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Hledger 1.50

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Re: Hledger 1.50

#31

Post by michaelsbradley »

simonmic wrote: post #22
michaelsbradley wrote: post #5

Book (digital and/or print, free and/or paid) recommendations to learn proper and effective use of this kind of accounting to manage personal/family and self-employment finances. Best resource would assume competency in undergraduate-level math, but assume no financial competency beyond "you have a checking account, maybe a credit card, and are familiar with receiving income and making payments, and you understand th…

You said book, but I wouldn't rule out the docs on hledger.org (and perhaps plaintextaccounting.org); of which https://hledger.org/hledger-by-example.html is book-ish, and https://hledger.org/accounting.html leads to some good general accounting resources. Also, again not what you asked for exactly, but the hledger chat room can be a very useful extra resource, to keep things moving along. And here's one I found usef…

Thank you!

Re: Hledger 1.50

#32

Post by seabass-labrax »

brisketbbq wrote: post #27
spiffytech wrote: post #24

To offer another option for a graphical FOSS budgeting app, I switched to https://actualbudget.org a few months back and it's great. It's like YNAB, but with less magic. Plus sophisticated features like a rules engine for automatically filling envelopes and cleaning up spare funds at the end of the month. I host it on Pikapods for cheap, and connect to my bank accounts with SimpleFINs. I've tried a lot of budget apps…

hledger is not just a budgeting app, but an accounting app to track your finances, debits/credits, investments, etc.

It does look like it has single-entry accounting with an optional double-entry mode, even if it isn't based on the accounting equation like hledger is:

https://actualbudget.org/docs/transactions/transfers

Re: Hledger 1.50

#33

Post by simonmic »

lvass wrote: post #23
seabass-labrax wrote: post #18

I used to use GnuCash, but a small yet constant irritation for me was how the entry's date (that is, the date when I authorized the transaction) wouldn't always match the clearing date of the transaction as reported by my bank in their statements. hledger, however, has support for adding 'posting dates' as specially formatted comments. What's really clever is how it automatically chooses which date to sort the report…

Is it like ledger's effective dates? https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Effective-Dates

They are different - though often tried for the same kinds of use case. Here's https://hledger.org/hledger.html#secondary-dates (hledger's name for effective dates) vs https://hledger.org/hledger.html#posting-dates. (Both features come from Ledger.)

Re: Hledger 1.50

#34

Post by yencabulator »

warmwaffles wrote: post #12
euroderf wrote: post #8

Shouldn't it be possible to encapsulate something like this with SQLite and produce an accounting engine that can guarantee consistent numbers and generate key numbers (trial balance, P&L, gearing, ...) ?

It is yes, but this is for Plain Text Accounting which allows you to put your books in version control which is an interesting way to keep track of changes over time.

Also great for "eyeball auditing". When Gnucash did something, I was never sure what actually happened. And sometimes it would crash. Was all my data safe? Hard to tell.

With ledger/hledger, I've never felt unsure about the change I'm making, and if something wipes out records I'll notice it before committing.

Re: Hledger 1.50

#35

Post by kreyenborgi »

yencabulator wrote: post #34
warmwaffles wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is yes, but this is for Plain Text Accounting which allows you to put your books in version control which is an interesting way to keep track of changes over time.

Also great for "eyeball auditing". When Gnucash did something, I was never sure what actually happened. And sometimes it would crash. Was all my data safe? Hard to tell. With ledger/hledger, I've never felt unsure about the change I'm making, and if something wipes out records I'll notice it before committing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41706037 or use gnucash for ui and ledger for change tracking

Re: Hledger 1.50

#36

Post by d10 »

faustlast wrote: post #3

I’ve been a long-time user of (h)ledger. I use a custom script to generate a cost basis when computing capital gains for selling transactions. Are there any recent updates or tools that improve cost-basis tracking or capital gains handling in hledger?

When I had this need I put together https://src.d10.dev/lotter. It takes as input ledger-cli entries and puts out entries with lot info added, which you can then run through `ledger`. You can quickly scan its output and see if what it does makes sense to you.

The repo hasn't seen activity for a while, but AFAIK it still works. I just haven't needed it myself recently.

Re: Hledger 1.50

#37

Post by simonmic »

yencabulator wrote: post #34
warmwaffles wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is yes, but this is for Plain Text Accounting which allows you to put your books in version control which is an interesting way to keep track of changes over time.

Also great for "eyeball auditing". When Gnucash did something, I was never sure what actually happened. And sometimes it would crash. Was all my data safe? Hard to tell. With ledger/hledger, I've never felt unsure about the change I'm making, and if something wipes out records I'll notice it before committing.

> When Gnucash did something, I was never sure what actually happened. And sometimes it would crash. Was all my data safe? Hard to tell.

You express it exactly, I felt the same way with Gnucash, Quicken, and all the other non-plain-text accounting apps I tried. Finance was stressful enough without also worrying about messed-up data. That was perhaps the biggest motivation to switch to Ledger, when I found it.

Later, I often could not figure out how to make Ledger do something I knew it could do, and I often was surprised by a crash or wrong behaviour when it saw some new combination of features and data that hadn't been tested or implemented yet. This was a big motivation to write hledger.

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