Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bravo!
Woah :O I cannot believe I’d get a reply from the creator of hledger himself. Damn God bless you simon ! Hledger is AWESOME
Thank you teitoklien. I found your list seriously inspiring, thanks for writing it up.
Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
111–120 of 123 posts
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Add an "error" account, put transactions there so that your transaction accounts have the correct value, and focus on inputting current data. 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.
GnuCash actually does that after an import. Sure, one can use the nice reconcile flow, but for importing lots of data I prefer slowly working through the bank statement at my own place, paired with occasional sanity checks.
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#113Plain 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…
I recently discovered Paisa, which is basically a nice UI over ledger-cli. Import is very convenient. You upload csv (or similar), see the preview, then write a script which converts each row into ledger text format. There is linting and everything. When you like the result, just save the script so you can import again anytime. It also supports downloading commodity prices if you use it to track stocks and similar. C…
yeah I looked at that too... and that aspect is useful.
However, I'm not really looking for a layer on top of ledger as much as I'm looking for a configurable web-scraping system (using the local password manager) that can be run to get the csv/pdf/etc.. files needed to create the ledger.
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#114Is there an text editor that is able to autocomplete the categories in hledger format ? It would be great to type Assets:: and then get a list of the possible categories, but I haven't found any editor or extension that does it.
A VS Code extension for ledger-cli provide autocomplete as long as your journal compatible with ledger-cli
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
GNU recutils should become the standard backend. Plain text db which has a powerful albeit simple records format, proper ids, enforces constraints, removes need of silly type conventions better defined in fields with %type, built in encryption. Foreign keys. Auto generated fields. Regex. No one in their right of mind will want to manually edit the data store holding critical accounting data. 99% of the times should b…
A recutils clone in Go would be pleasantly hackable for whipping up some double-entry.
The wheel is there already. Call librec from Lua and speed up your plain text accounting with LuaJIT.
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#116Plain 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…
I recently discovered Paisa, which is basically a nice UI over ledger-cli. Import is very convenient. You upload csv (or similar), see the preview, then write a script which converts each row into ledger text format. There is linting and everything. When you like the result, just save the script so you can import again anytime. It also supports downloading commodity prices if you use it to track stocks and similar. C…
Yes, charts are not generic enough for me too.
I like Paisa's ledger file editor, though other parts not working in my country, I'm fetching prices with a python script.
I wish its editor seperated into a library to be included in personal projects.
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#117I've been using ledger (ledger-cli) from the moment I first became self employed (almost twenty years ago). While far from perfect, I'm very happy about it. It's nice that everything is in plain text, which means that I can script things, read everything in VIM, and easily extract data. For one of my two current companies, the ledger file is 2MB of plain text and contains the transactions from 2016 onwards. While I p…
In thinking a bit more, I think the biggest pain point for me is one with plain text in general: it supports no attachments. I have my own system to refer to specific files and built a Mac app that lets me drop a file on a transaction, then it copies that file into a specific folder and adds a tag to the transaction. This could be done so much easier if the data would be sqlite, but then you obviously lose the abilit…
ZIP can be a useful container for when you want a plaintext file with attachments, but you also want the full folder structure transportable itself as a single file. Automating zip/unzip operations isn't too bad, and you sometimes easily can teach some applications to work directly with zip container streams, without a temporary folder, too. Some existing text editors can do it naturally already; emacs and vim both have native support. Others have plugins available, like VSCode has ZipFS [1] (which is also on the backlog of possible things to support out of the box [2]).
[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=arcanis....
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're willing to hold your nose a little bit, Plaid[0] might be worth looking into. They have (had?) a testing tier which is more than enough for personal uses (100 linked accounts). [0]: https://plaid.com/
According to this Reddit thread from 10 months ago, some major US banks like Chase won't work even in development mode without production approval, and some people mention obstacles getting approved for OAuth without being a company or otherwise having that level of security posture. (Other people seem to have gotten successfully approved for OAuth.) I agree this niche needs a better solution than it currently has, a…
Uh, somehow I forgot to link the Reddit thread I cited: https://www.reddit.com/r/mintuit/comments/17iq9gx/plaid_api_...
Also in June of this year Plaid decommissioned its development platform but added a (quite) limited free tier of the production platform: https://www.reddit.com/r/fintech/comments/1c8xxet/plaid_prod... This doesn't really invalidate the main point of my comment, but it does affect a few details.
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#119Wow, I had no idea accounting was such a big thing outside of like, actual full time accountants.
Doesn't using anything but some ultra well known service amplify the consequences of failure?
Like, isn't the IRS going to think any tech related error is more suspicious than if you had used some cloud thingy?
Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
#120I'd embrace plain text accounting more if it had a better schema. Ledger's is absolutely atrocious, and it drives my OCD nuts trying to use vim to "write" accounting entries. I think my ideal PTA would be some kind of jsonnet-based system where I can create/call functions to generate journal entries.
For a time I threw together a bunch of python scripts which did billing for me based on YAML files which struck a nice balance of readability vs programmability (since YAML turns into lines quite well and has less special character noise).
> less special character noise
I hope you've at least once stumbled upon the existence of https://noyaml.com/ and/or, at the time, were familiar with the quirks regarding number interpretation.