5 ms·

Just curious, do you guys have any power users? Like large companies? Also, what does the distant future look like for hledger?

jsmith99 7y ago
Large companies don't usually post everything manually. They journal adjustments, but the day to day entries will be made automatically by their ERP from systems like Purchase to Pay.
- dragonsh 7y ago
  Actually large companies are mostly manual compared to most small/medium size companies. Just too many processes to just generate correct journal entries in SAP from purchase, sales, operations, production and distribution. Moreover adjustments, inventory counting methods, purchase, sales require creative use of manual processes, excel and laborious job of account reconciliation at closing (which indeed is just a snapshot report at point in time). I have yet to see a multi-national SAP installation which automatically ingest banks, financial institutes reports and generate account reconciliation entries, government reports automatically. I feel combined with machine learning and storing hledger records in some large databse, it can become a powerful automated accounting system which SAP and large vendors can just dream of.
  - jchoelt 7y ago
    I actually built this for my own usage: https://github.com/j3k0/ledger-guesser https://github.com/j3k0/ledger-guesser Works quite well
- speleding 7y ago
  There is no reason to post things manually with (h)ledger, it's a command line tool so it's perfectly scriptable. Our company uses a plethora of (mostly) ruby scripts to get data from banks and the billing system API and a few other sources like exchange rates websites and converts the output into ledger files. And then another bunch of scripts takes the output from ledger and sends it to the API for, for example, the government VAT payments. (Our company is by no means big, but multinational with business in 7 currencies). There are a number of test and assert statements along the line to do sanity checks with a manual review since sending out incorrect values could potentially be expensive / illegal. It works great. The whole thing is stored in git so any changes are auditable. We need some of the power features of ledger though, so I doubt ledger will work for us, but I'll give it a spin.
- smichael 7y ago
  hledger power users (AFAIK) import most entries from CSV downloaded from financial institutions. I have this scripted to run nightly from cron, so the new entries are there awaiting finalisation when I open the journal in the morning.
smichael 7y ago
wtvanhest, not that I know of. It's hard to collect good usage data without nagging people. I hear from small business owners, the occasional accountant, and I have the impression there are other business/institutional users that don't interact. Distant future is hard to predict but here I go: hledger or any good parts of its design are still around and still providing value. Any past data kept with hledger is still readable and easy to convert, with or without a working hledger. Highly polished and efficient UIs are available everywhere they're useful. Data import and multimachine syncing are routine and just work. Data hygiene/security and personal privacy are routine and just work. Performance is high, "big data" is no problem. Resource usage is low, these tools continue to work in the turbulent and resource-constrained future. There is a strong global community of financially literate, capable, empowered, prospering individuals and organisations using efficient high quality universally available accounting tools to promote, enforce and create widespread transparency and societal insight in finance, business, politics and every ecological issue.

jsmith99 7y ago

Large companies don't usually post everything manually. They journal adjustments, but the day to day entries will be made automatically by their ERP from systems like Purchase to Pay.

dragonsh 7y ago
Actually large companies are mostly manual compared to most small/medium size companies. Just too many processes to just generate correct journal entries in SAP from purchase, sales, operations, production and distribution. Moreover adjustments, inventory counting methods, purchase, sales require creative use of manual processes, excel and laborious job of account reconciliation at closing (which indeed is just a snapshot report at point in time). I have yet to see a multi-national SAP installation which automatically ingest banks, financial institutes reports and generate account reconciliation entries, government reports automatically. I feel combined with machine learning and storing hledger records in some large databse, it can become a powerful automated accounting system which SAP and large vendors can just dream of.
- jchoelt 7y ago
  I actually built this for my own usage: https://github.com/j3k0/ledger-guesser https://github.com/j3k0/ledger-guesser Works quite well
speleding 7y ago
There is no reason to post things manually with (h)ledger, it's a command line tool so it's perfectly scriptable. Our company uses a plethora of (mostly) ruby scripts to get data from banks and the billing system API and a few other sources like exchange rates websites and converts the output into ledger files. And then another bunch of scripts takes the output from ledger and sends it to the API for, for example, the government VAT payments. (Our company is by no means big, but multinational with business in 7 currencies). There are a number of test and assert statements along the line to do sanity checks with a manual review since sending out incorrect values could potentially be expensive / illegal. It works great. The whole thing is stored in git so any changes are auditable. We need some of the power features of ledger though, so I doubt ledger will work for us, but I'll give it a spin.
smichael 7y ago
hledger power users (AFAIK) import most entries from CSV downloaded from financial institutions. I have this scripted to run nightly from cron, so the new entries are there awaiting finalisation when I open the journal in the morning.

smichael 7y ago

wtvanhest, not that I know of. It's hard to collect good usage data without nagging people. I hear from small business owners, the occasional accountant, and I have the impression there are other business/institutional users that don't interact. Distant future is hard to predict but here I go: hledger or any good parts of its design are still around and still providing value. Any past data kept with hledger is still readable and easy to convert, with or without a working hledger. Highly polished and efficient UIs are available everywhere they're useful. Data import and multimachine syncing are routine and just work. Data hygiene/security and personal privacy are routine and just work. Performance is high, "big data" is no problem. Resource usage is low, these tools continue to work in the turbulent and resource-constrained future. There is a strong global community of financially literate, capable, empowered, prospering individuals and organisations using efficient high quality universally available accounting tools to promote, enforce and create widespread transparency and societal insight in finance, business, politics and every ecological issue.