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Ledger, a command-line accounting system

ledger-cli.org

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Re: Ledger, a command-line accounting system

#131

Post by kspaans »

avodonosov wrote: post #126
roel_v wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean 'it will be balanced'? In double entry accounting, every ledger entry needs to balance. You have three entries. Whether they balance depends on how you enter them. What is the specific problem in your example?

I mean that balance report had 0 total. More precisely, I want to convert everything to a single currency, and than have 0 balance. I.g. I want to check my net worth in USD, or my net worth in EUR. To see capital gains/losses.

If I'm understanding you correctly you expected to see a line item in your balance report stating your losses due to the change in the exchange rate between USD and EUR? Ledger definitely supports that, you just need to make sure to arrange your accounts and transactions accordingly to capture that information. See the "Currency Trading Accounts" method:

https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Currency-trading-accou...

Re: Ledger, a command-line accounting system

#132

Post by roel_v »

avodonosov wrote: post #126
roel_v wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean 'it will be balanced'? In double entry accounting, every ledger entry needs to balance. You have three entries. Whether they balance depends on how you enter them. What is the specific problem in your example?

I mean that balance report had 0 total. More precisely, I want to convert everything to a single currency, and than have 0 balance. I.g. I want to check my net worth in USD, or my net worth in EUR. To see capital gains/losses.

After every entry, your total system balances to 0. Of course you have to enter all your entries, and not use the 'auto balancing' and unit conversion things that ledger recommends because they don't make sense. If you use ledger just as a, well, ledger, you can do what you want, of course after specifying exchange rates, just like you'd do in a real accounting system.

Re: Ledger, a command-line accounting system

#133

Post by mikekchar »

zrail wrote: post #70
Havoc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not intended as an attack Don't worry. I knew I'd catch grief. I know HN is strong on CLI love and thin on actual accounting experience. ;) >This is a true double-entry accounting system that happens to have a CLI. Double entry has existed in paper format since before the dawn of time. Its not particularly revolutionary (CLI or not) in fact its bare minimum for sanity. Hence my comment that this is barely a step abo…

My philosophy on this is, if/when my business grows to the point where I can't handle the bookkeeping anymore, I'll switch to something that I can hire out. And if that means paying someone to hand-jam in a year of transactions from my ledger files, so be it, but likely I'll write some translation software to make it happen. Until that point, I'll keep doing my books myself with ledger :)

One small caveat as someone in the same boat. If you have to declare capital gains on transactions from multiple currencies, the "currency account" system that ledger uses is a bit strange for some accountants. I do my own book keeping, but I have an accountant who deals with the government ;-) He calculates capital gains in a way that I would say is arguably wrong. However, I trust that his way will be accepted by the government, which is all that matters ;-)

Re: Ledger, a command-line accounting system

#134

Post by Dowwie »

There's another open source project worth checking out called BeanCount. The author, Martin Blais, originally wrote it in Python to serve similar double entry bookkeeping needs as those from the ledger-cli community. He seems to be continuing development of it, or at least porting portions of it (plugins?) to a variety of languages.

homepage: http://furius.ca/beancount/ source: https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/overview

Re: Ledger, a command-line accounting system

#136

Post by javiercr »

This is very interesting. I'm involved in an open source project to create a Ruby gem to extract bank data from multiple banks and offer it via a CLI and a Ruby API. We fetch the data either from bank APIs (which often we discover through reverse engineering of mobile apps) or simple web scrapping.

https://github.com/bankscrap/bankscrap

The project is still under heavy development but we already have support for 3 main banks in Spain. We also have managed to integrate it with Slack and other apps.

I am sure we can learn a lot from the Ledger CLI.

Re: Ledger, a command-line accounting system

#137

Post by draven »

psibi wrote: post #129
toomim wrote: post #80

And the author/maintainer of Ledger just became the maintainer of Emacs, just today!!

Any announcement/mailing list link regarding that ? Edit: Found that: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-11/msg00...

Congratulations to John!

I found his first answer in the thread interesting (he talks about his interaction with RMS.)

Re: Ledger, a command-line accounting system

#138

Post by themiurgo »

robotmachine wrote: post #36

I have been using Ledger for a long time and it has really been a wonderful tool. The reports are great. I even made a little Python script so I can easily make entries from terminal on my phone!

Would you elaborate how that works? I'd love to make entries from my phone.

Re: Ledger, a command-line accounting system

#139

Post by jareds »

tectonic wrote: post #13

I use and love ledger, and wrote a Ruby wrapper a few years ago called reckon that applies Naive Bayes to your bank CSV (kind of link Mint.com) and outputs a ledger input file. http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2013/02/16/command-line-a...

I just want to thank you for writing reckon. I'm a totally blind software developer and find ledger much easier to use then any program with a GUI for keeping track of my mony and budgeting. A large part of what I do is use reckon to enter my creditcard transactions from a CSV export.

Re: Ledger, a command-line accounting system

#140

Post by ljosa »

mercurial wrote: post #109
TeMPOraL wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I doubt many authors know anything about emacs... You'd be surprised. There's a list of writers who use Emacs floating somewhere around the interwebz, Vernor Vinge being a notable example. I can't find it right now, but few of those authors are mentioned here: http://irreal.org/blog/?p=4651 .

I don't doubt it for a second, but these people are outliers. This would be like me advocating how Wordperfect is widespread among authors, based on the fact that George RR Martin still uses it.

WordStar, not WordPerfect.
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