3 ms·

Is there a reason to homeroll your accounting like this vs using one of the plain text accounting tools and their scripting interfaces?

Temporary_31337 4y ago
One reason NOT to do it would be any legal repercussions if this is used for anything more than some kind of home budgeting. When you are reconciling the accounts, you shouldn’t miss items as described in the article.
ozim 4y ago
Mostly reason is because it is interesting. I could use liber office calc for my accounting as well. But for playing with code it is perfect combo for a problem I can tackle and a problem I am interested enough to solve. For accounting my own things I am also quite safe not much harm that can be done :)
TeMPOraL 4y ago
Coding to learn the domain. Correcting for conceptual model mismatch between you and the tool. Possibly both at the same time. Take Ledger: I've approached it repeatedly over the years, but I always struggled with it. Not because of double-entry accounting: that part I get. It's everything else that's confusing to me, because the tool - like every other tool in this space - seems to be written for an American audience that eats Equities, breathes Liabilities, commutes between Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable, and do 99% of their finances through the stock market. For a simple person from middle of nowhere in Europe, this is a completely alien mental framework. I think in terms of having dollars, paying in them, getting paid in them, occasionally borrowing them to or from someone else. Every time I read through Ledger's docs, I stumble on the same set of problems, like "wtf is this whole accounts payable / accounts receivable business", or "if this is a small-scale accounting/budgeting tool, why half of the docs are about managing stock prices?!". So yeah, I end up doing most of my personal finances with ad-hoc Emacs Lisp in an Org Mode document, or throwaway Excel sheets, and each time I do it I understand ever so slightly more about finances. For anything non-trivial, I just mail an accountant.
- rawoke083600 4y ago
  I absolutely hear you :) I think "personal accounting(wrong word)" is like the note-taking-app-craze ! It's yet to be solved for the 'common-man'. I'm talking about a 'first-practical' THEN 'correct system'. Versus the current 'First CORRECT then practical' philosophy of the current solutions (Money, Sage, Pastel etc) Every few years I go "THIS" year I'm going to do proper finance records with one of the accounting programs like a real adult ! Then I'm soon bored to tears or frustrated by all the things I don't know about accounting (my fault not the subject's fault) or the apps I then quickly revert to a "money-in-bank / days-left-in-month" 'accounting-system' and a fin.txt in Dropbox where I write down some things...
- marttt 4y ago
  Fellow European here. I'm currently transitioning my accounting from Ledger (used it for 5+ years) to PTA, a tiny Perl program by OpenBSD dev Ingo Schwarze: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/ https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/ As compared to Ledger, the journal entries are much less verbose, mostly fitting on a single line: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=1.2&content-type=text/plain https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=... As you can see, it also utilizes traditional account numbers (listed in a separate Chart of Accounts file) instead of Ledger's Account:Subaccount form. PTA also has Debit and Credit, so all amounts are positive, whereas Ledger uses "+" and "-". For me, the PTA approach feels much safer, since basically everybody (including the auditors) in my country are probably used to this kind of system and a numbered Chart of Accounts. Less confusion. Interestingly, while converting my .ledger file to .pta, I discovered a lot of mistakes that seem to be linked to either the system Ledger uses -- or, rather, me not understanding it. I was also fairly inexperienced with double entry accounting when I started with Ledger. But replacing +/- with Debit/Credit accounts pointed those errors out, somehow. Here's the author discussing PTA and comparing it to Ledger&friends. Also a great discussion on plain text accounting in general: http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430 http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=2020092812343...

Temporary_31337 4y ago

One reason NOT to do it would be any legal repercussions if this is used for anything more than some kind of home budgeting. When you are reconciling the accounts, you shouldn’t miss items as described in the article.

ozim 4y ago

Mostly reason is because it is interesting. I could use liber office calc for my accounting as well. But for playing with code it is perfect combo for a problem I can tackle and a problem I am interested enough to solve. For accounting my own things I am also quite safe not much harm that can be done :)

TeMPOraL 4y ago

Coding to learn the domain. Correcting for conceptual model mismatch between you and the tool. Possibly both at the same time. Take Ledger: I've approached it repeatedly over the years, but I always struggled with it. Not because of double-entry accounting: that part I get. It's everything else that's confusing to me, because the tool - like every other tool in this space - seems to be written for an American audience that eats Equities, breathes Liabilities, commutes between Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable, and do 99% of their finances through the stock market. For a simple person from middle of nowhere in Europe, this is a completely alien mental framework. I think in terms of having dollars, paying in them, getting paid in them, occasionally borrowing them to or from someone else. Every time I read through Ledger's docs, I stumble on the same set of problems, like "wtf is this whole accounts payable / accounts receivable business", or "if this is a small-scale accounting/budgeting tool, why half of the docs are about managing stock prices?!". So yeah, I end up doing most of my personal finances with ad-hoc Emacs Lisp in an Org Mode document, or throwaway Excel sheets, and each time I do it I understand ever so slightly more about finances. For anything non-trivial, I just mail an accountant.

rawoke083600 4y ago
I absolutely hear you :) I think "personal accounting(wrong word)" is like the note-taking-app-craze ! It's yet to be solved for the 'common-man'. I'm talking about a 'first-practical' THEN 'correct system'. Versus the current 'First CORRECT then practical' philosophy of the current solutions (Money, Sage, Pastel etc) Every few years I go "THIS" year I'm going to do proper finance records with one of the accounting programs like a real adult ! Then I'm soon bored to tears or frustrated by all the things I don't know about accounting (my fault not the subject's fault) or the apps I then quickly revert to a "money-in-bank / days-left-in-month" 'accounting-system' and a fin.txt in Dropbox where I write down some things...
marttt 4y ago
Fellow European here. I'm currently transitioning my accounting from Ledger (used it for 5+ years) to PTA, a tiny Perl program by OpenBSD dev Ingo Schwarze: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/ https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/ As compared to Ledger, the journal entries are much less verbose, mostly fitting on a single line: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=1.2&content-type=text/plain https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=... As you can see, it also utilizes traditional account numbers (listed in a separate Chart of Accounts file) instead of Ledger's Account:Subaccount form. PTA also has Debit and Credit, so all amounts are positive, whereas Ledger uses "+" and "-". For me, the PTA approach feels much safer, since basically everybody (including the auditors) in my country are probably used to this kind of system and a numbered Chart of Accounts. Less confusion. Interestingly, while converting my .ledger file to .pta, I discovered a lot of mistakes that seem to be linked to either the system Ledger uses -- or, rather, me not understanding it. I was also fairly inexperienced with double entry accounting when I started with Ledger. But replacing +/- with Debit/Credit accounts pointed those errors out, somehow. Here's the author discussing PTA and comparing it to Ledger&friends. Also a great discussion on plain text accounting in general: http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430 http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=2020092812343...