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Nice, I appreciate that, thank you so much! As I said, ledger looks cool and I might play with it just for the fun of it. But as far as I can see it's file base

Nice, I appreciate that, thank you so much! As I said, ledger looks cool and I might play with it just for the fun of it. But as far as I can see it's file based, right? We obviously keep our accounting data in databases and only support exporting to DATEV atm, hence the compatibility with that format. The point of our whole endeavour is to *not* do accounting. You process your documents and we use OCR and simple input from the user to create the correct journal entries. Your tax consultants and accountants work in the background to review everything and export that into their systems to continue working on that. That's necessary for all the publications and tax reports you need to do in Germany/Europe. You can think of us as a pre-accounting software. A nice input layer. It's more about the bigger picture. Think multiple companies, real estate. You get a real time overview of your finances. You get banking integration. You can collaborate, with your employees, your family, notaries, lawyers, tax people and accountants. So accounting is just a side-effect for the user. Having a real time overview of a more complex financial setup is the USP. Having said that, I don't see a real value to support import/export of the ledger format for now. Our first persona we're targeting aren't people that do their accounting themselves.

gen220 3y ago
Correcto, it's meant to live at-rest in plain text files. When you exec the `ledger` binary, you point it at a collection of ledger files, and it parses them into memory to perform whatever operations you request (report generation, etc.). It's written in C++ and scales about as well as you'd imagine (i.e. mainly a function of memory constraints). It sounds like exporting to DATEV is the right choice for your customers and region. The benefit of a format like ledger is that it's universal and relatively trivial to write your own parser for. Most accounting software packages might not import ledger files natively, but there's probably a ledger -> $your_format converter out there – if not, it's generally trivial to write one. It's kind of like how "markdown" became a common language for latex-generated PDFs, HTML, and powerpoint slides thanks to Pandoc. Ledger doesn't quite have a pandoc-style tool yet, but `.ldg` files are basically the accounting equivalent of markdown or HTML. I did some googling around for datev and ledger, found this thread that might be interesting to you (much of it is over my head): https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/jzi6ci/someone_from_germany/ https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/jzi6ci... Sounds like a good product! Wish you the best of luck with it. :)

gen220 3y ago

Correcto, it's meant to live at-rest in plain text files. When you exec the `ledger` binary, you point it at a collection of ledger files, and it parses them into memory to perform whatever operations you request (report generation, etc.). It's written in C++ and scales about as well as you'd imagine (i.e. mainly a function of memory constraints). It sounds like exporting to DATEV is the right choice for your customers and region. The benefit of a format like ledger is that it's universal and relatively trivial to write your own parser for. Most accounting software packages might not import ledger files natively, but there's probably a ledger -> $your_format converter out there – if not, it's generally trivial to write one. It's kind of like how "markdown" became a common language for latex-generated PDFs, HTML, and powerpoint slides thanks to Pandoc. Ledger doesn't quite have a pandoc-style tool yet, but `.ldg` files are basically the accounting equivalent of markdown or HTML. I did some googling around for datev and ledger, found this thread that might be interesting to you (much of it is over my head): https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/jzi6ci/someone_from_germany/ https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/jzi6ci... Sounds like a good product! Wish you the best of luck with it. :)