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 th

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.