Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
plaintextaccounting.org
Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
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Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
#2I’m using beancount to keep track of accounts in different currencies and stocks. Highly recommended. Tackler seems an interesting contender, though. The only weakness of plain text accounting is the lack of good graphic reporters.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
#3I've written a series of guides on how to use these tools in practice, here: https://felixcrux.com/blog/ledger-practices
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
#4Ledger has proven to be a huge improvement to my house finances. Just download statements, run them through a few scripts, and you have analytics-ready data.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
#5Just 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 updating the values in the sheet. This way I don’t get the historical overview, but at least the data can be updated in just a couple of minutes. As long as I see my net worth rise over time, I am happy.
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Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
#6Do 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.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
#7Just 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.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
#8I'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 problem: you want it to be easy to write, and easy to write CORRECTLY.
(2) They're the sort of solution that seems fantastic if you don't actually operate at scale. But once you start dealing with tens of transactions per day it simply is not sustainable.
Safe to say: I'm not really a fan.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
#9Do 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.
It's nice to be able to add comments, add a layer of preprocessing with a template/macro language, track changes with git, organize stuff in an arbitrary structure of files, etc.
Stuff like that is not as simple if the backend is an SQL DB.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
#10I'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…
> One of the hard problems in personal finance is data capture
With hledger and vim, I typically search and copy a previous similar transaction, then search and copy similar items. I have a keybinding to change the date, so like 3\d changes the date of the transaction I copied to 3 days ago. Overall, being proficient in vim, capture takes very few keystrokes.
Since the files are plain text, I can easily e.g. list all products I've ever bought with a `grep | sort | uniq` pipeline, to check stuff like whether I put a product identifier under a wrong account or used different identifiers for the same product.
Also, since the files are plain text, I can track changes with git. That gives me clarity over changes in the sense that I can make a large change (e.g. reorganizing accounts) over historical transactions and review the changes before committing.
Regarding large changes, which I think is also a type of capture, I can easily make them with `sed -i ...`, vim macros, awk, etc.
> and input validation
After I've captured, running hb (which is a personal alias for `hledger balance`) results in hledger raising an error if a transaction is not balanced. I can also add an assertion `= X` to the end of account changes to assert what the account is supposed to hold after the change. The number comes from physically checking the account, whether that's by checking the bank app or opening my wallet and counting. hledger will raise an error when an assertion is wrong.
> Programs like QuickBooks and Xero
Being unfamiliar with QuickBooks and Xero, how would these programs do capture and validation better for me?