81–90 of 169 posts
I use and love ledger, and wrote a Ruby wrapper a few years ago called reckon that applies Naive Bayes to your bank CSV (kind of link Mint.com) and outputs a ledger input file. http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2013/02/16/command-line-a...
I've used Ledger extensively for a side business as well as for timekeeping for work. It's incredibly powerful and incredibly unforgiving. If you want to keep PDF, JPG, etc. receipts with it, just put them in the same directory and note them in a comment. Additionally, use a VCS that does binaries well. Git does not.
http://blog.deveo.com/storing-large-binary-files-in-git-repo...
I have been very interested by ledger lately, is there a wrapper, somewhere, that would ease interactions with my bank account and/or allow me to plot reports graphically across time?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Double-entry refers to the number of accounts related to a transaction, rather than the process of entering it twice. When you think about it, all transactions have naturally (at least) a from and a to account. In the simplest example, I move $100 from one checking account to another. This is a pain to model in a spreadsheet, where I literally create two entries, but very easy to model in an electronic dual-entry sys…
> A big use-case as well for me is the purchase of expensive refundable plane tickets - essentially, I buy personal futures in plane tickets when I see a good price. The virtual accounts that dual-entry allows means that when I buy a refundable ticket, I treat it as an asset in a virtual account until it's used. Again, this helps me track my spending and budgetting more effectively. I would like to hear more about th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Double-entry refers to the number of accounts related to a transaction, rather than the process of entering it twice. When you think about it, all transactions have naturally (at least) a from and a to account. In the simplest example, I move $100 from one checking account to another. This is a pain to model in a spreadsheet, where I literally create two entries, but very easy to model in an electronic dual-entry sys…
Newbie to ledger here. Why not move $x from checking to Holiday Budget every month, and then track holiday spending by moving money from Holiday Budget to Spent on Holidays? Guess it throws off net worth calculations a bit, as you'd have to include the Holiday Budget as well in there. Are there other reasons?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MoneyDance doesn't appear to be a double entry system You didn't look very carefully then
All I found was an FAQ entry from MoneyDance talking about how underneath it's double entry, but they try their hardest to hide that fact from the users. So, yeah, I guess technically it's double entry, but not in a way that is immediately obvious for a lot of use cases.
A number of people here say use a VCS with ledger. When do you commit? After every entry? And do you have branches?
(Coming from a Windows background) I often wonder what the appeal is to something like this. (Seriously!) Why would you use something like this over say a spreadsheet? Is it really much easier than opening a browser and running Google Docs???
You ask "why" on a site named "Hacker News"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
YNAB is both. It's a double-entry budget management system.
YNAB is not double-entry. In fact I interviewed with them one time and they asked me how I would design it, and I started outlining how I run my ledger-based YNAB-like system with double-entry accounting. Their response was something along the lines of "wish we had thought of that, it would have been easier."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you might want a computer to do all of the work and that's easier via a command line app (for most programmers) than doing it all in VBA including parsing a bunch of files and generating the entries. As for the GUI, still needs to be built on top of something, why not this. This actually looks really cool and I'm interested in checking it out. I've often thought about how cool it would be to have double entry a…
> you might want a computer to do all of the work What is "all the work" here? MoneyDance (which I've used for a few years now) imports directly from Amex, my checking account, and three different credit card accounts... It generally classifies correctly, but then I want to manually review each transaction classification manually as some snacks or electronics are business expenditures, some are not... My accounts are…