Ledger, a command-line accounting system

I used ledger-cli, but as I constantly deal with several currencies, I can't rely on it. Unfortunately, none of the open source accounting system I know support multi-currency accounting well.

You can think of double entry accounting as unit tests for your financial books. It definitely does help in making sure that you don't make mistakes when you enter the data, but where it really shines is analysis after the fact.

In Japan, the government actually gives me concessions for submitting my documents for income tax as double entry accounting. This is because it saves them huge amounts of money. So, if I document an expense that I want to get a deduction for, they can easily check that there is a corresponding withdrawal from the bank account to pay that expense. Especially for complicated areas, like my payroll, where I have up to 5 bank accounts in play (some of them off shore), it's absolutely the only way they can go back and understand what the heck is going on.

Similarly, for me, I have sometimes gone back and discovered that I got an exchange rate wrong. Fixing that mistake is a nightmare (especially if you have to pay capital gains tax in a LIFO or FIFO manner -- you have to record the capital gains or losses for each "lot" of currency that you purchased). Double entry accounting will totally save your butt as you ripple through all your transactions changing the exchange rate for the foreign currency. If you get it wrong (i.e. over or underspend a particular "lot"), the numbers won't balance at the end.

Is it necessary for your average person? Obviously not. As your finances become more complicated it kind of goes like this: intellectually interesting -> super cool -> crap, how did I get by without this? -> there is absolutely no other way to do it and not get arrested for tax evasion.

I do something similar, although I name my receipts/documents with yyyymmdd-friendlyname.pdf for ease of lookup.

For my IT consulting business, I also wrote a wrapper that rejects entries that don't have a receipt tag which allows me to catch any entries that I haven't complied 100% with my practices (and tax office won't get upset in an audit).

I also autogenerate the ledger entries from the receipt name (and prompt for description/expense account/$$ with logic for handling common items like fuel etc).

I've played with PDF metadata so my entire receipt scanning => ledger is automated from just the PDF document but haven't reached a satisfactory setup there.

I use https://github.com/nuex/t, which generates ledger timelog entries as documented here http://www.ledger-cli.org/2.6/ledger.html#Using-timeclock-to.... I've tracked approx 2000 billable hours using this method over the last couple of years. When I invoice, timelog entries are archived into a separate file, so my active timelog ledger file records unbilled time.

Keep in mind that this is a ledger, not a spreadsheet. You record transactions in a text editor. The ledger-cli program is simply a report generator. From the perspective of an "accounting application", what you might think of as the meat of the program is actually the text editor. There are plugins for emacs and vim to do text highlighting and insert dates, etc, but it's basically free form editing.

In a way, it's exactly what you are thinking would be superior: why not use some general purpose tool for data entry and then write some macros for generating reports? It's just using a text editor rather than a spreadsheet.

The text editor is actually quite a bit better suited to this kind of entry than a spreadsheet. Have a look at the examples at the website. Since the journal is also just a text file, you can easily use a version control systems on the data -- this has saved me more times than I care to mention.

So, yes, it really is easier than just about everything else you could imagine. If you are interested in double entry accounting, I highly recommend it.