31–40 of 141 posts
CLI tools also have the advantage that their developers don't have to waste their time building and maintaining a useless GUI, but can instead use the time to improve the tool itself Maybe it's just me, but I stopped reading here b/c this language struck me as unnecessarily antagonistic. Just some feedback.
CLI tools also have the advantage that their developers don't have to waste their time building and maintaining a useless GUI, but can instead use the time to improve the tool itself Maybe it's just me, but I stopped reading here b/c this language struck me as unnecessarily antagonistic. Just some feedback.
It would be different if they were expressing the same sentiment for something like a 3D graphics editor...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, there are some really useful properties of the double entry system: https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1898 That's defining a group called the Pacioli Group. One thing that is relatively easy to do with this group is to quickly verify consistency in the transactions. That is something you lose with a single-entry system.
Transity isn't a single entry system. By using transactions to model financial flows it implicitly enforces that the amount is credited to the "from" account and debited to the "to" account. Therefore it's basically double entry by design. I'm really interested if someone can show me a use case where this system is less powerful / safe than a classic double entry system.
What about cases where there are multiple "to" accounts? For example, you might go to Best Buy and purchase a computer and a video game. In this case, the "to" would be split between two separate accounts (assuming you do your books this way).
This is a contrived example, but in the business world this type of transaction is very common. An example involving selling a taxable service (think of a haircut) might look like:
Debit Cash
Credit Service Income
Credit Sales Tax Payable (this is remitted to the government)Earlier quoted context omitted.
Transity isn't a single entry system. By using transactions to model financial flows it implicitly enforces that the amount is credited to the "from" account and debited to the "to" account. Therefore it's basically double entry by design. I'm really interested if someone can show me a use case where this system is less powerful / safe than a classic double entry system.
What you've described is literally not double-entry. Double-entry is based on the concepts of two accounts being modified by a related set of similarly-sized transactions (i.e., the credit and debit actions). The idea is that you can separately replay the sets of transactions for each account and at the end they reconcile (i.e., balance) because the accounts are modified separately. You've presented a system in which…
How do you handle recording sales taxes? In Canada, for a business, every transaction will require splitting the tax component into a separate account so that it can be fed into the quarterly GST return. This happens both on the sales side, where you record the taxes you collected, and on the purchases side, where you record the taxes you paid to your suppliers.
Personally I don't like the yaml-like syntax. I use beancount myself, and with fava (https://github.com/beancount/fava) as the UI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also have a single member LLC, but can't understand the advantages of using a cli tool over Quickbooks. Beyond the obvious transactions list and graphs of income and expenses, Quickbook self-employed estimates quarterly taxes and even allows me to make payments to the IRS directly via eftps.gov. At tax time, it exports all transactions tagged and categorized to TurboTax.
... and sends a copy of everything to Intuit.
hledger makes some strong assumptions (IIRC) about your accounts being in assets, liabilities, income, equity, expenses. But I may be thinking of beancount for that. If I'm remembering correctly, hledger will let you do whatever you want, but some of their built in reports (like balance sheet) assume liabilities and assets as top-level accounts.
However, ledger allows you to do things like:
personal:expenses:...
personal:assets:...
club:expenses:...
wife:expenses:...
apply account personal
2018/06/05 Gym
Expenses:Gym 54.00 USD
Assets:Checking
end apply account
Query: Does Transity allow for money to come from or go to multiple places? Suppose I'm traveling for work and need a more detailed accounting of my spending (they don't reimburse alcohol, perhaps):
2018/06/05 Place with good cocktails ; 50 USD is on me
Work:Expenses:Travel:Food 20.00 USD
Work:Expenses:Travel:Drinks 50.00 USD
Liabilities:Work:CC
I don't want to have to enter a from/to pair that's redundant (repeating the same from) for things I split like this.
Additionally, there's no need for this "perspective" aspect. If I move money to an account, its balance goes up. If I move money from it it goes down. If I am managing my girlfriend's accounts in ledger (or she is, but it's pushed into a common household file):
2018/06/05 GF ; lunch last week
Jared:Assets:Cash 10.00 USD
GF:Assets:Cash
Same thing with a business. If I own my own LLC and "pay" myself a salary out of it (I'm assuming I also pay out my health insurance or something in this, I don't know, I don't do payroll), let's say:
2018/06/05 Paycheck
Jared:Assets:Checking 2000.00 USD
Jared:Expenses:HealthInsurance 100.00 USD
JSLCC:Expenses:PayrollStuffs 200.00 USD
JSLLC:Assets:Checking
† https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/weaving-a-budget.html
+1 for YAML. Thanks for not using JSON. Now I want to see someone take, say, Tiffany & Co's latest 10-Q⁽¹⁾ and run it through this. __________ ¹ https://www.bamsec.com/filing/9824618000198?cik=98246
CLI tools also have the advantage that their developers don't have to waste their time building and maintaining a useless GUI, but can instead use the time to improve the tool itself Maybe it's just me, but I stopped reading here b/c this language struck me as unnecessarily antagonistic. Just some feedback.
Well, it's also non-sensical. A CLI "interface" needs a lot of thought and work behind it, too, unless you want to end up loathed by your users as something like git is.
Hm, the article asserts that Ledger doesn't have tags: > Sub accounts vs. Tags > But what if the expense is part of another category as well, like expenses for your vacation? Well, you'd be at a loss. There is no good way to model this in ledger-likes without getting really hacky. But that's not true. Ledger has tags. You specify a tag with: :tagname: For instance: 6-5-2018 Gave food to Bart Simpson, while on vacatio…