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 in

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. :)