Diaries and "book-keeping"

I need to keep track of what I have done, and what I plant to do.  I am comfortable with TeX (including LaTeX and others)., and so I put a question out to the TeX community on this.

To build something which can extract things like daily purchases out of a diary in TeX shouldn't be too difficult.  I would not be surprised if someone has done this before.

To keep track of the "accounting" of farming is more involved.  One I recently came across, was that I had bought blue orchard bees (in the winter), and looked to put them someplace where they could spend the winter.  There was a problem, and I moved them elsewhere, but still spring sort of came along and I realized that the bees where still in the fridge.

Have people done book-keeping via diary writing?  What about things like buying bees and then getting them outside when they should be?  And a zillion other things.

Do things like this exist?  My mind goes back to little languages and Brian Kernighan, and writing parsers.

I was like you, looking for something to track farm information and what I found was that nothing really existed. Undeterred, but of limited intelligence, I just used Microsoft Excel, and over a period of years developed it into a comprehensive program. I track a lot of stuff, from hours spent farm, to expenses, to soil amendments needed, to production. It can get boring jotting down notes every day, but tracked over a year, or over a decade now, I see a lot of trends and see a lot of progress on my farm. I have come a long ways in 10 years, and looking back I can see the goals I had back in 2008, and where I am now. Granted some have not occurred, but others have.

Overall it is a big help, and lenders, regulators (usda) and others have always appreciated up to date paper work and documentation.