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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

#81

Post by Jtsummers »

account-5 wrote: post #53
simonmic wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spreadsheets have lots of strengths. I believe one of the difficulties is (a) managing an increasingly large number of transactions over time, with (b) an uncertain number of postings to (c) arbitrary accounts in a hierarchy. Though I haven't tried myself, I suspect modelling a full double-entry-bookkeeping General Journal in a spreadsheet just gets cumbersome. Secondly, while certain kinds of calculations and querie…

I suppose the biggest barrier for me would be learning double entry bookkeeping as I'm not doing that just now. I wouldn't know where to start. Currently the above makes no sense to me.

The syntax above can be learned easily enough, but double-entry boils down to: Each transaction shows both where money goes and where it comes from, the sum should be 0.

Where it goes and comes from are "accounts", which may or may not correlate to actual accounts like you might think of in personal finance. There are 3 categories of accounts: expenses, assets, liabilities. You own the second two, they are your cash, checking, savings, brokerage as assets and your mortgage, car loan, CCs as liabilities. Expenses are where you spend money outside of your own accounts.

Before getting to expenses, you may have accounts like this for your assets and liabilities:

  assets:cash       $100
  assets:checking  $2000
  liabilities:cc   $-100
  liabilities:car  $-10000
Whenever you transact your money goes from one place to another, so a car payment may look like:

  2021-09-05 Car Payment
    assets:checking    $-500
    liabilities:car     $500
Positive means that that account gets the money, negative it loses the money. Note that it sums to $0. If there were an interest component we may do this:

  2021-09-05 Car Payment
    assets:checking    $-500
    liabilities:car     $400
    expenses:interest   $100
Expenses are not owned by you. They can be broad categories or more specific. Maybe you have two residences and utilities at both:

  expenses:primary:electric:edison:1234 -- your account number
  expenses:secondary:electric:pandg:1234
I wouldn't go that far, I might do:

  expenses:house:electric:primary
  expenses:house:electric:secondary
But the choice is up to you, both work. Think of them as hierarchical tags.

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

#82

Post by nlh »

I've switched all my accounting over to hledger (a Haskell-based and slightly more feature-filled version of the original) and I'm SUPER happy with it so far.

My primary consumption method is hledger-ui, a nice curses-based UI. It's got a `watch` mode so will update in real-time as you make edits to the source database, which is nice.

The ONE thing I miss from the old QuickBooks UI world: Entering categories for transactions directly in my text file is tiresome. QuickBooks had a super nice auto-complete feature wherein it would remember the category as you were typing a transaction, which made data entry a snap.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to replicate this inside a text editor? Or any other good way of quickly doing transaction entry?

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

#83

Post by smichael »

avodonosov wrote: post #74

I used ledger / cl-ledger for some time, but they do not correctly support multi-currency accounting, which is a show stopper for me.

Do you mean, in the sense of https://hledger.org/investments.html#a-more-correct-entry ?

balancednoautoconversion validation may be relevant, if so (https://hledger.org/hledger.html#strict-checks)

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

#84

Post by smichael »

nlh wrote: post #82

I've switched all my accounting over to hledger (a Haskell-based and slightly more feature-filled version of the original) and I'm SUPER happy with it so far. My primary consumption method is hledger-ui, a nice curses-based UI. It's got a `watch` mode so will update in real-time as you make edits to the source database, which is nice. The ONE thing I miss from the old QuickBooks UI world: Entering categories for tran…

ledger-mode in Emacs has some excellent account and description auto-completion (warning, may require a bit of configuration to suit your taste).

hledger add, hledger-iadd and hledger-web are some of the data entry uis with auto completion.

Alternatives: other ways of generating entries means less manual data entry, such as copy/paste in your editor, predefined templates (org-capture, yasnippet or equivalents), or conversion from bank csv data.

[PS I realize now you were asking for more than account name auto-completion, ie: filling in defaults for all postings (legs) when you reuse a transaction description. I don't know of many PTA tools doing this yet; hledger add is one.]

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

smichael wrote: post #84
nlh wrote: post #82

I've switched all my accounting over to hledger (a Haskell-based and slightly more feature-filled version of the original) and I'm SUPER happy with it so far. My primary consumption method is hledger-ui, a nice curses-based UI. It's got a `watch` mode so will update in real-time as you make edits to the source database, which is nice. The ONE thing I miss from the old QuickBooks UI world: Entering categories for tran…

ledger-mode in Emacs has some excellent account and description auto-completion (warning, may require a bit of configuration to suit your taste). hledger add, hledger-iadd and hledger-web are some of the data entry uis with auto completion. Alternatives: other ways of generating entries means less manual data entry, such as copy/paste in your editor, predefined templates (org-capture, yasnippet or equivalents), or co…

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by smichael »

jolmg wrote: post #67
smichael wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not used the SQL output, but I hope it's like all other hledger output: the number formatting is configurable (following your data format by default, but overrideable).

Yeah, but IMHO, while it makes sense to have configurable formatting for terminal output, it doesn't make sense to apply that formatting to output meant for SQL.

True! I will look into it, thanks for the report.

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

#87

Post by smichael »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #49

What is the best way to use ledger on my android phone? I need to be able to account for every transaction I make immediately after they happen. Sitting down and writing all this stuff into a file at the end of the day is just too boring. Anyone have experience with the apps mentioned in the site?

https://hledger.org/mobile-apps.html

PS a little daily-ish data-entry-and-reconciling ritual, with a pleasant tool setup, can be quite satisfying! I actually look forward to it. (That right there is part of my PTA success story. I used to suffer a lot of stress around all things finance.)

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

#88

Post by smichael »

simonmic wrote: post #38
account-5 wrote: post #35

As someone who "manages" there accounts in spreadsheets what would be the advantages? I'm already downloading CSVs from my accounts which I clean and import into a spreadsheet. Also can someone link to what the actual text file looks like? The format. I can't find a decent example, I just want to see this human readable format, thanks.

Spreadsheets have lots of strengths. I believe one of the difficulties is (a) managing an increasingly large number of transactions over time, with (b) an uncertain number of postings to (c) arbitrary accounts in a hierarchy. Though I haven't tried myself, I suspect modelling a full double-entry-bookkeeping General Journal in a spreadsheet just gets cumbersome. Secondly, while certain kinds of calculations and querie…

Another advantage over spreadsheets I forgot: more guide rails and more common ground (shared practices, howtos, support) with other users. Spreadsheets are a tabular report construction kit, PTA is an accounting system construction kit.

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

#89

Post by trepanne »

boulos wrote: post #27
qudat wrote: post #21

It's so funny to see this post on HN. I recently took the plunge and got rid of Mint for Beancount. I probably spent 10 hours getting things set up. So far I really like being in full control of the "database" via a composition of files. Even a database feels too heavy-handed for my personal accounts. It was a lot of fun to learn accounting terminology and methodologies like the double-entry accounting. The most anno…

If you're based in the US, I would recommend ofxtools [1]. Anytime an institution supports "Download in Quicken", they have an OFX endpoint that you can find via ofxhome. [1] https://github.com/csingley/ofxtools

Thanks for the recommendation, always happy to see people getting use out of ofxtools.

Unfortunately, it's far from true that all institutions supporting Quicken downloads can be found via ofxhome. That list was originally sourced from parsing MS Money API, and has been only sporadically updated in a manual case-by-case fashion. Also ofxhome is set to go away pretty soon.

But we do what we can

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

#90

Post by Buttons840 »

nlh wrote: post #82

I've switched all my accounting over to hledger (a Haskell-based and slightly more feature-filled version of the original) and I'm SUPER happy with it so far. My primary consumption method is hledger-ui, a nice curses-based UI. It's got a `watch` mode so will update in real-time as you make edits to the source database, which is nice. The ONE thing I miss from the old QuickBooks UI world: Entering categories for tran…

I've experimented with classifying my own transaction history using n-grams and either naive Bayes or a neural network, the neural network worked better. I could train the nn to convergence in a few seconds and it was good enough to remove 95% of the classification work.
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