lower food costs, and stopped eating out.
But there's also a dip around the holidays, because we spend a lot of that time with family and our food expenses go down proportionally. That dip happens to be consistent YoY, but we don't realize it because we have other things on our mind.
It's just great fun to have this stuff at your fingerprints.
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/8wb6YLn