Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by simonmic » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #105

ethbr0 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the data representation problem. It's in the customers' best interest to have a universal format. It's in no one else's (read: especially vendors) interest for there to be a universal format. Which is why you generally only see it when it's mandated by a coordinating party in the middle (e.g. Medicare).

Sort of. The challenge is that no two businesses are really alike, so it's difficult to create a standard that can capture all the nuance of running a business. GAAP/IFRS-compliant accounting requires double-entry accounting, so many ERP systems share a lot of the same things (account, debit/credit, accruals, receipt of goods, month-end close) that are needed to spit out the three sheets and other artifacts for finan…

http://xbrl.squarespace.com aims at this problem, I think ?

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

#112

Post by smichael » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

avodonosov wrote: post #101

smichael wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

I mean I want to log income, spendings, exchanges in multiple currencies (or commodities), and then be able to see reports in a single currency - my net worth, my income over period of time, capital gains / losses. Leger printed nonsence for such roports. I used to pay taxes in multi currency environment, and know the official rules here, in Belarus, how to calculate the indicators when converting to a single currenc…

> I mean I want to log income, spendings, exchanges in multiple currencies (or commodities), and then be able to see reports in a single currency -

All the major PTA tools support this - perhaps the chat could help ?

> my net worth, my income over period of time, capital gains / losses.

The first two are easy, the third is more complicated but also possible - unrealized gains at least, I forget how easy realized gains are in the various tools, it might not be fully automatic.

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

#113

Post by tomnipotent » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 8:51 PM UTC

simonmic wrote: post #111

tomnipotent wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. The challenge is that no two businesses are really alike, so it's difficult to create a standard that can capture all the nuance of running a business. GAAP/IFRS-compliant accounting requires double-entry accounting, so many ERP systems share a lot of the same things (account, debit/credit, accruals, receipt of goods, month-end close) that are needed to spit out the three sheets and other artifacts for finan…

http://xbrl.squarespace.com aims at this problem, I think ?

This is for exchanging reporting data, not all the things that lead up to that.

It can't tell you how to structure sales to account for taxes across multiple countries, or how to accrue for gift cards/liabilities, or recognizing revenue from annual subscriptions, or deprecating assets, or amortizing expenses. Each ERP and business will do this in slightly different ways.

But what it can tell you is how to represent those results when everything else is said-and-done.

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

#114

Post by avodonosov » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

smichael wrote: post #112

avodonosov wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I want to log income, spendings, exchanges in multiple currencies (or commodities), and then be able to see reports in a single currency - my net worth, my income over period of time, capital gains / losses. Leger printed nonsence for such roports. I used to pay taxes in multi currency environment, and know the official rules here, in Belarus, how to calculate the indicators when converting to a single currenc…

> I mean I want to log income, spendings, exchanges in multiple currencies (or commodities), and then be able to see reports in a single currency - All the major PTA tools support this - perhaps the chat could help ? > my net worth, my income over period of time, capital gains / losses. The first two are easy, the third is more complicated but also possible - unrealized gains at least, I forget how easy realized gain…

The supoort existing was not practical, and I doubt it changed since I tried.

If you can, lets chat, thank you.

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

#115

Post by smichael » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

avodonosov wrote: post #114

smichael wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean I want to log income, spendings, exchanges in multiple currencies (or commodities), and then be able to see reports in a single currency - All the major PTA tools support this - perhaps the chat could help ? > my net worth, my income over period of time, capital gains / losses. The first two are easy, the third is more complicated but also possible - unrealized gains at least, I forget how easy realized gain…

The supoort existing was not practical, and I doubt it changed since I tried. If you can, lets chat, thank you.

By all means - see you in one of the chats! https://plaintextaccounting.org/#mail-listsirc

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

#116

Post by teitoklien » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:50 PM UTC

anyfactor wrote: post #42

I really don't know for whom this is for. For Normal People: Double Entry even though may sound simple, it is quite a difficult concept to grasp. For the sake of double entry we use counter entries that take months to grasp. For example - Amortization, Allowance etc. More over double entry method strives for standardization of entries. Having a plaintext non-autocompleting solution without accounting for only handful…

I use ledger for my transactions , daily I found it simpler than the other applications , considering i spend most of my time in text editor or cli . Moreover having to deal with multiple currencies in ledger is just so simple. Its command line parameters make it very similar to me like other tools , grep , awk , xsv , etc.

Over the years, I’ve kept extending it to calculate and generate invoices for my clients and email it to them with a payment link automatically. Also combined with gnuplot its a very minimal and excellent tool for visualising my finances in any way I want to. My plan is overtime to combine it with streamlit.io to make interact-able projection tools for myself to tinker with my finances.

And its community is super fun too ! Ledger and Hledger are some of my favourite tools.

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

#117

Post by teitoklien » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

felixc wrote: post #3

I've written a series of guides on how to use these tools in practice, here: https://felixcrux.com/blog/ledger-practices

Hey felix , Your blog helped me tremendously a few months ago, to get better at managing my ledger files.

Thanks a lot for all of your recommendations !

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

#118

Post by minikomi » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 3:06 AM UTC

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #29

minikomi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Termux on the phone with custom ledger focused org capture templates has worked well for me Now I just use a simple discord bot to capture, which is synced to a private git repository

Is your bot that does this open sourced? This seems very interesting

Sorry mate it's just an easy message parser built on discord.py, pretty bodgy code and no intention to OS

Messages look like

    &out soba shop
    Soba 800
    Beer 700

Or

    &p #custom:category payee
    Item (int cost)
    Item (int cost)

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

#119

Post by France_is_bacon » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 5:26 AM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #34

hardtoreason wrote: post #8

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…

> hard problems in personal finance is data capture and input validation It's also true for business accounting. Getting data into your accounting/ERP software is always a clusterfuck, and I've yet to see a process that didn't require many hours/days of reconciliation and posting manual journal entries to close a reporting period.

Never had a problem with any of this. Yes, it is time-consuming, but so is everything in business. Maybe if I have someone to open a business in my name, do all the work, and I just sit and drink margaritas at the beach all day, none of work would be time-consuming for me.

But back to reality, everything in life is time-consuming. But, that is why it is so important to have a healthy profit margin and enough revenue in to hire a bookkeeper - so it takes you zero time.

But, even still, the real issue is that most business people don't know sh-t about accounting, don't know about accounting controls, don't know about so much, that they can't really evaluate anything anyways. How many companies have I been with or known someone that works at them that have been ripped off by embezzlement, because the company didn't know about controls. Too many. Rita Crundwell who was the Comptroller and Treasurer of the town of Dixon, Illinois is an especially juicy case of embezzlement. Crundwell stole nearly $2.5 million per year from the city. Crundwell with embezzling $53 million over the prior 22 years. And I think it was more, because she worked for a longer period than that, but no records were available. There was a great analysis of it, and wow, was it great. Just so fascinating.

I have a lot of experience in accounting and bookkeeping, so I really enjoy it. I don't know, it doesn't really take me a long time, I do it every day, so it takes me less than 4 or 5 minutes per day. Sometimes a little longer, sometimes less.

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

#120

Post by jimnotgym » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 6:30 AM UTC

cwp wrote: post #78

jimnotgym wrote: post #56

>Most (not all) plain text accounting implementations use signed amounts instead of debits and credits. This makes them "double entry light" perhaps, but it has been a rather successful simplification, intuitive to most newcomers. They shouldn't do themselves down. I am an accountant and I have used several large systems that do exactly this in the database. It is also by far the preferred way to export a trial balan…

When you say "it is the norm in the industry" do you mean that accountants are moving away from debits and credits, or is it just that accounting software translates to signed numbers when dealing with non-accounting software such as databases and spreadsheets?

It is totally normal to display debits and credits on screen in gui software as signed numbers too. It is very convenient to be able to sum a list and find a balance. It also means that the sum of the entire ledger must always be zero which is a common consistency check that is applied. This is how it is in SAP, Coda, Sage and Netsuite at least.