6 ms·

Command Line, Console and UI Based Open Source Plain Text Accounting

200 points by golanggeek 9y ago

jasonkostempski 9y ago
I've been trying to replace the last dependency I have on Google products, a "finacial forecast" Spreadsheet integrated with Calendar. It lets me see approximately how much cash I'll have on hand at future dates, basically letting me live paycheck to paycheck without too much stress :) Can this do something like that? If not, does anyone know of something with similar features (local program, simple data files, etc.) that can?
- jareds 9y ago
  Depending on how complicated your spreadsheet is yes. I enter my fixed expenses a month ahead of time. I can then see how much money I expect to have on a given date with something like ledger -e 2017-12-15 bal checking
- howeyc 9y ago
  I don't see why not, if you're willing to get deep into the ledger file format. Look at "Forecast" and "Budgeting." http://plaintextaccounting.org/ http://plaintextaccounting.org/ Integrated right into your calendar, I don't know about that part.
  - sevensor 9y ago
    > Integrated right into your calendar, I don't know about that part. Depends on the calendar -- surely it could be integrated with cal(1).
    - jasonkostempski 9y ago
      integrating with cal would be perfect. I'm going to look into this as soon as I can.
rjzzleep 9y ago
Does anyone have any advice on how to be successful with ledger? I've tried a few things. I entered a lot of things, but the issues I have are more structural nature and probably general lack of accounting experience: What types do you use is there a useful list, that I can then translate to SMB or Personal tax filing? A somewhat standardized structure of assets, liabilities, accounts payable, accounts receivable etc. How do you deal with Cash? (EDIT: most answers assume that you only spend little cash, but in some countries cash can account for a decent amount of your income) How do you deal with interest? How do you keep your bank statements? I've tried using https://github.com/johannesgerer/buchhaltung https://github.com/johannesgerer/buchhaltung which supports paypal ofx and hbci How do you convert your balance sheet into a tax filing compatible format? How do you track things like rent? Do you keep it as a recurring entry i.e. `~ Monthly` or do you only book it when you pay with buchhaltung? Do you keep completely separate ledger files if you're sole proprietor or can you keep them semi separate and work with includes to create separate reports for private and sole proprietor tax filing? How do you track small expenses on the go? There's a web app called fava from beancount which looks nice, but i'm not sure you want to expose it to the outside world and i'm not sure the files are fully compatible with hledger https://beancount.github.io/fava/ https://beancount.github.io/fava/ Any help would be greatly appreciated.
- jdemler 9y ago
  Probably you should read up or watch some youtube videos on accounting. (H)Ledger is a great tool which allows you to find your solutions to your problems. If you want an example for standardized structures of accounts take a look at the german "Kontenrahmen" https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontenrahmen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontenrahmen. Cash can be dealt with in many ways. Some only track the ATM transactions. Interests are just transactions, too. HBCI/FinTS is a great way to keep track with your actual bank account. Usually tax reports only need a few numbers. Write up some script that prints these numbers for your ledger account. (H)Ledger does not support recurring transactions. But there are a lot of unix tools that do recurring things (cron, systemd-timers). I would keep ledger files for private and businesspurposes seperate. Keep in mind, that (H)Ledger is plaintext. Automation is simple. If you want to track expenses on the go, my advise would be to write a Telegram bot.
megous 9y ago
I've tried using ledger in the past. I ended up moving all the data to a database. Ultimately it is much easier/flexible to work with SQL, than arbitrary command line tools. Also it's easier to manipulate and process the data from anywhere (psql, cli app, web app, ...), without fear of corruption.
- matthiasv 9y ago
  How do you model double-entry book-keeping in your relational database? And where comes the fear of corruption if .ledger files are merely text?
  - megous 9y ago
    Corruption not in a sense of storage issues, but in a sense of a fragile text format made for human editing, but not entire pleasant for that. I wanted more pleasant entry. It became tedious/error prone to search for similar entries with vim and copy pasting. I could have made a specialized tool with nice autocomplete on top of ledger, but then why not drop the entire thing and use a database, where you don't need to re-invent groupping, sorting, filtering, summing, date interval operations and all the mundane stuff. I also wanted to import data from a bank, and keep all the info associated with the entries. Easy to do in a database, not so in ledger text format.
  - megous 9y ago
    I can't share everything here, but basics are this. Three tables: accounts, transactions, entries. Entries have amount, unit, notes. Accounts have name, parent_account. Transactions have subject, notes, date. That's the data. Then I have a view that flattens accounts tree, so that each has name and fullname. Name being Fun, fullname a full path to that account, eg. Expenses:Fun. With that base structure, you can start answering any questions by just summing entries groupped by accounts filtered by a regexp on fullname and fitler on date. What is my cashflow for any time period, what is my equity, what is my balance sheet, what I actually have, what changed recently, how any of this develops over time...
arca_vorago 9y ago
This is very impressive! I have a SO pursuing accounting, and there are so many subpar proprietary systems in the accounting world it's crazy. I have used gnucash, but there are many issues with gnucash that text only systems like ledger address, but the learning curve for them is daunting to your average user. So I could definitely see great opportunity for a text based ledger system and all its benefits along with a GUI overlay. All that, with a gplv3 license, this is the kind of project I can get behind!
yegle 9y ago
I've been using beancount for the last 3 years. The fava project provides an awesome web UI for beancount and I'm really happy with that.
- mapleoin 9y ago
  I've been using ledger for years. I really wanted to give beancount a try, but keeping documentation in google docs aggravates me. I understand that it might be easier for the writers to write and keep up to date. But it's an absolute pain to read/browse/skim/search, which is the whole point of documentation.
jdemler 9y ago
At CurrySoftware GmbH we use ledger + recutils + aqbanking + custom bash scripts to automate many business processes. Some of these processes are required by german law and many companys outsource these to accountants or tax advisors or buy shitty software from DATEV. The great advantage in staying fully plaintext is, that you do not need to automate everything for the whole system to work. Incoming invoices are frequent -> write a bash script, Outgoing invoices are frequent -> write a bash script. Paying the state back some VAT happens once a month, use emacs to do it manually. I really love it.
- levosmetalo 9y ago
  It would be interesting if you could share your workflow/scripts. Especially how did you implement SKR03 (guess you use that) into your hledger account hierarchy, and how do you generate e.g monthly VAT reports, or yearly VAT and trade tax reports.
  - jdemler 9y ago
    The system is not yet ready to be published but drop me a mail and I will send you some bash scripts and will try to answer questions. We use a custom "Kontenrahmen" based on the same ideas as SKR03, as using numbers is not necessary with ledger. That also means we can only communicate with tax advisors through paper. But as we communicate with the Finanzamt directly, thats ok.
clircle 9y ago
Are there any plain text accounting systems that provide an android app as well? I'm using gnucash, mostly because it has a nice companion app.
marvinpinto 9y ago
Related to this, I wrote a CLI tool called Ledger Reconciler[0] to automate the process of logging into all my financial accounts and inputting those transactions into Ledger. It uses headless Chrome underneath (via the puppeteer API[1]) so it could theoretically work with any system without needing to rely on public/private banking APIs. I also tried to make the plugin system as friendly as I could so people for people to add their own financial instutions. I'm optimistic someone will contribute a plugin one day :) [0]: https://disjoint.ca/projects/ledger-reconciler https://disjoint.ca/projects/ledger-reconciler [1]: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer
- jimbokun 9y ago
  How do you handle authenticating to the financial institutions?
  - sly010 9y ago
    I think we all know the answer to that question :) I would note that professional bank feed apis (e.g. yoodle) also use username password pairs and not only break when you change password but can result in a locked bank account due to too many retries. That said, there is no universal solution in the US.
    - kreetx 9y ago
      > I think we all know the answer to that question :) May I ask-- for those not in the know --that what is it? :) From your comment I'd infer that username/password, but that hasn't been the case for many years, at least at the banks I use (in Europe).
      - stedaniels 9y ago
        If he's using headless Chrome then it's likely form filling. I.e. just automatically typing in the answers to the authentication prompts on the pages as you'd normally do when you log in. Most banks, even those with TOTP or alternate MFA methods, allow you to login with standard authentication details to get access to statements and not make any changes.
sleavey 9y ago
I use GnuCash [1] with non-compressed save files enabled so that I can store changes on Git. It works flawlessly for me: I can edit accounts across different computers, get the full force of a mature accounting package to do my finances, and can use/write scripts that plot some statistics using various bindings (e.g. Python) [2]. [1] https://gnucash.org/ https://gnucash.org/ [2] https://github.com/SeanDS/gnucashxml https://github.com/SeanDS/gnucashxml
- wgreenberg 9y ago
  Have you found a sane way to handle massive initial imports? As far as I can tell, there's no way to bulk-categorize transactions. That means I'd have to go through each of my 6k+ transactions one-by-one for categorization.
  - sleavey 9y ago
    Not sure - I moved to GnuCash with only a few hundred transactions to import, so I did it manually. It may be possible to use the search tool to find the transactions you want to give a particular category to, and then categorise all of those (I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to bulk categorise a list of transactions).
LVB 9y ago
I successfully switched to ledger a few years ago after a few failed attempts years earlier. I attribute success to: https://github.com/quentinsf/icsv2ledger https://github.com/quentinsf/icsv2ledger It is the transaction import script that has really worked well for me without quirks. A lot of people recommend "reckon"--which I've tried--but I found that while Bayesian scoring sounds good, a solid set of regex work better. icsv2ledger does a great job of allowing you to build up a pool of search terms to map inputs to categories. And since the regex set is an artifact that you can tweak and add to, you end up with a very stable and comprehensive import process. I also like that it will (optionally) add the raw CSV that was imported as a comment in the transaction, and use that to avoid reimporting transactions. While this is a little visually noisy in the ledger file, I'm blind to it by now and it makes it rock solid to reimport CSV files without fear of duplicates. This also provides a neat way of dealing with each side of a transaction coming in separately. For example, both my checking and credit card list the transaction that corresponds to me paying my bill, but that is only one transaction in the ledger file. After I've done the import of everything, I simply delete one of the new entries but first copy its CSV comment into the remaining remaining transaction. So one ledger transaction lists both CSV comments, and subsequent imports from either account are duplicate free.
narendraj9 9y ago
https://github.com/narendraj9/hledger-mode https://github.com/narendraj9/hledger-mode I have been using this for almost two years now. I am not sure if there are any other users but I find it very convenient. (Disclaimer: I wrote the extension).
- golanggeek 9y ago
  Thats awesome, to use it with emacs
Loic 9y ago
This looks like a very well done project. If you are more a traditional software kind of person, I recommend heavily KMyMoney[0]. I have my full family accounting since 2007 in it (every single income/expense) and it works flawlessly allowing me with the great reports to know exactly where our family money is spent and saved. [0]: https://kmymoney.org/ https://kmymoney.org/

200 points by golanggeek 9y ago

I've been trying to replace the last dependency I have on Google products, a "finacial forecast" Spreadsheet integrated with Calendar. It lets me see approximately how much cash I'll have on hand at future dates, basically letting me live paycheck to paycheck without too much stress :) Can this do something like that? If not, does anyone know of something with similar features (local program, simple data files, etc.) that can?

jareds 9y ago
Depending on how complicated your spreadsheet is yes. I enter my fixed expenses a month ahead of time. I can then see how much money I expect to have on a given date with something like ledger -e 2017-12-15 bal checking
howeyc 9y ago
I don't see why not, if you're willing to get deep into the ledger file format. Look at "Forecast" and "Budgeting." http://plaintextaccounting.org/ http://plaintextaccounting.org/ Integrated right into your calendar, I don't know about that part.
- sevensor 9y ago
  > Integrated right into your calendar, I don't know about that part. Depends on the calendar -- surely it could be integrated with cal(1).
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    integrating with cal would be perfect. I'm going to look into this as soon as I can.

rjzzleep 9y ago

Does anyone have any advice on how to be successful with ledger? I've tried a few things. I entered a lot of things, but the issues I have are more structural nature and probably general lack of accounting experience: What types do you use is there a useful list, that I can then translate to SMB or Personal tax filing? A somewhat standardized structure of assets, liabilities, accounts payable, accounts receivable etc. How do you deal with Cash? (EDIT: most answers assume that you only spend little cash, but in some countries cash can account for a decent amount of your income) How do you deal with interest? How do you keep your bank statements? I've tried using https://github.com/johannesgerer/buchhaltung https://github.com/johannesgerer/buchhaltung which supports paypal ofx and hbci How do you convert your balance sheet into a tax filing compatible format? How do you track things like rent? Do you keep it as a recurring entry i.e. `~ Monthly` or do you only book it when you pay with buchhaltung? Do you keep completely separate ledger files if you're sole proprietor or can you keep them semi separate and work with includes to create separate reports for private and sole proprietor tax filing? How do you track small expenses on the go? There's a web app called fava from beancount which looks nice, but i'm not sure you want to expose it to the outside world and i'm not sure the files are fully compatible with hledger https://beancount.github.io/fava/ https://beancount.github.io/fava/ Any help would be greatly appreciated.

jdemler 9y ago
Probably you should read up or watch some youtube videos on accounting. (H)Ledger is a great tool which allows you to find your solutions to your problems. If you want an example for standardized structures of accounts take a look at the german "Kontenrahmen" https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontenrahmen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontenrahmen. Cash can be dealt with in many ways. Some only track the ATM transactions. Interests are just transactions, too. HBCI/FinTS is a great way to keep track with your actual bank account. Usually tax reports only need a few numbers. Write up some script that prints these numbers for your ledger account. (H)Ledger does not support recurring transactions. But there are a lot of unix tools that do recurring things (cron, systemd-timers). I would keep ledger files for private and businesspurposes seperate. Keep in mind, that (H)Ledger is plaintext. Automation is simple. If you want to track expenses on the go, my advise would be to write a Telegram bot.

megous 9y ago

I've tried using ledger in the past. I ended up moving all the data to a database. Ultimately it is much easier/flexible to work with SQL, than arbitrary command line tools. Also it's easier to manipulate and process the data from anywhere (psql, cli app, web app, ...), without fear of corruption.

matthiasv 9y ago
How do you model double-entry book-keeping in your relational database? And where comes the fear of corruption if .ledger files are merely text?
- megous 9y ago
  Corruption not in a sense of storage issues, but in a sense of a fragile text format made for human editing, but not entire pleasant for that. I wanted more pleasant entry. It became tedious/error prone to search for similar entries with vim and copy pasting. I could have made a specialized tool with nice autocomplete on top of ledger, but then why not drop the entire thing and use a database, where you don't need to re-invent groupping, sorting, filtering, summing, date interval operations and all the mundane stuff. I also wanted to import data from a bank, and keep all the info associated with the entries. Easy to do in a database, not so in ledger text format.
- megous 9y ago
  I can't share everything here, but basics are this. Three tables: accounts, transactions, entries. Entries have amount, unit, notes. Accounts have name, parent_account. Transactions have subject, notes, date. That's the data. Then I have a view that flattens accounts tree, so that each has name and fullname. Name being Fun, fullname a full path to that account, eg. Expenses:Fun. With that base structure, you can start answering any questions by just summing entries groupped by accounts filtered by a regexp on fullname and fitler on date. What is my cashflow for any time period, what is my equity, what is my balance sheet, what I actually have, what changed recently, how any of this develops over time...

arca_vorago 9y ago

This is very impressive! I have a SO pursuing accounting, and there are so many subpar proprietary systems in the accounting world it's crazy. I have used gnucash, but there are many issues with gnucash that text only systems like ledger address, but the learning curve for them is daunting to your average user. So I could definitely see great opportunity for a text based ledger system and all its benefits along with a GUI overlay. All that, with a gplv3 license, this is the kind of project I can get behind!

yegle 9y ago

I've been using beancount for the last 3 years. The fava project provides an awesome web UI for beancount and I'm really happy with that.

mapleoin 9y ago
I've been using ledger for years. I really wanted to give beancount a try, but keeping documentation in google docs aggravates me. I understand that it might be easier for the writers to write and keep up to date. But it's an absolute pain to read/browse/skim/search, which is the whole point of documentation.

jdemler 9y ago

At CurrySoftware GmbH we use ledger + recutils + aqbanking + custom bash scripts to automate many business processes. Some of these processes are required by german law and many companys outsource these to accountants or tax advisors or buy shitty software from DATEV. The great advantage in staying fully plaintext is, that you do not need to automate everything for the whole system to work. Incoming invoices are frequent -> write a bash script, Outgoing invoices are frequent -> write a bash script. Paying the state back some VAT happens once a month, use emacs to do it manually. I really love it.

levosmetalo 9y ago
It would be interesting if you could share your workflow/scripts. Especially how did you implement SKR03 (guess you use that) into your hledger account hierarchy, and how do you generate e.g monthly VAT reports, or yearly VAT and trade tax reports.
- jdemler 9y ago
  The system is not yet ready to be published but drop me a mail and I will send you some bash scripts and will try to answer questions. We use a custom "Kontenrahmen" based on the same ideas as SKR03, as using numbers is not necessary with ledger. That also means we can only communicate with tax advisors through paper. But as we communicate with the Finanzamt directly, thats ok.

clircle 9y ago

Are there any plain text accounting systems that provide an android app as well? I'm using gnucash, mostly because it has a nice companion app.

marvinpinto 9y ago

Related to this, I wrote a CLI tool called Ledger Reconciler[0] to automate the process of logging into all my financial accounts and inputting those transactions into Ledger. It uses headless Chrome underneath (via the puppeteer API[1]) so it could theoretically work with any system without needing to rely on public/private banking APIs. I also tried to make the plugin system as friendly as I could so people for people to add their own financial instutions. I'm optimistic someone will contribute a plugin one day :) [0]: https://disjoint.ca/projects/ledger-reconciler https://disjoint.ca/projects/ledger-reconciler [1]: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer

jimbokun 9y ago
How do you handle authenticating to the financial institutions?
- sly010 9y ago
  I think we all know the answer to that question :) I would note that professional bank feed apis (e.g. yoodle) also use username password pairs and not only break when you change password but can result in a locked bank account due to too many retries. That said, there is no universal solution in the US.
  - kreetx 9y ago
    > I think we all know the answer to that question :) May I ask-- for those not in the know --that what is it? :) From your comment I'd infer that username/password, but that hasn't been the case for many years, at least at the banks I use (in Europe).
    - stedaniels 9y ago
      If he's using headless Chrome then it's likely form filling. I.e. just automatically typing in the answers to the authentication prompts on the pages as you'd normally do when you log in. Most banks, even those with TOTP or alternate MFA methods, allow you to login with standard authentication details to get access to statements and not make any changes.

sleavey 9y ago

I use GnuCash [1] with non-compressed save files enabled so that I can store changes on Git. It works flawlessly for me: I can edit accounts across different computers, get the full force of a mature accounting package to do my finances, and can use/write scripts that plot some statistics using various bindings (e.g. Python) [2]. [1] https://gnucash.org/ https://gnucash.org/ [2] https://github.com/SeanDS/gnucashxml https://github.com/SeanDS/gnucashxml

wgreenberg 9y ago
Have you found a sane way to handle massive initial imports? As far as I can tell, there's no way to bulk-categorize transactions. That means I'd have to go through each of my 6k+ transactions one-by-one for categorization.
- sleavey 9y ago
  Not sure - I moved to GnuCash with only a few hundred transactions to import, so I did it manually. It may be possible to use the search tool to find the transactions you want to give a particular category to, and then categorise all of those (I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to bulk categorise a list of transactions).

LVB 9y ago

I successfully switched to ledger a few years ago after a few failed attempts years earlier. I attribute success to: https://github.com/quentinsf/icsv2ledger https://github.com/quentinsf/icsv2ledger It is the transaction import script that has really worked well for me without quirks. A lot of people recommend "reckon"--which I've tried--but I found that while Bayesian scoring sounds good, a solid set of regex work better. icsv2ledger does a great job of allowing you to build up a pool of search terms to map inputs to categories. And since the regex set is an artifact that you can tweak and add to, you end up with a very stable and comprehensive import process. I also like that it will (optionally) add the raw CSV that was imported as a comment in the transaction, and use that to avoid reimporting transactions. While this is a little visually noisy in the ledger file, I'm blind to it by now and it makes it rock solid to reimport CSV files without fear of duplicates. This also provides a neat way of dealing with each side of a transaction coming in separately. For example, both my checking and credit card list the transaction that corresponds to me paying my bill, but that is only one transaction in the ledger file. After I've done the import of everything, I simply delete one of the new entries but first copy its CSV comment into the remaining remaining transaction. So one ledger transaction lists both CSV comments, and subsequent imports from either account are duplicate free.

narendraj9 9y ago

https://github.com/narendraj9/hledger-mode https://github.com/narendraj9/hledger-mode I have been using this for almost two years now. I am not sure if there are any other users but I find it very convenient. (Disclaimer: I wrote the extension).

golanggeek 9y ago
Thats awesome, to use it with emacs

Loic 9y ago

This looks like a very well done project. If you are more a traditional software kind of person, I recommend heavily KMyMoney[0]. I have my full family accounting since 2007 in it (every single income/expense) and it works flawlessly allowing me with the great reports to know exactly where our family money is spent and saved. [0]: https://kmymoney.org/ https://kmymoney.org/