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(Coming from a Windows background) I often wonder what the appeal is to something like this. (Seriously!) Why would you use something like this over say a spre

• peteretep 11y ago
  Over a spreadsheet is an easy sell - dual-entry accounting is an absolute revelation. Over the many good GUI dual-entry accounting programs, I'm not so sure.
  • jegutman 11y ago
    Well, you might want a computer to do all of the work and that's easier via a command line app (for most programmers) than doing it all in VBA including parsing a bunch of files and generating the entries. As for the GUI, still needs to be built on top of something, why not this. This actually looks really cool and I'm interested in checking it out. I've often thought about how cool it would be to have double entry accounting for every day life.
    • peteretep 11y ago
      > you might want a computer to do all of the work What is "all the work" here? MoneyDance (which I've used for a few years now) imports directly from Amex, my checking account, and three different credit card accounts... It generally classifies correctly, but then I want to manually review each transaction classification manually as some snacks or electronics are business expenditures, some are not... My accounts are generally pretty complicated, but I'm yet to find a use-case that MoneyDance (or GnuCash, back in the day) can't support... I'm a programmer, and I love programming, but not everything needs my time and attention to program. I also (no longer) run my own mail server, just because I can.
      • sophacles 11y ago
        MoneyDance doesn't appear to be a double entry system. The nice thing about double entry bookkeeping, is it allows some pretty complicated cash-flow tracking - so setting up your accounts for a small business or consultancy is a bit easier.
        • peteretep 11y ago
          > MoneyDance doesn't appear to be a double entry system You didn't look very carefully then
          • sophacles 11y ago
            All I found was an FAQ entry from MoneyDance talking about how underneath it's double entry, but they try their hardest to hide that fact from the users. So, yeah, I guess technically it's double entry, but not in a way that is immediately obvious for a lot of use cases.
            • peteretep 11y ago
              If you can explain to me which use cases it doesn't support, I'd be interested...?
        • e12e 11y ago
          I'm curious about this. I thought double entry book-keeping was mostly an artefact of manual/analog book-keeping. Humans are notoriously error-prone, and it's easier to avoid errors when two sets of numbers are supposed to balance out (ideally, exactly). How is double entry beneficial once all transactions are documented digitally? Could you give a somewhat concrete example? (Contrived or otherwise)?
          • peteretep 11y ago
            Double-entry refers to the number of accounts related to a transaction, rather than the process of entering it twice. When you think about it, all transactions have naturally (at least) a from and a to account. In the simplest example, I move $100 from one checking account to another. This is a pain to model in a spreadsheet, where I literally create two entries, but very easy to model in an electronic dual-entry system where I create a single transaction with a from and a to end point, and an amount. Consider if I decide to buy a stock from my checking account. The from is my checking account, and then there are two "to" accounts - an account which models the value of the stock, and an account for the vendor's charges for the purchase. I might decide to aggregate all such bank charges to a single virtual account for this purpose. In this case, that virtual account would be the same as a "category" in a spreadsheet based model. It can also make budgeting and cash-flow visualization easier. I have a virtual account called "Holiday Budget", which makes a transaction to another virtual account called "Spent on Holidays" of $x every month. Whenever I spend money on a holiday item from my checking account, the "from" is my checking account, and the "to" is my "Holiday Budget". This keeps my net-worth and budgeting reports very simple - they say I spend the same $x on holidays every month - while accounting for some very lumpy spending. I can easily see if I'm over or under budget by looking at the value of the virtual account "Holiday Budget" at any point. It makes recording the value of unconventional assets easier. When I buy a laptop, I create a new account for the laptop, and transfer the money from my checking account to the virtual account that represents the value of the laptop. Every month, I draw down money from the laptop account in to an account called "depreciation". This helps me keep my budget reports insulated from lumpy spending too. A big use-case as well for me is the purchase of expensive refundable plane tickets - essentially, I buy personal futures in plane tickets when I see a good price. The virtual accounts that dual-entry allows means that when I buy a refundable ticket, I treat it as an asset in a virtual account until it's used. Again, this helps me track my spending and budgetting more effectively.
    • leni536 11y ago
      > I've often thought about how cool it would be to have double entry accounting for every day life. I have a hard time imagining something that is less cool than accounting. It's certainly a good idea though.
  • ChuckMcM 11y ago
    Well something like quickbooks its much more transparent and Ledger isn't constantly trying to upsell you some service :-) Agreed on the spreadsheet, its balance checking is really the key feature here that spreadsheets don't do. The simplicity of simple text files means you don't have to worry about your files not being readable by a future you. Which is not the case of every 'gui' dual-entry accounting system to date. Seriously, pick any system you could have used in 2000 and figure out if you can read its files now.
    • peteretep 11y ago
      > Seriously, pick any system you could have used in > 2000 and figure out if you can read its files now Back then I used Gnucash. It's simple XML, and I wrote some Perl to pull a report on it recently. MoneyDance, which I use now, seems to have some kind of binary format, but will export XML, CSV, etc etc...
    • a3n 11y ago
      Ledger also isn't bribing Congress to keep the tax system complex enough that you need Quicken or HR Block. I won't touch anything from Intuit.
• jdreaver 11y ago
  * ledger is for double-entry accounting. Doing that in a spreadsheet can be a huge pain. When you then want to query the data in different ways, that will add a ton of complexity to your spreadsheet. * It is plain text, so you can keep your data in version control. * It has awesome reporting capabilities. These are builtin, so you don't have to create them from scratch. Spreadsheets are nice and simple, but once you do anything moderately complex you are asking for bugs under all of your hidden formulas.
• erronjason 11y ago
  Granted, this is the extreme, but in my mind this is simply the manifestation of the "do one thing well" mantra of *nix. The basic chains of tools allowing extensibility and chaining from one to another because they're so well-rounded in their own right. This has always been a thing (reduction to absurdity); these days you just see it more often as javascript libraries for anything you could possibly want.
• dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Why would you use something like this over say a spreadsheet? Because doing double entry accounting with the kind of reporting, balance checking, automatic addition of balancing entries, etc., that ledger-cli provides is difficult. And because its plain text, it works quite well with the same kind of version control, diffing, etc., tools used for code. > Is it really much easier than opening a browser and running Google Docs??? Yes.
• hughw 11y ago
  You ask "why" on a site named "Hacker News"?
  • cpayne 11y ago
    Most people are helpful (so long as you don't sound snarky) and don't mind answering...
    • hughw 11y ago
      Yes. At the risk of over-explaining: I meant my comment as a sideways remark that Hacker News is full of hackers, many of whom believe a cool program is its own reward, whether it's needed commercially or not. I did not mean to disparage the question or the questioner.
• izolate 11y ago
  I often see this sort of comment come from Windows folk. It's very hard to justify a reason. You're either bit by the CLI bug, or you aren't. To those who don't "get" the CLI madness, I can see why you're drawn to the Windows ecosystem.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    You need to be shown it. It's the same as with people doing only Java hearing about REPL. It's weird at first, but once you get it, you don't want to go back.
  • a3n 11y ago
    One of the best things I ever did for humanity was infect my cube-mate with the cli bug. Bash, to Vim, to Python. It was glorious.
• maaku 11y ago
  Try doing something the program doesn't support. Experts prefer plain-text formats and command-line tools because with a little bit of elbow grease you can always do things the program creator never thought of or chose not to support.
  • peteretep 11y ago
    > Experts prefer plain-text formats and command-line tools Sure. Expert computer users prefer Lynx for web-browsing, expert Windows and Apple developers prefer vim and gcc, expert fiction writers prefer using emacs, and professional accountants use command-line accountancy tools...
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I think I got Poe'd here - I'm not sure if you're serious or not, because the only thing that sounds stretched to me is the Lynx one. Of adoption of CLI among professional accountants I know nothing about, but the rest pretty much checks out.
      • mercurial 11y ago
        In my experience, Windows developers (if they don't come from the *nix world) after often very uncomfortable with the command line (or anything non-Windows), and I doubt many authors know anything about emacs...
        • TeMPOraL 11y ago
          > 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 http://irreal.org/blog/?p=4651.
          • mercurial 11y ago
• tomcam 11y ago
  A spreadsheet used like this is almost always a database in disguise, but it's way too easy to delete a row or cell by mistake. Also double-entry bookkeeping does not lend itself well to a spreadsheet model. And as others said: open source, version control, and extreme ease. For someone like me who types a lot and lives on the command line, it's infinitely quicker than firing up a spreadsheet program.
• a3n 11y ago
  I tried to do this with a spreadsheet years ago, for single entry check balancing. Formulas, if this, if that, it got out of control. It made me a believer of using something already existing if that suffices. I do like creating things, but not that, and not in a spreadsheet. That said, if that works for you, then that's exactly what you should do.
• mikekchar 11y ago
  Keep in mind that this is a ledger, not a spreadsheet. You record transactions in a text editor. The ledger-cli program is simply a report generator. From the perspective of an "accounting application", what you might think of as the meat of the program is actually the text editor. There are plugins for emacs and vim to do text highlighting and insert dates, etc, but it's basically free form editing. In a way, it's exactly what you are thinking would be superior: why not use some general purpose tool for data entry and then write some macros for generating reports? It's just using a text editor rather than a spreadsheet. The text editor is actually quite a bit better suited to this kind of entry than a spreadsheet. Have a look at the examples at the website. Since the journal is also just a text file, you can easily use a version control systems on the data -- this has saved me more times than I care to mention. So, yes, it really is easier than just about everything else you could imagine. If you are interested in double entry accounting, I highly recommend it.