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Well, my company has been using Ledger CLI for a decade. It has a few large advantages over off-the-shelf accounting packages, the primary one is that it allows

Well, my company has been using Ledger CLI for a decade. It has a few large advantages over off-the-shelf accounting packages, the primary one is that it allows us to extend the "Everything is code" approach to everything from ops to accounting. - For example, instead of someone needing to remember passwords to five different current accounts and credit card sites, there are ruby scripts that download the data, convert them into journal entries and get committed to git. (Commercial packages can read your credit card data too, but there will always be a data source you need that they don't support) - The scripts get committed and version controlled, but the ledger files themselves go into git as well. So you can bi-sect, revert, merge. All the tools git gives you that are an order more powerful than what an accounting package will have. - As an organisation grows it will run into weird business specific processes, e.g. some tax or reporting requirement that your off-the-shelf package cannot do. If it's all just plain text files and code then the reporting requirement is one more ruby script away. (I've been a consultant in a previous life and you wouldn't believe the man hours that get lost in accounting departments with people doing these manual chores) - Filling out quarterly tax statement is again just a single script. Took a bit of time to get it to work but now saves a lot of man hours each time. There is a disadvantage: your average accountant won't know what ledger is or how to use it. But we have yet another little script that converts the ledger output to Excel for use in audits, etc.

anyfactor 5y ago
Ledger CLI in a company in this day and age? I forgot to mention I studied accounting in uni and after investing/wasting my time into understanding CLI and terminal application I have come to the conclusion that they are simply not for me. Specially if you are not using Linux in all your applications and even that is another issue. I digress... I am just incredibly intrigued by your organization's practice. Who are the people that are interacting with accounting system? I know it requires a more than capable IT person to feel comfortable using a CLI. So, do you not have assistants or accounts professionals whose main job or one of their main is to do accounting? Or is it all IT or programmers that are interacting with this system. How large is your organization. That is a question also. How long did the organization ran for to settle on understanding the basic requirements from the accounting software to commit to creating a CLI solution? How are you outputting reports that are well formatted? Audit usually requires a walkthrough process of accounting. I couldn't imagine any auditor not being surprised to see a CLI based software and let alone attempting to understand these. I have thought about creating my own CLI solution that just appended to my workbook. But it is just not scalable and simple modularity requires going down the codebase which is not something I imagine doing on the weekends. And that is why the barrage of questions. With CLI applications (not even custom GUI application) the layer of complexities for the sake of simplicity means that the person using it has a ton of highly specific needs that is not the standardized and they also have a very different definition of the word "simple".
- speleding 5y ago
  The company is small (around 20 direct + indirect) but the accounting can get somewhat complex because it has sales in multiple countries, leading to 7 currencies and with two dozen different VAT rates. The fact that ledger can keep tally in multiple currencies was an essential feature for our use case, most commercial packages want to convert everything into a base currency which leads to cumbersome conversions when you subsequently need to pay affiliates and taxes in a non-base currency. That's small enough that all accounting can be handled by a single person, me, including updating the scripts that keep it all running. They do need regular upkeep as a result of changes in regulations, APIs, etc. It takes me about two or three days per quarter, and a few more days at year closing. There is a script that generates a pretty Excel workbook from the ledger output with a familiar looking dual ledger balance sheet and another one with a profit and loss statement, any accountant should be able to read those. There is not often a need to involve an actual accountant or do audits though, the company is privately held. Teaching a programmer the basics of accounting is pretty easy. Would this work in an organisation that's not a software company where you would need to teach an accountant scripting, git, CLI, etc? I don't know.

anyfactor 5y ago

Ledger CLI in a company in this day and age? I forgot to mention I studied accounting in uni and after investing/wasting my time into understanding CLI and terminal application I have come to the conclusion that they are simply not for me. Specially if you are not using Linux in all your applications and even that is another issue. I digress... I am just incredibly intrigued by your organization's practice. Who are the people that are interacting with accounting system? I know it requires a more than capable IT person to feel comfortable using a CLI. So, do you not have assistants or accounts professionals whose main job or one of their main is to do accounting? Or is it all IT or programmers that are interacting with this system. How large is your organization. That is a question also. How long did the organization ran for to settle on understanding the basic requirements from the accounting software to commit to creating a CLI solution? How are you outputting reports that are well formatted? Audit usually requires a walkthrough process of accounting. I couldn't imagine any auditor not being surprised to see a CLI based software and let alone attempting to understand these. I have thought about creating my own CLI solution that just appended to my workbook. But it is just not scalable and simple modularity requires going down the codebase which is not something I imagine doing on the weekends. And that is why the barrage of questions. With CLI applications (not even custom GUI application) the layer of complexities for the sake of simplicity means that the person using it has a ton of highly specific needs that is not the standardized and they also have a very different definition of the word "simple".

speleding 5y ago
The company is small (around 20 direct + indirect) but the accounting can get somewhat complex because it has sales in multiple countries, leading to 7 currencies and with two dozen different VAT rates. The fact that ledger can keep tally in multiple currencies was an essential feature for our use case, most commercial packages want to convert everything into a base currency which leads to cumbersome conversions when you subsequently need to pay affiliates and taxes in a non-base currency. That's small enough that all accounting can be handled by a single person, me, including updating the scripts that keep it all running. They do need regular upkeep as a result of changes in regulations, APIs, etc. It takes me about two or three days per quarter, and a few more days at year closing. There is a script that generates a pretty Excel workbook from the ledger output with a familiar looking dual ledger balance sheet and another one with a profit and loss statement, any accountant should be able to read those. There is not often a need to involve an actual accountant or do audits though, the company is privately held. Teaching a programmer the basics of accounting is pretty easy. Would this work in an organisation that's not a software company where you would need to teach an accountant scripting, git, CLI, etc? I don't know.