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Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

plaintextaccounting.org

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Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#21

Post by markgall »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #19

I use ledger for all bookkeeping and accounting for personal and many LLCs. If you’re a terminal rat and cli master, use vim or emacs, sed/awk know the basics, script in bash/python/perl/ruby regularly then just learn ledger and double entry accounting and switch to it and I suspect you will be much happier than whatever you are doing today. A few basic tips: - reckon is helpful for importing transactions quickly. ht…

I agree with the first two of these, they are great. (And I bet the third is too, I've just never needed it.)

If I had to submit one tip it would be to set everything up with a Makefile or similar. I keep my transactions spread across quite a few separate files for different accounts, and the actual commands I issue to include the right files are very long. Similarly I have various plotting and summary scripts whose exact syntax I don't usually remember. But with make I can just "make cashflow" "make balance 'A=Checking'" "make balance-plot 'A=retirement'" and so on.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#22

Post by koolba »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #5
RivieraKid wrote: post #2

I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).

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.

Just do what any real accountant does, true up the balance, throw the difference in a suspense account, and go grab a pint.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#23

Post by wuming2 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #4

I'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.

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 be ETL with the odd visual check for inspiration.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#24

Post by FredPret »

candiddevmike wrote: post #4

I'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.

You never have to look at it. I have an Excel - one file a year - with a schema that makes sense to me, then a Python script to convert that to {year}.beancount. The script is triggered by fswatch.

So I get a browser frontend with fava and data input in Excel.

It’s non-trivial, but then so is any form of accounting.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#25

Post by wruza »

Systems that use immediate strict categorization don’t work for some people. At a company I worked at we went with a two-phase approach. A person would write notes (literally iphone notes) in the following format:

  Apr 5 24
  -50 Alice tools
  -220 Bob home project

  Apr 2 24
  +20 Bob returned loan
Note that time goes “up” to avoid scrolling too much on open. Later we loaded it into a script which would parse dates, detect keywords and make templates for proper double-entry. It would detect both the outer “agent” and the internal analytics and also put the original text as a comment. What it couldn’t detect had to be manually categorized and (sometimes) added to the script. Of course the script used editable lists for correspondence, not only hardcoded values. These lists were person-specific, so that Alice and Bob wouldn’t have to sync their vocabularies.

I cannot imagine any of the people at that company filling this

  9/19 (1234) comment here
    Cat1:cat2:cat3
    Cat4:cat5
every time money moves and they are in a queue, in the car, talking to someone, etc. They’d simply resort to smaller notes again in the notes app or in the chat, or would try to “remember” it, to fill properly at the end of the day (more likely week).

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#26

Post by racked »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #5
RivieraKid wrote: post #2

I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).

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.

What is the bottleneck in your experience? I have around 100 transactions a month spread across various banks and providers. My experience is this:

I spent about a week defining a procedure to export all statements into CSV, converting the CSV into a Gnucash-friendly format where needed with some GPT3-authored PHP scripts. Once a month I do an import into Gnucash and the process takes at most 2 hours.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#27

Post by BeetleB »

wruza wrote: post #25

Systems that use immediate strict categorization don’t work for some people. At a company I worked at we went with a two-phase approach. A person would write notes (literally iphone notes) in the following format: Apr 5 24 -50 Alice tools -220 Bob home project Apr 2 24 +20 Bob returned loan Note that time goes “up” to avoid scrolling too much on open. Later we loaded it into a script which would parse dates, detect k…

It sounds like what you are doing is plain text accounting!

> Later we loaded it into a script which would...

I too do not manually enter things in the ledger file (well, rarely). I actually enter it into KMyMoney, and have a script to convert to a ledger file.

Overall, your comment is coming across as a fairly weird complaint. It's a tool, and given that its in text, you're free to build whatever workflow you wish around it - including having people take notes on their iPhone and using a script to convert to the ledger format.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#28

Post by BeetleB »

candiddevmike wrote: post #4

I'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.

I suggest use some other tool for data entry, and as long as you can figure out its internal format, write a script to output to ledger. That's what I do with KMyMoney.

Re: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

#29

Post by BeetleB »

markgall wrote: post #21
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #19

I use ledger for all bookkeeping and accounting for personal and many LLCs. If you’re a terminal rat and cli master, use vim or emacs, sed/awk know the basics, script in bash/python/perl/ruby regularly then just learn ledger and double entry accounting and switch to it and I suspect you will be much happier than whatever you are doing today. A few basic tips: - reckon is helpful for importing transactions quickly. ht…

I agree with the first two of these, they are great. (And I bet the third is too, I've just never needed it.) If I had to submit one tip it would be to set everything up with a Makefile or similar. I keep my transactions spread across quite a few separate files for different accounts, and the actual commands I issue to include the right files are very long. Similarly I have various plotting and summary scripts whose…

> If I had to submit one tip it would be to set everything up with a Makefile or similar.

If I had to submit a tip on top of yours, it's to use justfiles instead of Makefiles :-)

https://github.com/casey/just

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