101–110 of 123 posts
Also, I wish they would use words like "debit" and "credit" instead of trying to hide this under +/- notation. It makes translating from real financial documents or scenarios into plain-text reports somewhat painful because we're not speaking the same language.
I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).
Exactly my experience but with GnuCash. I used to do it weekly, if you miss one or even two or three weeks it's not too bad, but beyond that the effort required to catch up just snowballs. It's also been about a year since I've imported. I've been meaning to get around to reviving it, and the only way I can imagine doing it is to break it up into smaller chunks, like uploading one month at a time over a few days.
If for some reason you care about your historical data enough to import it, you can add new transactions into "error" to subtract whatever part of it they are responsible for. If the account reaches zero, you can even cheat and delete all transactions.
Welcome again to PTA, HN friends! I set up the plaintextaccounting.org site in 2016, to grow a more organised info hub and community around ledger (2003), hledger (2007), beancount (2008), and the many related apps and resources. I'm happy to answer questions; there's also a FAQ on the site. I don't spend as much time as I'd like making the site and docs better. Feedback and help is always welcome. Stability, efficie…
Has anyone tried training their own personal machine learning model to take export from their Bank+receipts and auto categorize everything? It seems like it'd be a fairly simple classification model that wouldn't require too much training...
How does PTA perform with a medium long ledger, say 1m transactions. Basic checks like summing the ledger, how long does that take?
On a macbook air m1, here's how hledger 1.40 from homebrew handles it (it used to be faster; perhaps this will improve again):
$ hledger -f examples/1Mtxns-1kaccts.journal stats
Main file : .../1Mtxns-1kaccts.journal
Included files : 0
Txns span : 2000-01-01 to 4737-11-28 (1000000 days)
Last txn : 4737-11-27 (990974 days from now)
Txns : 1000000 (1.0 per day)
Txns last 30 days : 31 (1.0 per day)
Txns last 7 days : 8 (1.1 per day)
Payees/descriptions : 1000000
Accounts : 1000 (depth 10)
Commodities : 26
Market prices : 1000000
Runtime stats : 80.23 s elapsed, 12465 txns/s, 2584 MB live, 7679 MB alloc
Tackler advertises 56k txns/s: https://tackler.e257.fi/docs/performance
In my experience about half the time is spent on parsing and half on report calculation. Long-running apps like hledger-ui and hledger-web do the parsing only once at startup, saving time compared to CLI commands.
Plain text accounting is cool but I think one of the biggest barriers for people is downloading bank data into a standard format. The banks are never going to embrace much more than CSV or excel files... the various data aggregation platforms (yodlee, plaid, etc...) are not open source or hobbyist friendly. Back in ancient times there was a company called Wesabe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesabe ) that wrote sof…
Charts are not generic enough for my taste so I'm exporting data elsewhere, but for data entry it is great.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the first two of these, they are great. (And I bet the third is too, I've just never needed it.) If I had to submit one tip it would be to set everything up with a Makefile or similar. I keep my transactions spread across quite a few separate files for different accounts, and the actual commands I issue to include the right files are very long. Similarly I have various plotting and summary scripts whose…
> If I had to submit one tip it would be to set everything up with a Makefile or similar. If I had to submit a tip on top of yours, it's to use justfiles instead of Makefiles :-) https://github.com/casey/just
Plain text accounting is cool but I think one of the biggest barriers for people is downloading bank data into a standard format. The banks are never going to embrace much more than CSV or excel files... the various data aggregation platforms (yodlee, plaid, etc...) are not open source or hobbyist friendly. Back in ancient times there was a company called Wesabe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesabe ) that wrote sof…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use it for many things (i use hledger) - Tracking pending payment from clients - Keeping track of my expenses in various sectors, food (groceries, eatout), books, magazine subscriptions, etc - Keeping track of my current balance accounts across various currency deposits - Loans I give to people, and gifts I give to people - Creating virtual envelops to segregate my savings account money for my goals like travelling…
Bravo!
Damn
God bless you simon !
Hledger is AWESOME
I see a lot of people in here using hledger or beancount over ledger. Could somebody explain the differences? Looking to get back into PTA, but am facing some choice paralysis now.
Understandable. Docs like https://plaintextaccounting.org/#comparisons and https://hledger.org/faq.html#why-was-hledger-created- try to help. (I'm hledger's lead developer.) Don't be afraid to try them all a little; you can mostly-automatically convert between them.