4 ms·
I used ledger [1] to track all of my expenses for roughly four years. It's a command line based double entry accounting tool. It was super interesting in terms
by war1025 6y ago
I used ledger [1] to track all of my expenses for roughly four years. It's a command line based double entry accounting tool. It was super interesting in terms of figuring out where money went and general double entry accounting techniques.
That said, it was a ton of work to keep up to date given that I was trying to track money when I spent it vs when it cleared my bank account, and those two often varied by several days. Add on top of that three kids and various purchases my wife would make, and it just became too much of a hassle. But it also helped me understand where my money was going each month much better.
The whole double entry idea is basically that every time there is a flow of money, it is going from one place and to another.
So each transaction has two entries:
1. Where the money is going
2. Where the money came from.
That's really what it boils down to.
[1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/ https://www.ledger-cli.org/
- accrual 6y agoThis is what I use as well and I concur it can become pretty tedious. My biggest issue is with Amazon purchases - I can enter everything in at the time of purchase but Amazon will batch together various charges, so what I have in my ledger never matches my credit card statement unless I carefully sum the correct batches together. First world problems, I suppose.
- juped 6y agoLedger is almost great software, except that it uses signed numbers. Why?!
- adamnew123456 6y agoDepends what you mean - signs for input or signs for output? If the reactions to TFA are any indication, compared to the amount of effort you have to go through to explain the credit/debit notation, account signs are fairly straightforward. Just start from the rule that assets are positive and you can derive the rest with some fairly basic examples. For output? I guess you could apply some sign normalization so that Income or Accounts Payable would be positive, but if you understand where the signs come from I don't see the benefit in dropping them. The other thing to know is that Ledger itself isn't aware of what constitutes a debit vs. credit (or a "naturally positive" vs "naturally negative") account, so you'd have to tell it up-front which ones should be sign-normalized for display.