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Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

plaintextaccounting.org

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

#121

Post by abdullahkhalids »

andrepd wrote: post #63
croo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already after the data capture part. The hard part is to remember every little transaction I had until I have vim at my hand. The only solution seems to be working more or less is to take out my phone and type it as soon as the transaction happened. And I won't try to use vim on phone ever again..

I use GnuCash. For card transactions I simply import my bank statement .csv file every other week or so. For cash transaction, I use the app on my phone, otherwise I just forget how much I spent and where, by the time I get to my PC.

I never really got past the importing stage in GNUcash. I want to categorize the payments into different accounts, depending on how the money was spent. But there is no easy way of doing it. Or doing it iteratively.

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

#122

Post by smichael »

jimnotgym wrote: post #120
cwp wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for these comments, good to know!

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

#123

Post by sitanhuang »

natchy wrote: post #17

I’ve never seems a timeline-view calendar in the terminal like here: https://github.com/SitanHuang/ledg What libraries were used to do that? I don’t see a package.json

Thx for linking to my project! I created it with dependency-free in mind so I don't actually use any library at all, hence the absence of package.json.

Lemme know if you ever need any help with ledg!

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

#124

Post by andrepd »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #121
andrepd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use GnuCash. For card transactions I simply import my bank statement .csv file every other week or so. For cash transaction, I use the app on my phone, otherwise I just forget how much I spent and where, by the time I get to my PC.

I never really got past the importing stage in GNUcash. I want to categorize the payments into different accounts, depending on how the money was spent. But there is no easy way of doing it. Or doing it iteratively.

When you import all your new transactions are presented. You can click (or ctrl-click to choose several) and match them to an account of your choosing.

It also memorises what transactions go into what category, so after you categorise, say "PURCHASE LIDL" as Expenses.Groceries, it will automatically match future transactions with the same name to groceries as well.

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

#125

Post by smichael »

smichael wrote: post #86
jolmg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but IMHO, while it makes sense to have configurable formatting for terminal output, it doesn't make sense to apply that formatting to output meant for SQL.

True! I will look into it, thanks for the report.

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/1684

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

#126

Post by felixc »

teitoklien wrote: post #117
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 !

Hey! I'm really glad it was useful to someone. Thank you for the kind words :)
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