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The Surprising Ease of Plain Text Accounting

328 points by vincecima 10y ago

aklemm 10y ago
I'm right on the verge of going with the new YNAB (first serious attempt to organize finances and budget outside my wife's use of Mint), but maybe I'll give Ledger a shot first.
- DontGiveTwoFlux 10y ago
  The power of ynab isn't the tool, but the philosophy. The UI works well because it changes how you think of your budget. I'm a little disappointed the author didn't comment on how ledger compares with the budgeting side, as tracking expenses is only half (or less) of the battle. I'd recommend ynab because it forces you to plan instead of react. I think as far as software goes, that's the fundamental advantage- you think differently. It's kind of like how editing in vim you start to think in terms of verb-object. I'm stuck on ynab4 for as long as possible, but you can try out the nYNAB (the SaaS offering) for free for a little more than a month. If you get it, be sure to watch the instructional videos.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    ledger can do budgeting: http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Budgeting http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Budgeting
    - adrianratnapala 10y ago
      That help section on budgeting only talks about periodic transactions. Is there also some notion of "estimated future, one-off, transaction"? I suppose you could implement that using ordinary transactions. It's just that after fighting with gnucash, I got the impressions that budgeting and accounting are very different things and that I should not try to use the same tool for both jobs.
      - ams6110 10y ago
        I think you could just use a "yearly" period for that. When I used ledger, I started a new file every year.
      - db48x 10y ago
        Yea, I thought that was a pretty incomplete part of the documentation when I looked through it recently. I haven't done any budgeting in ledger, but the section on virtual accounts seemed like it presented a better way to do a budget: http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Introduction-to-Ledger http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Introduction-to-L....
  - andrewaylett 10y ago
    +1 philosophy, that's been the biggest change for me compared to trying (and failing) to use other systems. I don't see why YNAB4 would stop working -- certainly I intend to keep using it as long as I can. I also noticed that you can still buy a license on Steam, at least in the UK, and having run the application once through Steam you apparently get a license key that works standalone. And v4 runs well on Linux using wine :).
- lbotos 10y ago
  I have a few friends who try and champion both YNAB and Ledger but Mint works super well for me by keeping my thinking Macro level. If you are someone who just needs a broad budget, Mint can be great. But if you think you need super fine grained control to the point that it will re-enforce changing your spending happens Ledger/YNAB will for sure help with that. I just find that I stop using them, and that was worse.
- vincecima 10y ago
  YNAB was/is a great tool and would have continued to use them if not prompted to change. I was not using the budgeting part however.
  - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    If you don't use the budgeting part then there are many better solutions out there.
- k2enemy 10y ago
  Just be aware that they solve very different problems. I'm actually very confused about how the author of the article jumped from a budgeting tool to a double entry bookkeeping application and they somehow solved the same problem. I guess if you just need some method of recording all of your income and expenditures, they overlap in that area.
ams6110 10y ago
A few years ago I volunteered to be treasurer of a small non-profit. They had been keeping their books on paper. I looked at QuickBooks, and it frankly baffled me. Being an old hand at command line and plain-text computing, I found ledger and immediately loved it. I used the emacs ledger mode to manage the ledger file. I kept the ledger file version controlled in mercurial, so I could easily see diffs between various points in time which was sometimes helpful. When I turned the books over to the next treasurer, I helped him import into QuickBooks, which he was already familiar with. That's the one shortcoming of the tool, that you are unlikely to find anyone else (e.g. professional accountants) who's willing to work with it.
kovrik 10y ago
These accounting apps never worked for me. I think I'm missing something, but how do you actually use them? Do you really put every cent you spend into it? How is it possible? How do you remember all that. for example, during a weekend trip? Next step: ok, assume we put every cent spent into the app. How does it help? Even more: I already have all my transactions listed in my bank's mobile app. How to use it?
- db48x 10y ago
  You can easily summarize transactions with ledger. Just put a transaction where you move $X to cash when you make a withdrawal. Then at the end of the week add another where you report that your cash balance is $Y. Since transactions always balance to $0, it knows how much you must have spent. All you lose is the ability to later find out what you spent your cash on, but that's a trade-off most people are willing to make; rent and utilities and groceries are both easier and more important to track.
  - kovrik 10y ago
    Yeah, I get it. Ok, so I put all my transactions (or group them) into the app. In N months I have a huge list of transactions (actually, I'll just spend time and energy on duplicating bank statements which I can get for free). How to use that data?
    - ams6110 10y ago
      One thing you can do is reconcile your transactions with the bank's. They are not infallible. But I'm mostly in your camp. I don't use accounting software for my personal finances. I don't know anyone who does. I think it's more useful for businesses or other organizations that have to be able to report where the money goes.
    - db48x 10y ago
      Most likely you would import most of your transactions from your bank, then enter cash transactions by hand, and edit transactions that just show check numbers and wire transfers. Data entry can and should be automated. Once you have the data in a bookkeeping system (ledger or otherwise), you use it to answer specific questions. Use it to find out where your money has gone (I spent how much on coffee?!), how much more or less you spent this month vs last, or vs this month last year, how much your liabilities are (debts, like credit cards), how much you've earned but not yet received (from your consulting clients, for example), etc, etc. Ledger can print out simple text reports, or CSV that you can graph (most people will just paste that into a spreadsheet, but perhaps you prefer gnuplot or whatever).
cyberferret 10y ago
This is basically the old EMACS/Vim vs Sublime/Atom debate that developers have battled for years, moved across to the accounting world, isn't it? Having been involved in accounting system implementation for > 30 years, I understand that people are usually used to doing things one way and find it hard to adapt to change, but even after all my years in the industry, command line accounting fills me with unease - and this is coming from someone who still loves working in the DOS prompt! I am sure for a simple expense/budget ledger it will work OK, but when it comes to recurring journals, multiple reconciliation accounts, inter company transfers, control account tracing etc., give me a nice GUI any day...
- jasonm23 10y ago
  Honestly, I really don't mean to be rude, but if you're literally referring to the command line as the DOS prompt, you're reference point is one of the worst surviving command line interfaces. UNIX/Linux command line shells are actually made to be productive and your investment in using them is paid off almost everyday. It's a common misapprehension that all CLIs are the same, but to be honest, that's from the perspective of the GUI user. Perhaps you simply missignalled in your comment, and you're a *nix shell power user, in which case I'm preaching to the choir, and accept my apologies. If you didn't misspeak, give Bash, Zsh or FiSh a serious try (Windows 10, MacOs and Linux all support these shells now.)
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    I use them all, but started on CP/M then MS-DOS back in the early 80's (plus a little bit of Vax PDP-8). Currently use OS X terminal or the various Unix flavours on our virtual servers. I mentioned 'DOS prompt' by default because I guess that is the one I've used the longest.
- db48x 10y ago
  Storing the data in a simple text format doesn't stop you from using graphics to understand it. What it does do is let you use tools you already know (your favorite text editor, version-control system, command shell, etc) for editing, queries, backups, graphs, and so on. These are all tools that you've already learned how to use, and which you use every day for other tasks involving text. Whereas with some slick GUI you're probably trapped in that vendor's proprietary file format. On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that plain-text files don't scale to a multinational, with hundreds of accountants of various types all trying to work with the same files. Even with proper use of Git I bet that would get old fast. You would instead want a real database, with a schema, and some data validation and some programs/webpages to smooth out the data entry and querying and whatnot. All of that can be done without any kind of lock-in to one data format, or one particular vendor's tools, but it's way too much overhead for a small business, let alone a single person.
arvinsim 10y ago
I am using Spacemacs so I like the idea of using plain text files. But until there is way to input new transactions via my smartphone easily, I will probably stick with classic YNAB for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, I might have to learn Android programming to create my own app to do so.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  You could keep your ledger on Nextcloud, and tell the Android app to keep it available offline. Then edit in an Android text editor. Obviously a fancy Android app that reads/writes the text files would be great, though.
- syl20bnr 10y ago
  And there is the `finance` layer for it with support for ledger :-)
rosstex 10y ago
I love the use of asciinema in this. It's handy for me all the time when I want to show a friend something.
CorvusCrypto 10y ago
So what is this sacrifice of privacy the author mentions? I mean is this a legitimate statement? While I can sympathize with the author's mindset this seems like a loaded statement based on nothing. If I'm wrong and Mint is leaking my info like a sieve please tell me now.
- kevindong 10y ago
  I do feel slightly uneasy when I use Mint. Primarily because Mint is essentially just a web scraper. They take the account credentials you give them (and presumably encrypt them) and periodically login your bank's web portal, scrape the .html file that contains all of your transactions, works some magic to parse through it, and then displays all of your transactions. I'm not entirely sure if Mint sells your financial information (i.e., what you spend money on, how much you have, etc.) to outside companies (namely, financial institutions). But, they for sure analyze your transactions to show you paid "recommendations" of what financial products you should use. I've browsed through some of their recommendations before. The majority of them are middling or good, but a significant portion (<15%) are incredible awful.
  - CorvusCrypto 10y ago
    All financial institutions sell your information, electronic or not. In my company we use services that allow us to pull tax data on every resident in the state (of CA) and we get their social, phone numbers, owned/rented properties, outstanding loans, etc. While I totally get the uneasiness of giving info to a third party, we all do that anyway in the analog world as well. and yes, this means Mint probably sells your info, though they cover it in the privacy statement they have. [guess not actually (see reply from georgeglue1)] EDIT: If your first statement is true, that tbh is a bit more of an alarming thing to know... oO
    - georgeglue1 10y ago
      Actually, Intuit is one of those mega-companies that could run a successful hedge fund (or sell data/access to one), but has too much to lose in their core businesses to allow them to sell data. The Mint data set might be worth, say, 8 figures a year, but if you risk a user revolt on Quickbooks, it's not worth it.
vinceguidry 10y ago
Accounting for personal finances is a waste of time, in my opinion, if you plan to be upwardly mobile. Instead of making the most of what you have, just make more. Spend all the time and resources you need to to make yourself better. In five years, I've gone from making $30K / year to over $100K. Accounting will not get you there. Removing all the barriers in the way of success will. Businesses need accounting. Humans need nurturing and growth. Don't nurture your business and account for yourself. Account for the business and nurture yourself. Your business can't love you back.
- kevindong 10y ago
  This is the most absurd thing I've read in the last couple months. If you're trying to troll, 10/10.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    Wasn't trying to troll. I was serious enough once about personal accounting that I built my own web app because I thought the standard double-entry system wasn't really suited to the task. After I got the basic system tweaked to my satisfaction, I used it for several months. I started to take it to the next level, but had the curious realization that I cared more for the process of developing the app than I did for actually tracking my finances. Eventually I gave it up, and went out and got a better job where I'm more fulfilled professionally and way better paid. I learned then that working on the app was substituting for professional fulfillment and vowed never to let that happen again. Tracking cash inflows and outflows is an essential business skill. But a business is a machine, and people are not. Personal productivity does not respond well to wringing unit economics out of daily activities. If your goal is to turn yourself into a machine, by all means use a mechanistic approach. But we are meant to build machines, not to be them.
    - CorvusCrypto 10y ago
      I can see being more lackadaisical about personal accounting on 30k/year, but when you make 15k/yr you need a budget and you need to track your expenses to survive. I think this is just something that varies from person to person, but it's nice to know that you spent X amount on groceries per week versus Y amount on gas so you can pinpoint what is hitting you most during times of dire financial stress to optimize.
wesm 10y ago
On plain text accounting, you should check out Beancount (I am unaffiliated, but know the author): http://furius.ca/beancount/ http://furius.ca/beancount/
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  Is there a comparison somewhere to help someone decide between ledger, hledger, and beancount? I can't determine from the website what sets it apart (or even how it really works...ledger and hledger both have lots of screenshots, examples, etc. Oh, nevermind. The ledger website includes it in their list of "ports to other languages". Beancount is a Python implementation of the same basic system.
  - LVB 10y ago
    This extensive thread has some in-depth discussion of the subtler differences: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ledger-cli/__yuMVjrOH0/mgBYLfMUm0YJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ledger-cli/__yuMVjrOH0/mgBYL...
steve_taylor 10y ago
Slight correction, if I may. Interest is piqued, not peaked.
Dr_tldr 10y ago
He works for a company called Astral Health, of course he's serious.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  Should probably update my profile. I'm now working on an app for CNN. Great Big Story. http://www.greatbigstory.com http://www.greatbigstory.com Astral Health and Beauty is a $40MM / year cosmetics and skincare company that I am proud to have been a part of. The beauty business gets shit on quite a bit, but it offers something priceless to the disadvantaged that is in short supply; the ability to feel good about oneself.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Realism helps most people feel better about themselves, advertising and mass media is causing the problem in the first place. The skincare and cosmetics industry is a large part of the problem in the first place. Icelandic public baths for example show young people that most humans are just not that attractive and it's ok. Consider TV uses highly attractive people to pretend to be less than attractive which is horribly damaging.
    - vinceguidry 10y ago
      Cosmetics much older than advertising.
      - Retric 10y ago
        Advertising is thousands of years old, so it's hard to say. My point is the industry has become toxic over time.
      - Dr_tldr 10y ago
        So you're saying "it was already broken when I got here, who cares if I make it worse"? Sounds like a really selfish and unenlightened attitude.
- 10y ago
kilroy123 10y ago
I might try this out. Right now, I'm using a combo of mint and my own google spreadsheet. Mint.com with the mojito plugin for chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mojito-mint-with-a-kick/akfnkdbpccapkganipclkhgppknhjlee?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mojito-mint-with-a... The mojito google spreadsheets look amazing, but I couldn't get things to work, and ran into a lot of errors. The plethora of budget tracking software is frustrating. It seems no one tool is a clear winner. To me, this still looks painful. Mint is closest there, IMO. However, it's pretty much abandonware at this point.
noufalibrahim 10y ago
This article mirrors much of my own experiences with using ledger. I wrote about my setup here http://nibrahim.net.in/2015/11/07/ledger_and_personal_finance.html http://nibrahim.net.in/2015/11/07/ledger_and_personal_financ...
tdkl 10y ago
Cool. Now add those on fly on a mobile device. YNAB app does it in couple taps. Also YNAB 4 won't just suddenly stop working.
- lfowles 10y ago
  As a YNAB user, I would be concerned that the mobile app cloud sync would stop working in the future and not get updated.
  - vincecima 10y ago
    Agreed, at some point SDKs will break it.
  - tdkl 10y ago
    The only cloud sync in YNAB 4 is the one via Dropbox, where it shares the budget file with the desktop app. So the only issue is the DB API being updated.
- vincecima 10y ago
  Yes, would love to build something like `hledger add` for mobile.
Pamar 10y ago
Here is a short dscription of how I do this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085755 (It also works for repeating or future expenses - I often "initialize" future files with stuff like rent or an average monthly expense for stuff like groceries, then I update it with receipts I have collected on the last few days)
chj 10y ago
Seriously, spreadsheets are born for these tasks. I tried but didn't like accounting apps because they force you to do too much work and just aren't that easy to find the functions I need. In the end I designed an excel file tailored to my needs (and it's giving me more fun than writing code), which gives monthly view of my financial activities, with support for currency conversion. So at the end of every month I would spend about half an hour logging all the numbers and get a nice overview. I can also put in spending and earning projections so I can easily see how I will be at the end of year.
- austinjp 10y ago
  Indeed. Only last week I imported a year's bank statement (one single file downloaded manually) into Google Sheets (worked perfectly first time). Then I spent an hour scanning it by eye and constructing dirt-simple regexes to extract outgoings into categories. As a check I compared total outgoings vs total regex-extracted outgoings; it was out by £400 for the whole year, which I can tolerate. It told me exactly what to needed to know: I spend a surprising amount on eating out, and a surprisingly small amount on holidays. Budget for the year: spend 50% less on eating out. Two hours work total. Not perfect, but a piece of cake, and very valuable.
  - 4ndr3vv 10y ago
    Devils Advocate: Ah! but now you have a budget, you need to track it to make sure you're sticking to it - how do you know if you're spending 50% less on eating out this month if the data arn't there in-front of you to check?
    - lm2s 10y ago
      I felt like the parent comment didn't meant 50% exactly, just an approximation. So, if it were me, I'd just keep that in mind when deciding to go out to eat.. After 1 or 2 months it's easy to see if I'm on track to the ~50% or not and adjust accordingly.
    - db48x 10y ago
      I guess he'll find out next year when he repeats the exercise :)
preek 10y ago
We are actually using this in our company and couldn't be happier. We're using Emacs ledger-mode and git to keep track of everything. Ledger is also tied into our billing system. A couple of shell scripts and Latex easily beats everything that I have seen in the last 10 years in the market. That is, of course, a subjective statement and is meant to be such.
- coryking 10y ago
  It sounds like you are try to build your own home-brew accounting system. That is absolutely insane. How do you ship this off to your accountant during tax season? How do you deal with accrual-based accounting concepts like invoices, accounts recevable, accounts payable, long term and short term debt, assets, etc? Do you even know what accrual based accounting is and why you want to use it?
  - db48x 10y ago
    Ledger easily handles accounts receivable/payable, though it doesn't actually generate the invoices for you. Personally, I use org-mode for time tracking and invoice generation (invoices aren't even PDFs ATM, though I have had clients that insisted on them), then I add a corresponding transaction in a ledger file when I send the invoice or receive a payment.
somberi 10y ago
As a middle-aged, married man, my current view is: 1. I had kept personal accounts for a while, until I realized my expenses swayed month-to-month, but within a narrow band (+- 10%). This made the "insights" less interesting and approximations worked well enough for my use case. I suspect that this is so, for most people. For who have not kept personal accounts, what I am describing is similar to when you got your Fitbit - The first 2-3 weeks are full of glorious insights and a month goes by and you do not really need a fitbit to tell you how many steps you walked. Approximation approaches real count. Same for personal ledgers. 2. I now focus my efforts on income expansion rather than cost control. Some of you may say, recording costs is not controlling it. In that case, I find accounting, even less useful (once I have arrived at approximate cash outflow). Income expansion, puts me in a different frame, which I find strangely empowering. Even more so than the satisfaction that comes from having controlled costs.
- mason55 10y ago
  This was my experience as well. I used Mint and YNAB off and on through my 20's when I was less responsible with money. As I got older and was able to consistently reduce my expenses and my salary went way up I found that my spending was so far below my income that tracking just didn't make sense any more. Combined with a bunch of automated transfers for short- and long-term saving and keeping a large buffer of cash in my bank account, I don't really ever think about money any more.
  - ndonnellan 10y ago
    Something that I haven't seen mentioned here is the benefit of budgeting for things that you want to spend money on but do irregularly enough that you might forget. I was never irresponsible with money, instead I just tended to save and save (and think I was saving a lot) and not really know what to do with it. Now that I'm consistent with budgeting (YNAB), I'm confident I'm saving for the future AND for things like birthdays, xmas, charity, cycling, etc and spend more on those things. It's like a contract with myself. I totally agree with a corollary you're implying to "you can't change what you don't track": - "It's meaningless to track something that doesn't change" I can see a future where I stop tracking incidental or recurring, automatic bills and just focus on those other things.
dade_ 10y ago
I still remember cringing the day I finally had to move my parents business off CA Simply Accounting for DOS. There was definately a learning curve for the text based app but it took far fewer steps to actually input the data and print off cheques, etc. 15 years of accounting easily fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Now, it's a monster database with a terrible UI. In subsequent years Simply has become anything but simple and I cringe at the thought of giving in and moving to the cloud. Ledger doesn't look like a great fit for business though, and accountants want data from accounting packages they know. Quite a racket.
bakhy 10y ago
the repeated usage of the phrase "my net worth" stings. i presume it's just a turn of phrase and does not really mean much, but it's ugly. you're worth more than any dollar amount! ;)
annnnd 10y ago
> I had tried similar services before (Mint, Buxfer, PocketSmith, etc) and never found the sacrifice of privacy worth it. ... > With YNAB 4 now unsupported, I started looking for alternatives. Would I finally surrender to Intuit and start using Quicken? Was a Google Docs spreadsheet enough to get me through? So OP has privacy concerns with accounting services, but not with Google? Interesting.
dbrgn 10y ago
Just found this: http://plaintextaccounting.org/ http://plaintextaccounting.org/
Chickenosaurus 10y ago
Related mini Show HN: Accounting is a small Java double-entry bookkeeping component. Accounting is supposed to be integrated in applications that can make use of an accounting feature. It is not a stand-alone application. Accounting makes as few assumptions as possible about the used technologies which enables it to be used very flexibly. On the other hand, this means you will likely have to write glue code to integrate accounting into your application landscape. Check out accounting on GitHub: https://github.com/Nick-Triller/accounting https://github.com/Nick-Triller/accounting
graeme 10y ago
Can anyone comment on experiences with Quicken? I had been planning to set up accounting with Xero, but I don't like cloud services for something that requires focus. It can be more difficult to concentrate on something in the browser. Quicken is the only desktop app that works for Canada and Quebec, I think. How is it? I'm on Mac, but I can run it on a VM.
smichael 10y ago
hledger author and plain text accounting fan here! Thanks for this nice blog post and interesting discussion. There are some great questions raised here, perhaps I can steal them for a FAQ ? Here are some answers: Isn't personal accounting a waste of time ? People have very different needs and practise personal accounting for many different reasons. There is of course a point of diminishing returns; tailor your accounting practices to your needs. Needs change over time. Some of us would benefit from doing more (or better) accounting, some less (I would guess this second group is smaller). In [The Millionaire Next Door](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door) (highly recommended), one research finding was that above-average wealth accumulators spend more time on financial planning, which for many of us requires accounting as a foundation. "Minimal time dedicated to financial planning is a leading indicator of a UAW [Under Accumulator of Wealth]". Isn't a command-line tool too limited for real-world accounting needs ? "I am sure for a simple expense/budget ledger it will work OK, but when it comes to recurring journals, multiple reconciliation accounts, inter company transfers, control account tracing etc., give me a nice GUI any day..." Understandable. The current plain text accounting tools provide a very generic double entry accounting system with which you can model such things, and script them. There are a number of generic GUIs available (hledger has curses and web interfaces, and there are web/curses/GTK interfaces for Ledger and beancount). But there are not yet a lot of rich task-specific GUIs. There's no reason they can't be built, though. Isn't a plain text format too limited for large organizations ? "it's pretty obvious that plain-text files don't scale to a multinational, with hundreds of accountants of various types all trying to work with the same files. Even with proper use of Git I bet that would get old fast. You would instead want a real database, with a schema, and some data validation and some programs/webpages to smooth out the data entry and querying and whatnot." I'm not sure. Current plain text accounting tools can do some schema definition and data validation, and will do more in future. The plain text storage format is open, human-readable, future-proof (useful even without the software), scales smoothly from simple to complex needs, and taps a huge ecosystem of highly useful tooling, such as version control systems. And, despite the name, there's no reason these tools can't support other kinds of storage, such as a database. (hledger has four storage formats and is designed to accept more). Do you really enter every little transaction ? Yes! Many folks in our community do it. Mahatma Gandhi reconciled to the penny every night. J.D. Rockefeller was famous for his ledgers. It's not required. I started doing it as a temporary learning exercise, and still like it. It makes troubleshooting and reconciling easier. How is that possible ? Practice, and a process/toolset that suits you. Some folks import most of the data from their banks, so little manual data entry is required. A few prefer to manually enter everything, for the increased awareness and insight. "Manual" data entry is usually assisted in some way: interactive console tools (hledger add and similar), web-based tools (hledger-web and similar), GUI tools (ledgerhelpers), smart editors (eg emacs & ledger-mode), recurring transaction scripts. I currently use a mixture of bank CSV import and rapid copy/paste in emacs. I spend 15 minutes a day on average, and for me that's currently a good investment. How do I use the transaction data in my bank's web or mobile app ? If you can export it as CSV, you can import it and run queries against it. There are also some tools for converting OFX, QIF etc. So I've got a huge list of transactions recorded, duplicating my bank statements. How does that help ? Accounting is modelling flows of money (or other value). Such a model aggregates information from many sources, in one trusted place. With it you can efficiently generate reports, forecast things (cashflow!), answer questions, try experiments. Some people need a very simple model, others benefit from a more detailed one, and we don't know up front what we might need in future. The most fundamental accounting data is a simple list of transactions (the journal). Once you have captured this, you can mine it for anything you may want later on. Plain text accounting provides nice open data format(s), tools and practices for doing this, and could be a good foundation for more powerful tools. Where can I see a comparison of hledger, Ledger, beancount, and the rest ? Glad you asked! http://plaintextaccounting.org http://plaintextaccounting.org gives an overview of these tools and practices. In particular see "Ledger-likes" and "comparisons" under "read more". hledger's FAQ discusses differences from Ledger. Beancount docs probably do too. How do you do budgeting ? Some notes are [here](http://plaintextaccounting.org/#budgeting http://plaintextaccounting.org/#budgeting). I emulate YNAB-ish envelope budgetting (see third link). Double entry accounting ? Where are the debits and credits ? Most (not all) plain text accounting implementations use signed amounts instead of debits and credits. This makes them "double entry light" perhaps, but it has been a rather successful simplification, intuitive to most newcomers.
joelx 10y ago
Since September 2009, I have maintained a Google sheet outlining my net worth. Twice a month, I add a new column then list the balances of my bank accounts and credit cards and brokerages. Very easy to maintain and useful. I can see changes in my net worth at a glance over the last seven years.

328 points by vincecima 10y ago

I'm right on the verge of going with the new YNAB (first serious attempt to organize finances and budget outside my wife's use of Mint), but maybe I'll give Ledger a shot first.

DontGiveTwoFlux 10y ago
The power of ynab isn't the tool, but the philosophy. The UI works well because it changes how you think of your budget. I'm a little disappointed the author didn't comment on how ledger compares with the budgeting side, as tracking expenses is only half (or less) of the battle. I'd recommend ynab because it forces you to plan instead of react. I think as far as software goes, that's the fundamental advantage- you think differently. It's kind of like how editing in vim you start to think in terms of verb-object. I'm stuck on ynab4 for as long as possible, but you can try out the nYNAB (the SaaS offering) for free for a little more than a month. If you get it, be sure to watch the instructional videos.
- ams6110 10y ago
  ledger can do budgeting: http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Budgeting http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Budgeting
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    That help section on budgeting only talks about periodic transactions. Is there also some notion of "estimated future, one-off, transaction"? I suppose you could implement that using ordinary transactions. It's just that after fighting with gnucash, I got the impressions that budgeting and accounting are very different things and that I should not try to use the same tool for both jobs.
    - ams6110 10y ago
      I think you could just use a "yearly" period for that. When I used ledger, I started a new file every year.
    - db48x 10y ago
      Yea, I thought that was a pretty incomplete part of the documentation when I looked through it recently. I haven't done any budgeting in ledger, but the section on virtual accounts seemed like it presented a better way to do a budget: http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Introduction-to-Ledger http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Introduction-to-L....
- andrewaylett 10y ago
  +1 philosophy, that's been the biggest change for me compared to trying (and failing) to use other systems. I don't see why YNAB4 would stop working -- certainly I intend to keep using it as long as I can. I also noticed that you can still buy a license on Steam, at least in the UK, and having run the application once through Steam you apparently get a license key that works standalone. And v4 runs well on Linux using wine :).
lbotos 10y ago
I have a few friends who try and champion both YNAB and Ledger but Mint works super well for me by keeping my thinking Macro level. If you are someone who just needs a broad budget, Mint can be great. But if you think you need super fine grained control to the point that it will re-enforce changing your spending happens Ledger/YNAB will for sure help with that. I just find that I stop using them, and that was worse.
vincecima 10y ago
YNAB was/is a great tool and would have continued to use them if not prompted to change. I was not using the budgeting part however.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  If you don't use the budgeting part then there are many better solutions out there.
k2enemy 10y ago
Just be aware that they solve very different problems. I'm actually very confused about how the author of the article jumped from a budgeting tool to a double entry bookkeeping application and they somehow solved the same problem. I guess if you just need some method of recording all of your income and expenditures, they overlap in that area.

ams6110 10y ago

A few years ago I volunteered to be treasurer of a small non-profit. They had been keeping their books on paper. I looked at QuickBooks, and it frankly baffled me. Being an old hand at command line and plain-text computing, I found ledger and immediately loved it. I used the emacs ledger mode to manage the ledger file. I kept the ledger file version controlled in mercurial, so I could easily see diffs between various points in time which was sometimes helpful. When I turned the books over to the next treasurer, I helped him import into QuickBooks, which he was already familiar with. That's the one shortcoming of the tool, that you are unlikely to find anyone else (e.g. professional accountants) who's willing to work with it.

kovrik 10y ago

These accounting apps never worked for me. I think I'm missing something, but how do you actually use them? Do you really put every cent you spend into it? How is it possible? How do you remember all that. for example, during a weekend trip? Next step: ok, assume we put every cent spent into the app. How does it help? Even more: I already have all my transactions listed in my bank's mobile app. How to use it?

db48x 10y ago
You can easily summarize transactions with ledger. Just put a transaction where you move $X to cash when you make a withdrawal. Then at the end of the week add another where you report that your cash balance is $Y. Since transactions always balance to $0, it knows how much you must have spent. All you lose is the ability to later find out what you spent your cash on, but that's a trade-off most people are willing to make; rent and utilities and groceries are both easier and more important to track.
- kovrik 10y ago
  Yeah, I get it. Ok, so I put all my transactions (or group them) into the app. In N months I have a huge list of transactions (actually, I'll just spend time and energy on duplicating bank statements which I can get for free). How to use that data?
  - ams6110 10y ago
    One thing you can do is reconcile your transactions with the bank's. They are not infallible. But I'm mostly in your camp. I don't use accounting software for my personal finances. I don't know anyone who does. I think it's more useful for businesses or other organizations that have to be able to report where the money goes.
  - db48x 10y ago
    Most likely you would import most of your transactions from your bank, then enter cash transactions by hand, and edit transactions that just show check numbers and wire transfers. Data entry can and should be automated. Once you have the data in a bookkeeping system (ledger or otherwise), you use it to answer specific questions. Use it to find out where your money has gone (I spent how much on coffee?!), how much more or less you spent this month vs last, or vs this month last year, how much your liabilities are (debts, like credit cards), how much you've earned but not yet received (from your consulting clients, for example), etc, etc. Ledger can print out simple text reports, or CSV that you can graph (most people will just paste that into a spreadsheet, but perhaps you prefer gnuplot or whatever).

cyberferret 10y ago

This is basically the old EMACS/Vim vs Sublime/Atom debate that developers have battled for years, moved across to the accounting world, isn't it? Having been involved in accounting system implementation for > 30 years, I understand that people are usually used to doing things one way and find it hard to adapt to change, but even after all my years in the industry, command line accounting fills me with unease - and this is coming from someone who still loves working in the DOS prompt! I am sure for a simple expense/budget ledger it will work OK, but when it comes to recurring journals, multiple reconciliation accounts, inter company transfers, control account tracing etc., give me a nice GUI any day...

jasonm23 10y ago
Honestly, I really don't mean to be rude, but if you're literally referring to the command line as the DOS prompt, you're reference point is one of the worst surviving command line interfaces. UNIX/Linux command line shells are actually made to be productive and your investment in using them is paid off almost everyday. It's a common misapprehension that all CLIs are the same, but to be honest, that's from the perspective of the GUI user. Perhaps you simply missignalled in your comment, and you're a *nix shell power user, in which case I'm preaching to the choir, and accept my apologies. If you didn't misspeak, give Bash, Zsh or FiSh a serious try (Windows 10, MacOs and Linux all support these shells now.)
- cyberferret 10y ago
  I use them all, but started on CP/M then MS-DOS back in the early 80's (plus a little bit of Vax PDP-8). Currently use OS X terminal or the various Unix flavours on our virtual servers. I mentioned 'DOS prompt' by default because I guess that is the one I've used the longest.
db48x 10y ago
Storing the data in a simple text format doesn't stop you from using graphics to understand it. What it does do is let you use tools you already know (your favorite text editor, version-control system, command shell, etc) for editing, queries, backups, graphs, and so on. These are all tools that you've already learned how to use, and which you use every day for other tasks involving text. Whereas with some slick GUI you're probably trapped in that vendor's proprietary file format. On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that plain-text files don't scale to a multinational, with hundreds of accountants of various types all trying to work with the same files. Even with proper use of Git I bet that would get old fast. You would instead want a real database, with a schema, and some data validation and some programs/webpages to smooth out the data entry and querying and whatnot. All of that can be done without any kind of lock-in to one data format, or one particular vendor's tools, but it's way too much overhead for a small business, let alone a single person.

arvinsim 10y ago

I am using Spacemacs so I like the idea of using plain text files. But until there is way to input new transactions via my smartphone easily, I will probably stick with classic YNAB for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, I might have to learn Android programming to create my own app to do so.

NoGravitas 10y ago
You could keep your ledger on Nextcloud, and tell the Android app to keep it available offline. Then edit in an Android text editor. Obviously a fancy Android app that reads/writes the text files would be great, though.
syl20bnr 10y ago
And there is the `finance` layer for it with support for ledger :-)

rosstex 10y ago

I love the use of asciinema in this. It's handy for me all the time when I want to show a friend something.

CorvusCrypto 10y ago

So what is this sacrifice of privacy the author mentions? I mean is this a legitimate statement? While I can sympathize with the author's mindset this seems like a loaded statement based on nothing. If I'm wrong and Mint is leaking my info like a sieve please tell me now.

kevindong 10y ago
I do feel slightly uneasy when I use Mint. Primarily because Mint is essentially just a web scraper. They take the account credentials you give them (and presumably encrypt them) and periodically login your bank's web portal, scrape the .html file that contains all of your transactions, works some magic to parse through it, and then displays all of your transactions. I'm not entirely sure if Mint sells your financial information (i.e., what you spend money on, how much you have, etc.) to outside companies (namely, financial institutions). But, they for sure analyze your transactions to show you paid "recommendations" of what financial products you should use. I've browsed through some of their recommendations before. The majority of them are middling or good, but a significant portion (<15%) are incredible awful.
- CorvusCrypto 10y ago
  All financial institutions sell your information, electronic or not. In my company we use services that allow us to pull tax data on every resident in the state (of CA) and we get their social, phone numbers, owned/rented properties, outstanding loans, etc. While I totally get the uneasiness of giving info to a third party, we all do that anyway in the analog world as well. and yes, this means Mint probably sells your info, though they cover it in the privacy statement they have. [guess not actually (see reply from georgeglue1)] EDIT: If your first statement is true, that tbh is a bit more of an alarming thing to know... oO
  - georgeglue1 10y ago
    Actually, Intuit is one of those mega-companies that could run a successful hedge fund (or sell data/access to one), but has too much to lose in their core businesses to allow them to sell data. The Mint data set might be worth, say, 8 figures a year, but if you risk a user revolt on Quickbooks, it's not worth it.

vinceguidry 10y ago

Accounting for personal finances is a waste of time, in my opinion, if you plan to be upwardly mobile. Instead of making the most of what you have, just make more. Spend all the time and resources you need to to make yourself better. In five years, I've gone from making $30K / year to over $100K. Accounting will not get you there. Removing all the barriers in the way of success will. Businesses need accounting. Humans need nurturing and growth. Don't nurture your business and account for yourself. Account for the business and nurture yourself. Your business can't love you back.

kevindong 10y ago
This is the most absurd thing I've read in the last couple months. If you're trying to troll, 10/10.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  Wasn't trying to troll. I was serious enough once about personal accounting that I built my own web app because I thought the standard double-entry system wasn't really suited to the task. After I got the basic system tweaked to my satisfaction, I used it for several months. I started to take it to the next level, but had the curious realization that I cared more for the process of developing the app than I did for actually tracking my finances. Eventually I gave it up, and went out and got a better job where I'm more fulfilled professionally and way better paid. I learned then that working on the app was substituting for professional fulfillment and vowed never to let that happen again. Tracking cash inflows and outflows is an essential business skill. But a business is a machine, and people are not. Personal productivity does not respond well to wringing unit economics out of daily activities. If your goal is to turn yourself into a machine, by all means use a mechanistic approach. But we are meant to build machines, not to be them.
  - CorvusCrypto 10y ago
    I can see being more lackadaisical about personal accounting on 30k/year, but when you make 15k/yr you need a budget and you need to track your expenses to survive. I think this is just something that varies from person to person, but it's nice to know that you spent X amount on groceries per week versus Y amount on gas so you can pinpoint what is hitting you most during times of dire financial stress to optimize.

wesm 10y ago

On plain text accounting, you should check out Beancount (I am unaffiliated, but know the author): http://furius.ca/beancount/ http://furius.ca/beancount/

SwellJoe 10y ago
Is there a comparison somewhere to help someone decide between ledger, hledger, and beancount? I can't determine from the website what sets it apart (or even how it really works...ledger and hledger both have lots of screenshots, examples, etc. Oh, nevermind. The ledger website includes it in their list of "ports to other languages". Beancount is a Python implementation of the same basic system.
- LVB 10y ago
  This extensive thread has some in-depth discussion of the subtler differences: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ledger-cli/__yuMVjrOH0/mgBYLfMUm0YJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ledger-cli/__yuMVjrOH0/mgBYL...

steve_taylor 10y ago

Slight correction, if I may. Interest is piqued, not peaked.

Dr_tldr 10y ago

He works for a company called Astral Health, of course he's serious.

vinceguidry 10y ago
Should probably update my profile. I'm now working on an app for CNN. Great Big Story. http://www.greatbigstory.com http://www.greatbigstory.com Astral Health and Beauty is a $40MM / year cosmetics and skincare company that I am proud to have been a part of. The beauty business gets shit on quite a bit, but it offers something priceless to the disadvantaged that is in short supply; the ability to feel good about oneself.
- Retric 10y ago
  Realism helps most people feel better about themselves, advertising and mass media is causing the problem in the first place. The skincare and cosmetics industry is a large part of the problem in the first place. Icelandic public baths for example show young people that most humans are just not that attractive and it's ok. Consider TV uses highly attractive people to pretend to be less than attractive which is horribly damaging.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    Cosmetics much older than advertising.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Advertising is thousands of years old, so it's hard to say. My point is the industry has become toxic over time.
    - Dr_tldr 10y ago
      So you're saying "it was already broken when I got here, who cares if I make it worse"? Sounds like a really selfish and unenlightened attitude.
10y ago

kilroy123 10y ago

I might try this out. Right now, I'm using a combo of mint and my own google spreadsheet. Mint.com with the mojito plugin for chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mojito-mint-with-a-kick/akfnkdbpccapkganipclkhgppknhjlee?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mojito-mint-with-a... The mojito google spreadsheets look amazing, but I couldn't get things to work, and ran into a lot of errors. The plethora of budget tracking software is frustrating. It seems no one tool is a clear winner. To me, this still looks painful. Mint is closest there, IMO. However, it's pretty much abandonware at this point.

noufalibrahim 10y ago

This article mirrors much of my own experiences with using ledger. I wrote about my setup here http://nibrahim.net.in/2015/11/07/ledger_and_personal_finance.html http://nibrahim.net.in/2015/11/07/ledger_and_personal_financ...

tdkl 10y ago

Cool. Now add those on fly on a mobile device. YNAB app does it in couple taps. Also YNAB 4 won't just suddenly stop working.

lfowles 10y ago
As a YNAB user, I would be concerned that the mobile app cloud sync would stop working in the future and not get updated.
- vincecima 10y ago
  Agreed, at some point SDKs will break it.
- tdkl 10y ago
  The only cloud sync in YNAB 4 is the one via Dropbox, where it shares the budget file with the desktop app. So the only issue is the DB API being updated.
vincecima 10y ago
Yes, would love to build something like `hledger add` for mobile.

Pamar 10y ago

Here is a short dscription of how I do this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085755 (It also works for repeating or future expenses - I often "initialize" future files with stuff like rent or an average monthly expense for stuff like groceries, then I update it with receipts I have collected on the last few days)

chj 10y ago

Seriously, spreadsheets are born for these tasks. I tried but didn't like accounting apps because they force you to do too much work and just aren't that easy to find the functions I need. In the end I designed an excel file tailored to my needs (and it's giving me more fun than writing code), which gives monthly view of my financial activities, with support for currency conversion. So at the end of every month I would spend about half an hour logging all the numbers and get a nice overview. I can also put in spending and earning projections so I can easily see how I will be at the end of year.

austinjp 10y ago
Indeed. Only last week I imported a year's bank statement (one single file downloaded manually) into Google Sheets (worked perfectly first time). Then I spent an hour scanning it by eye and constructing dirt-simple regexes to extract outgoings into categories. As a check I compared total outgoings vs total regex-extracted outgoings; it was out by £400 for the whole year, which I can tolerate. It told me exactly what to needed to know: I spend a surprising amount on eating out, and a surprisingly small amount on holidays. Budget for the year: spend 50% less on eating out. Two hours work total. Not perfect, but a piece of cake, and very valuable.
- 4ndr3vv 10y ago
  Devils Advocate: Ah! but now you have a budget, you need to track it to make sure you're sticking to it - how do you know if you're spending 50% less on eating out this month if the data arn't there in-front of you to check?
  - lm2s 10y ago
    I felt like the parent comment didn't meant 50% exactly, just an approximation. So, if it were me, I'd just keep that in mind when deciding to go out to eat.. After 1 or 2 months it's easy to see if I'm on track to the ~50% or not and adjust accordingly.
  - db48x 10y ago
    I guess he'll find out next year when he repeats the exercise :)

preek 10y ago

We are actually using this in our company and couldn't be happier. We're using Emacs ledger-mode and git to keep track of everything. Ledger is also tied into our billing system. A couple of shell scripts and Latex easily beats everything that I have seen in the last 10 years in the market. That is, of course, a subjective statement and is meant to be such.

coryking 10y ago
It sounds like you are try to build your own home-brew accounting system. That is absolutely insane. How do you ship this off to your accountant during tax season? How do you deal with accrual-based accounting concepts like invoices, accounts recevable, accounts payable, long term and short term debt, assets, etc? Do you even know what accrual based accounting is and why you want to use it?
- db48x 10y ago
  Ledger easily handles accounts receivable/payable, though it doesn't actually generate the invoices for you. Personally, I use org-mode for time tracking and invoice generation (invoices aren't even PDFs ATM, though I have had clients that insisted on them), then I add a corresponding transaction in a ledger file when I send the invoice or receive a payment.

somberi 10y ago

As a middle-aged, married man, my current view is: 1. I had kept personal accounts for a while, until I realized my expenses swayed month-to-month, but within a narrow band (+- 10%). This made the "insights" less interesting and approximations worked well enough for my use case. I suspect that this is so, for most people. For who have not kept personal accounts, what I am describing is similar to when you got your Fitbit - The first 2-3 weeks are full of glorious insights and a month goes by and you do not really need a fitbit to tell you how many steps you walked. Approximation approaches real count. Same for personal ledgers. 2. I now focus my efforts on income expansion rather than cost control. Some of you may say, recording costs is not controlling it. In that case, I find accounting, even less useful (once I have arrived at approximate cash outflow). Income expansion, puts me in a different frame, which I find strangely empowering. Even more so than the satisfaction that comes from having controlled costs.

mason55 10y ago
This was my experience as well. I used Mint and YNAB off and on through my 20's when I was less responsible with money. As I got older and was able to consistently reduce my expenses and my salary went way up I found that my spending was so far below my income that tracking just didn't make sense any more. Combined with a bunch of automated transfers for short- and long-term saving and keeping a large buffer of cash in my bank account, I don't really ever think about money any more.
- ndonnellan 10y ago
  Something that I haven't seen mentioned here is the benefit of budgeting for things that you want to spend money on but do irregularly enough that you might forget. I was never irresponsible with money, instead I just tended to save and save (and think I was saving a lot) and not really know what to do with it. Now that I'm consistent with budgeting (YNAB), I'm confident I'm saving for the future AND for things like birthdays, xmas, charity, cycling, etc and spend more on those things. It's like a contract with myself. I totally agree with a corollary you're implying to "you can't change what you don't track": - "It's meaningless to track something that doesn't change" I can see a future where I stop tracking incidental or recurring, automatic bills and just focus on those other things.

dade_ 10y ago

I still remember cringing the day I finally had to move my parents business off CA Simply Accounting for DOS. There was definately a learning curve for the text based app but it took far fewer steps to actually input the data and print off cheques, etc. 15 years of accounting easily fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Now, it's a monster database with a terrible UI. In subsequent years Simply has become anything but simple and I cringe at the thought of giving in and moving to the cloud. Ledger doesn't look like a great fit for business though, and accountants want data from accounting packages they know. Quite a racket.

bakhy 10y ago

the repeated usage of the phrase "my net worth" stings. i presume it's just a turn of phrase and does not really mean much, but it's ugly. you're worth more than any dollar amount! ;)

annnnd 10y ago

> I had tried similar services before (Mint, Buxfer, PocketSmith, etc) and never found the sacrifice of privacy worth it. ... > With YNAB 4 now unsupported, I started looking for alternatives. Would I finally surrender to Intuit and start using Quicken? Was a Google Docs spreadsheet enough to get me through? So OP has privacy concerns with accounting services, but not with Google? Interesting.

dbrgn 10y ago

Just found this: http://plaintextaccounting.org/ http://plaintextaccounting.org/

Chickenosaurus 10y ago

Related mini Show HN: Accounting is a small Java double-entry bookkeeping component. Accounting is supposed to be integrated in applications that can make use of an accounting feature. It is not a stand-alone application. Accounting makes as few assumptions as possible about the used technologies which enables it to be used very flexibly. On the other hand, this means you will likely have to write glue code to integrate accounting into your application landscape. Check out accounting on GitHub: https://github.com/Nick-Triller/accounting https://github.com/Nick-Triller/accounting

graeme 10y ago

Can anyone comment on experiences with Quicken? I had been planning to set up accounting with Xero, but I don't like cloud services for something that requires focus. It can be more difficult to concentrate on something in the browser. Quicken is the only desktop app that works for Canada and Quebec, I think. How is it? I'm on Mac, but I can run it on a VM.

smichael 10y ago

hledger author and plain text accounting fan here! Thanks for this nice blog post and interesting discussion. There are some great questions raised here, perhaps I can steal them for a FAQ ? Here are some answers: Isn't personal accounting a waste of time ? People have very different needs and practise personal accounting for many different reasons. There is of course a point of diminishing returns; tailor your accounting practices to your needs. Needs change over time. Some of us would benefit from doing more (or better) accounting, some less (I would guess this second group is smaller). In [The Millionaire Next Door](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door) (highly recommended), one research finding was that above-average wealth accumulators spend more time on financial planning, which for many of us requires accounting as a foundation. "Minimal time dedicated to financial planning is a leading indicator of a UAW [Under Accumulator of Wealth]". Isn't a command-line tool too limited for real-world accounting needs ? "I am sure for a simple expense/budget ledger it will work OK, but when it comes to recurring journals, multiple reconciliation accounts, inter company transfers, control account tracing etc., give me a nice GUI any day..." Understandable. The current plain text accounting tools provide a very generic double entry accounting system with which you can model such things, and script them. There are a number of generic GUIs available (hledger has curses and web interfaces, and there are web/curses/GTK interfaces for Ledger and beancount). But there are not yet a lot of rich task-specific GUIs. There's no reason they can't be built, though. Isn't a plain text format too limited for large organizations ? "it's pretty obvious that plain-text files don't scale to a multinational, with hundreds of accountants of various types all trying to work with the same files. Even with proper use of Git I bet that would get old fast. You would instead want a real database, with a schema, and some data validation and some programs/webpages to smooth out the data entry and querying and whatnot." I'm not sure. Current plain text accounting tools can do some schema definition and data validation, and will do more in future. The plain text storage format is open, human-readable, future-proof (useful even without the software), scales smoothly from simple to complex needs, and taps a huge ecosystem of highly useful tooling, such as version control systems. And, despite the name, there's no reason these tools can't support other kinds of storage, such as a database. (hledger has four storage formats and is designed to accept more). Do you really enter every little transaction ? Yes! Many folks in our community do it. Mahatma Gandhi reconciled to the penny every night. J.D. Rockefeller was famous for his ledgers. It's not required. I started doing it as a temporary learning exercise, and still like it. It makes troubleshooting and reconciling easier. How is that possible ? Practice, and a process/toolset that suits you. Some folks import most of the data from their banks, so little manual data entry is required. A few prefer to manually enter everything, for the increased awareness and insight. "Manual" data entry is usually assisted in some way: interactive console tools (hledger add and similar), web-based tools (hledger-web and similar), GUI tools (ledgerhelpers), smart editors (eg emacs & ledger-mode), recurring transaction scripts. I currently use a mixture of bank CSV import and rapid copy/paste in emacs. I spend 15 minutes a day on average, and for me that's currently a good investment. How do I use the transaction data in my bank's web or mobile app ? If you can export it as CSV, you can import it and run queries against it. There are also some tools for converting OFX, QIF etc. So I've got a huge list of transactions recorded, duplicating my bank statements. How does that help ? Accounting is modelling flows of money (or other value). Such a model aggregates information from many sources, in one trusted place. With it you can efficiently generate reports, forecast things (cashflow!), answer questions, try experiments. Some people need a very simple model, others benefit from a more detailed one, and we don't know up front what we might need in future. The most fundamental accounting data is a simple list of transactions (the journal). Once you have captured this, you can mine it for anything you may want later on. Plain text accounting provides nice open data format(s), tools and practices for doing this, and could be a good foundation for more powerful tools. Where can I see a comparison of hledger, Ledger, beancount, and the rest ? Glad you asked! http://plaintextaccounting.org http://plaintextaccounting.org gives an overview of these tools and practices. In particular see "Ledger-likes" and "comparisons" under "read more". hledger's FAQ discusses differences from Ledger. Beancount docs probably do too. How do you do budgeting ? Some notes are [here](http://plaintextaccounting.org/#budgeting http://plaintextaccounting.org/#budgeting). I emulate YNAB-ish envelope budgetting (see third link). Double entry accounting ? Where are the debits and credits ? Most (not all) plain text accounting implementations use signed amounts instead of debits and credits. This makes them "double entry light" perhaps, but it has been a rather successful simplification, intuitive to most newcomers.

joelx 10y ago

Since September 2009, I have maintained a Google sheet outlining my net worth. Twice a month, I add a new column then list the balances of my bank accounts and credit cards and brokerages. Very easy to maintain and useful. I can see changes in my net worth at a glance over the last seven years.