91–100 of 123 posts
xero keeps raising their prices every few months, which is annoying (the whole attitude of 'you won't switch anyway, so we'll do whatever we want').
Quickbooks online has gotten pretty good. I honestly wouldn’t recommend these plain text tools anymore. Quickbooks has become almost a standard.
I just switched off of ledger because multiple accountants and tax preparers didn’t know what to do with it even if I hand generated profit and loss reports. Quickbooks online has gotten pretty good. I honestly wouldn’t recommend these plain text tools anymore. Quickbooks has become almost a standard.
I set up the plaintextaccounting.org site in 2016, to grow a more organised info hub and community around ledger (2003), hledger (2007), beancount (2008), and the many related apps and resources. I'm happy to answer questions; there's also a FAQ on the site.
I don't spend as much time as I'd like making the site and docs better. Feedback and help is always welcome. Stability, efficiency, and longevity are all important, which is one reason it remains fairly simple.
This style of tools and workflows for bookkeeping/accounting, which I named "plain text accounting" for convenience, but was first popularised by Ledger starting in 2003, has a number of aspects; it's not so easy to explain briefly. I think a key one is the use of textual domain specific languages for interacting with the accounting software's internal data model. I mean the various file formats of the PTA tools (describing data), and also the tools' command line interfaces and related scripts and idioms (describing reports or actions).
Textual languages are more expressive and flexible, version controllable, and modular/scriptable/glueable than GUIs, which tend to be more static in their capabilities. Note once you have one text DSL, it's relatively easy to add more, eg custom formats that better fit your needs. And such DSLs need not preclude GUIs; they can be an alternative (perhaps assisted by smart editors/IDEs), complementary, or a foundation.
-Simon
I just switched off of ledger because multiple accountants and tax preparers didn’t know what to do with it even if I hand generated profit and loss reports. Quickbooks online has gotten pretty good. I honestly wouldn’t recommend these plain text tools anymore. Quickbooks has become almost a standard.
The accounting people I know all hate Quickbooks (with an extra portion of hate for the online version).
Plain 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 had plan to process these data and add to an accounting system, but didn't get a chance, and then my mobile crashed and I lost the Tasker action. Now I'm not getting any motivation to implement it again
I see a lot of people in here using hledger or beancount over ledger. Could somebody explain the differences? Looking to get back into PTA, but am facing some choice paralysis now.
Don't be afraid to try them all a little; you can mostly-automatically convert between them.
I’d appreciate hearing how others have used the various plain text accounting tools for their own use. Are you legitimately using it to inform yourself of your spending habits and taking corrective action? Is it simply for tracking your expenses, revenues, net worth, etc? Or is it simply about the process? I can certainly see the appeal of such an orderly, structured process. Every time I’m reminded of plain text acc…
I use it for many things (i use hledger) - Tracking pending payment from clients - Keeping track of my expenses in various sectors, food (groceries, eatout), books, magazine subscriptions, etc - Keeping track of my current balance accounts across various currency deposits - Loans I give to people, and gifts I give to people - Creating virtual envelops to segregate my savings account money for my goals like travelling…
Is 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.
hledger-ui