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Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

plaintextaccounting.org

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Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#11

Do all of these use a text file as the back end? I like the idea of a CLI, but it’s way easier running Tableau over an SQL database than a text file with indentation (just read the beancount review). I feel quite inspired by this regardless and will give it a shot.

Yes - “Plain text accounting apps”

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#13

Do all of these use a text file as the back end? I like the idea of a CLI, but it’s way easier running Tableau over an SQL database than a text file with indentation (just read the beancount review). I feel quite inspired by this regardless and will give it a shot.

Currently yes. hledger has rudimentary SQL export (https://hledger.org/hledger.html#output-format).

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#14

I've used the ledger-likes extensively, and they have two major problems: (1) One of the hard problems in personal finance is data capture and input validation. Programs like QuickBooks and Xero don't just hide the GL because they're being mean, they're doing it because even experienced bookkeepers make mistakes on the general ledger all the time. "Since it's a text file it's easy to read" solves exactly the wrong pr…

The reason I use Xero is the integration with my bank, credit cards, invoicing, and payroll system.

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#15
post #7
post #5

Just looking through the docs of one of these apps called Ledger [0], it seems to me it’s a lot of work to keep everything up to date. I guess one could write tools to ease importing data from banks, brokers and the like. Currently I don’t do the full accounting stuff. I just keep track of my net worth using an Apple provided Numbers sheet. It’s easy and quick, just occasionally logging into all my accounts and then…

> it seems to me it’s a lot of work to keep everything up to date Unless you do dozens of transactions every day, it's not much of a hassle to keep track of them manually. If you're like a day trader or a small business owner then yeah, you'll probably need some helper tools.

> Unless you do dozens of transactions every day, it's not much of a hassle to keep track of them manually.

I don't have too many transactions indeed.

I am actually contemplating to switching from my Numbers sheet to the Ledger command line tool. I do like that this tool is multiplatform and based on simple text files. And it shouldn't be too hard to write a few scripts to convert data from my banks and brokers into the format used by Ledger. I guess I'd need a day to setup everything, so perhaps it'd be a decent weekend project.

Eventually I would like to leave the macOS platform and not relying on Numbers would make the switch just a little bit easier.

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#16

Do all of these use a text file as the back end? I like the idea of a CLI, but it’s way easier running Tableau over an SQL database than a text file with indentation (just read the beancount review). I feel quite inspired by this regardless and will give it a shot.

Currently yes. hledger has rudimentary SQL export ( https://hledger.org/hledger.html#output-format ).

It'd be cooler if the quantities didn't come formatted with thousands seperator commas and currency symbols. Then, the numbers could more easily be treated as numbers in SQL.

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#18
post #17

I’ve never seems a timeline-view calendar in the terminal like here: https://github.com/SitanHuang/ledg What libraries were used to do that? I don’t see a package.json

It's not complicated enough to need a library. Here's the code: https://github.com/SitanHuang/ledg/tree/develop/lib/cli/char...

Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

#19

I've used the ledger-likes extensively, and they have two major problems: (1) One of the hard problems in personal finance is data capture and input validation. Programs like QuickBooks and Xero don't just hide the GL because they're being mean, they're doing it because even experienced bookkeepers make mistakes on the general ledger all the time. "Since it's a text file it's easy to read" solves exactly the wrong pr…

Have you tried `ledger xact` command? This helps to create new transactions based on previous ones. I have a small wrapper[1] for this, namely "la", which enables me to do something like "la coles 5" to create a new transaction like previous supermarket transaction with the today as date, same from and to accounts, and $5 as amount. If I want to change something, it could be as complete as "la [YYYY.MM.DD/M.D/D] coles grocery 5 credit". If someone has tens of transactions per day it is very likely they are all similar and only little extra adjustment is needed.

Also I use a credit card for most of my expenses, and there are only a handful of bank transfers per month from my access account. Every first day of the month I pull out last month's credit card statement and log all the transactions. It usually takes less than 30 minutes.

[1]: https://github.com/roylez/dotfiles/blob/master/misc/bin/la

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