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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 ter

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.

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.