9 ms·

Ledger

183 points by hggh 3y ago

skulk 3y ago
Also see: hledger, a Haskell-based clone. The main benefit of using hledger seems to be better documentation, but I haven't tried ledger. Comparison of the two: https://hledger.org/ledger.html https://hledger.org/ledger.html I'm trying to start using hledger.
- jesusofnazarath 3y ago
  Hledger has a more sane query language, but its not as powerful as ledger's. Also probably less bugs than ledger. Ledger, however, lets you do pretty much anything you want and thats why i prefer it. of course its easier to make mistakes with it, but i prefer the freedom it offers.
- lvass 3y ago
  My ledger file works in both ledger and hledger, I tend to mostly use ledger as it's worked better within emacs for me. It's very rare that I even have to use the CLI. Ledger's docs are great.
- notfed 3y ago
  Can hledger be run in a Haskell repl? That sounds way more useful than a command line terminal. (Otherwise I'm not sure why it matters whether it was written in Haskell?)
  - whateveracct 3y ago
    Yep it has a Haskell interface! That's one common feature of many Haskell CLIs - they tend to be a statically typed library thinly wrapped into a CLI.
    - wbadart 3y ago
      My favorite part of the (extensive) Haskell API is `Hledger.Cli.Script` [0]. It re-exports all the most commonly used functions and data types, meaning you're just one import away from everything you need to get started. [0]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hledger-1.32.3/docs/Hledger-Cli-Script.html https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hledger-1.32.3/docs/Hled...
  - maxcoder4 3y ago
    >Otherwise I'm not sure why it matters whether it was written in Haskell? It's a common trope with less popular languages. Often when I check out some project on GitHub, the first "feature" in the readme is "written in rust".
- chromatin 3y ago
  A key advantage of hledger, and why I migrated from ledger, is that hledger internally orders transactions chronologically, whereas ledger inexplicably orders them in the order they appear int he file, irrespective of the date attached to them. This [ledger's approach] totally breaks the ability to break different transaction types into different files and then import all files into a master file.
  - lvass 3y ago
    You can get this behavior with --sort d in argument or ledgerrc or setting LEDGER_SORT=d in your environment. Or merge files sorted by date with ledger -f file1 -f file2 --sort d print. I agree the default sorting is quite jarring, but practically every single time if some entry is out of place chronologically, for me it's because I input-ed the wrong date and the default sort makes more sense. The reason I have hledger installed is for check ordereddates.
    - speleding 3y ago
      My solution is to pick the file names in such a way that `include *.ledger` imports them in the right order (you need the latest version of ledger for that to work, in older versions the order was indeterminate)
- peterhajas 3y ago
  The other nice part of `hledger` is the web UI (`hledger-web`), which is handy for checking out your transactions.
- faustlast 3y ago
  In summary for me: hledger has better csv importing system and ledger has support for lots. I use both.
- speleding 3y ago
  ledger has a few powerful features that hledger lacks, for example in ledger you can create an "assert" statement that checks all your journal entries fall in the correct time period (easy to mess up if you copy/paste journal entries). But it's pretty easy to move between the two.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    hledger can validate date order, that seems to eliminate copy-paste-fail-to-update-date for me.
Jtsummers 3y ago
https://plaintextaccounting.org https://plaintextaccounting.org Includes a list of similar software and ports and their current status (active/inactive).
dbacar 3y ago
Just use Excel, man.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  In fact, let’s just use Excel for everything. Throw away all other software, you don’t need any of that.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Excel is the command line of the data manipulation world.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Except when Excel mangles your genomics. Or dates. Excel is the worst thing ever happened to data scientists. If sciencist knew awk/perl + gnuplot and basic C, most of the errors would't happened. From HN: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385
      - nequo 3y ago
        R is pretty good to boot, and has been around since the 1990s too. I would’ve said that Excel is the assembly of data manipulation and dplyr is the command line. The higher level of abstraction and the guardrails help.
- jldugger 3y ago
  I feel like GNUCash splits the difference. You still get a GUI and reporting tools, but you also get the benefit of local reasoning that double entry accounting provides: as long as every transaction is balanced the entire book is balanced. And the data model supports transactions between more than two accounts, which is extremely useful. My preferred backend is SQL based, so it's a relatively amenable to inspection and custom tooling.
- 3y ago
Temporary_31337 3y ago
I know that US finance is a bit behind but in Europe you can get a bank account with a nice app and even separate that into different pots or accounts free of charge. My bank automatically classifies expenses and you can of course export to csv for further analysis. I have two virtual debit cards one for personal and one for business stuff so all of the stuff ledger does is fully automatic.
- __jonas 3y ago
  Don't know about how it is in the US but what I enjoy about banks here is that basically all of them offer FinTS/HBCI/PSD2 or some other API to interact with the account so you can have a nice desktop app that automatically pulls info from all your accounts without ever having to interact with each banks online banking interface. For Mac for example, this one is very nice: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/moneymoney/id872698314?l=en https://apps.apple.com/de/app/moneymoney/id872698314?l=en
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    But you can’t use PSD2 APIs as an individual (at most banks), so if you want to use it, you necessarily have to entrust your financial data to a third party.
- para_parolu 3y ago
  The problem happens when you get more accounts of different types. Currently, I have around 40 accounts in ledger for me and my family. Multiple bank accounts, multiple brokerages, loans, tax optimization accounts, pension, etc. Some institutions have a good tools and some not regardless of country. I recall using european NyKredit was pain as much as bank of America. Ledger (or hledger in my case) helps to build structured “meta view” while still keeping my data private (from one vendor).
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I used to have so many accounts, as I get older I get closer and closer to one account of each type.
koeng 3y ago
I use hledger for my solo-company. It is really great, and very easy to understand what is going on. Highly recommend.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
LVB 3y ago
I like the idea of plaintext accounting and have tried a few of these options a number of times, sometimes pretty earnestly, but have never landed on a satisfactory flow. I've always ended up spending quite a lot of time building out the tooling around trying to fetch from now more than a dozen accounts and then munge/categorize things acceptably. In the end, I just fall back to pressing "Download All Accounts" in the clunky-but-serviceable Moneydance (local data FTW).
- Arcanum-XIII 3y ago
  I have the same issue, but in Europe. Most bank don't offert a data export, so it's fun an games to try to get YOUR data. In Belgium we have CODA for companies... but they're slightly different for each bank. I've worked on this for a middleman and it's hell, between the source data sucking and the destination being cryptic. I don't understand this: why would anyone want to block this? There are no advantages. None. For either party.
nyrikki 3y ago
Double entry accounting is the original immutable event architecture. They call out that it is hard to learn, but most of that in my experience is because people don't realize that credit cards and debit cards. Just remember the formula: Assets= liabilities + capital It may be counterintuitive at first, but keeping that formula true is the requirement. Debits on the left and are positive Credits on the right and are negative. Using Excel and a cash basis has killed lots of companies where customers pay for services and products, which looks like income, while the related expenses haven't been paid for.
- notfed 3y ago
  > Assets= liabilities + capital Lol, that'd be nice! I think you'll want to edit that.
  - nyrikki 3y ago
    Are you complaining about the order of the C and L terms? Because the accounting equation has been the same for centuries. Assets = Capital + Liabilities https://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/student/exam-support-resources/foundation-level-study-resources/fa1/technical-articles/accounting-equation.html#:~:text=Assets%20%3D%20Capital%20%2B%20Liabilities,owed%20to%20creditors%20(liabilities) https://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/student/exam-support-resour....
    - forkerenok 3y ago
      It took a second for me because I'm accustomed to people talking about Assets and Liabilities to describe the picture, so the equation in my head is the inverted one: Capital = Assets - Liabilities. I can imagine GP had a similar confusion.
      - nyrikki 3y ago
        Thanks for that explanation, Thinking about it. I was taught to call that proprietorship. Which was probably meant to remove that ambiguity. A - L = P We put it on the right side to say that was the Owners value. I never knew why they insisted on that but now I do.
globular-toast 3y ago
I've been using ledger for over a decade at this point. It's nice being able to plot my finances like total wealth over my entire adult life.
lvass 3y ago
I think all these tutorials and showcases showing CLI usage for plaintext accounting kinda miss the mark and ultimately hinders adoption. 99% of the times I interact with ledger is with the same 4 commands. The fact I have the ledger file open in emacs and use these commands from a keybind is what makes the experience great. Trust me, if you need to run some complicated analysis, (h)ledger has your back and you can find how to do it in the docs. Most of the time you don't so just go and start bookkeeping. You need your file populated to see any benefit, and they'll become obvious when you get there.
- margarina72 3y ago
  Do you have a good guide to start that you could recommend? It sounds quite simple when you mention it, but every time I tried to get started with Ledger with or without emacs, it always seemed too much of an undertaking and stalled pretty early... if you have a good workflow to recommend, that would be very helpful.
  - ramses0 3y ago
    Just start with `hledger-ui` and like the article said: mess it up a bunch and keep fixing it or starting over. Pick one particular "zone" of finances (eg: monthly bills) and track only that part of it for a while. You'll figure it out!
  - mbork_pl 3y ago
    May I recommend my ebook I linked to in another comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39494344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39494344)? You don't need a lot of commands to use Ledger successfully. 99% of the time, I only use one (`ledger bal`). The main thing is how to put stuff in your ledger file (and in fact, I devote most of the book to that). And, of course, the discipline to do it regularly (which I outsource to Beeminder).
  - lvass 3y ago
    https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Principles-of-Accounting-with-Ledger https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Principles-of-Accoun... https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Keeping-a-Journal https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Keeping-a-Journal
raamdev 3y ago
I've been using Ledger for years now and with thousands of entries a year. I track investments, income, expenses, and budgeting. For mobile entry, I keep my ledger file on Dropbox and use the Drafts app and TextExpander on my iPhone to quickly append properly formatted ledger entries to the file from my phone, the moment the expense occurs. Every two to four weeks, I spend 10 minutes and use ledger-mode in Emacs to reconcile accounts with online bank / credit card transactions. It works really well and I love the flexibility and long-term portability of keeping my ledger in plain-text.
- jimmcslim 3y ago
  Can you share some more details on how you are using Drafts and TextExpander?
  - raamdev 3y ago
    Sure! Here's what I do to add an expense from my phone: 1. Open the Drafts App on my iPhone. 2. Type "lfood", which triggers TextExpander with my ledger food expense snippet [1]. I make use of the TextExpander fill-ins feature [2] to automatically set the current date and to give me a list of dropdowns that I can use to change the account, but usually I just leave the default and only fill in the expense amount. 3. Enter the expense amount, select the credit card that I used from a dropdown if it's different from the default. 4. Trigger the 'Save to Ledger' action [3] that I created within the Drafts app [4], which appends the ledger entry to my ledger file on Dropbox. I created a short gif [5] showing this entire process in action. [1] https://i.imgur.com/NXEimql.png https://i.imgur.com/NXEimql.png [2] https://textexpander.com/learn/using/snippets/advanced-snippet-elements/advanced-fill-ins https://textexpander.com/learn/using/snippets/advanced-snipp... [3] https://i.imgur.com/LNDJNGi.png https://i.imgur.com/LNDJNGi.png [4] https://docs.getdrafts.com/actions/ https://docs.getdrafts.com/actions/ [5] https://ibb.co/vk45Kb7 https://ibb.co/vk45Kb7
    - jimmcslim 3y ago
      Fantastic, thanks for this!
compns8-ng 3y ago
Been using ledger and hledger for about four years, love them dearly. I find ledger + Emacs ledger-mode the most convenient for daily use. Hledger has a somewhat nicer way of formatting reports on the CLI, making it useful for creating ad-hoc reports and digging into your data.
zie 3y ago
Been using hledger & friends for a few days now: `2008-01-01 Opening Balance` hledger-flow is my BFF for managing this: https://github.com/apauley/hledger-flow https://github.com/apauley/hledger-flow Like others have mentioned plaintextaccounting.org is a great resource into the larger community.
rwbt 3y ago
I've been using hledger[1] - similar tool but has more features like balance sheet, income statement generation with a plain text file for the last 3 years and it's been working out great. Before that I used iBank (rebranded as Banktivity) and don't miss it at all. [1] - https://hledger.org https://hledger.org
gadiyar 3y ago
Any users of GnuCash here? Folks recommending Excel may be missing the value double-entry accounting brings.
- somat 3y ago
  As much as I dislike excel(mainly because of the weak data model), it can do double entry accounting just fine.
  - mbork_pl 3y ago
    Do you have any templates? Happy Ledger user here, but I'd be curious to learn how people do double-entry accounting in Excel.
    - somat 3y ago
      Not really, I don't do much in excel anymore, And I probably should not be giving advice as I have no classical training in accounting. But the ledger docs have a pretty great introduction to basic accounting theory. It is not too difficult to apply this theory into whatever data storage engine you are using. https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Principles-of-Accounting-with-Ledger https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Principles-of-Accoun... the data page might be as simple as id|date|comment|from|from_amount|to|to_amount|balance_func() then a few report pages summing the values
      - yencabulator 3y ago
        That simple schema fails to represent split transactions. I went the superstore and bought groceries, computer gear, and a new battery for the car. Oh and my spouse handed me a $100 bill to cover some of the cost.
        somat 3y ago
        Yes, a simplified schema like that fails to capture the entire semantics of a transaction. However, I find for personal finance I never need full transaction semantics and simplified two party semantics are much easier to enter and calculate. I will be honest, I use ledger and I like how it can express the complex transaction, however I also have to admit that I have never used them. If I were storing my finance data in a relational database or a spreadsheet, I would be very tempted to use the simplified two party model. I probably would not actually do it, but when I am elbow deep in code making sure to handle N-Party transactions correctly, I would be tempted. The author of the plain text accounting system(PTA) went with this simplified model and made a good case for it, one line per transaction is much easier to parse, for both the human reading them and the machine. note that PTA does support split transactions but they are the special case. https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/README https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/README
thisisthenewme 3y ago
I recently started using Ledger this year, and I've been really impressed with its utility for me. I think, for my personal needs, https://pypi.org/project/ledger-autosync/ https://pypi.org/project/ledger-autosync/ is a must-have. I don't want create my own transactions, and with the autosync extension, I can simply export my bank transactions as QFX files and then import them into my ledger file. In the past, I struggled to accurately track my spending, and typical banking apps were either slow or lacked good querying capabilities. Now, I can easily budget, track purchases, calculate my worth across multiple accounts, and more. I guess similar results might be possible with other accounting tool but Ledger perfectly meets my requirements. Also, it integrates pretty well with Emacs and I get to check my reports from there.
- bbor 3y ago
  Lmao I wrote my own csv translator using regex, because I thought this was a paid feature of stuff like Plaid only. You’re a lifesaver! How do you download your statements though? That’s still a small sticking point for me, and it sounds like you still need to individually go to each bank and pull each statement. Maybe I just have too many credit cards lol
- globular-toast 3y ago
  It looks like ledger-autosync isn't very good at guessing what accounts to use. I wrote my own machine learning thing to do that. However my scripts are a hodgepodge with manual work required. I wonder if I could integrate the machine learning aspect into autosync...
mbork_pl 3y ago
Shameless plug – last year I published a short ebook teaching the principles of personal accounting using Ledger: https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger. In fact, I've been using Ledger for about 10 years now (earlier GnuCash), and I like it a lot.
fhd2 3y ago
I've been using ledger for years, quite happily. My setup includes a whole lot of custom code for downloading transactions from my banks, PayPal etc and classifying them automatically. I use Ledger as the storage format and to generate reports. I find it simple, pretty easy to learn and powerful. The only thing I'm really missing are custom fields, I slam a lot of information about transactions into comments.
- beej71 3y ago
  I've just done the same thing. My inputs are CSV files from all over the place, and the output is a ledger file. Driven by make, of course. :) Processing the CSVs takes about one second per year of my data, so what I think I'll probably do is summarize it out to ledger format each year. I was using awk to do the CSV parsing, and it's blazing fast. But it gets a little bit unwieldy if you have to do multiple passes through a file or if a single CSV file has multiple sections. So I moved them to Python which is far more capable, but slower.
  - fhd2 3y ago
    I use a Makefile as well :D Both to glue it all together and for the most common reports I need. For turning the CSV files into Ledger, I have a binary written in Common Lisp. Suppose I tried to make accounting exciting and it worked :P
a_gnostic 3y ago
Ledger
FerretFred 3y ago
Sounds like an interesting piece of software, but the real bonus (for me) is the site design: a model of simplicity and clarity!
bbor 3y ago
I love how this thread immediately filled up with all the accounting nerds on the site. Good to see you all again! I’ll do my part and throw in what I believe is the most popular modern take on this, beancount. I ended up going back to ledger but if the super old school interface and stack bother you, beancount might be nicer. Plus the beancount docs are just out-of-this-world good for learning double-entry accounting in general. Docs: https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_method.html#introduction https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... Comparison: https://beancount.github.io/docs/a_comparison_of_beancount_and_ledger_hledger.html https://beancount.github.io/docs/a_comparison_of_beancount_a...
- cipehr 3y ago
  I’ve been using beancount for almost 1.5 years now, and other than having to explicitly open accounts I love it! I use the fava UI to have all the nice modern visuals: https://beancount.github.io/fava/ https://beancount.github.io/fava/
- visika 3y ago
  beancount user here, I remember starting with ledger/hledger and then switching to beancount because of its nicer handling of investments (as in nicer towards the user); the "Philosophical Differences" highlighted in the docs reminded me of why I switched — and then there is fava which is cool to start with
nlh 3y ago
Allow me to gush about ledger for a moment -- I've been using it exclusively for my small business accounting for the past 3 years and it's absolutely spectacular and has been life-changing. For many years I suffered through QuickBooks because I just assumed that was the Only Way. The single biggest pain point (and it's hard to pick just one) is that QuickBooks makes it absolutely mind-numbingly difficult to bulk-change any entries in your ledger -- if you categorize 1000 items one way and your accountant later tells you to recategorize them, there is NO WAY (or at least there was no way when I did this in the early 2000s) to bulk recategorize items. So I remember the pain of having to manually change thousands of entries or, worse, doing indecipherable things like making single journal entries like "moving from X category to Y category". Discovering ledger was a breath of fresh air because the source data is just text! If you need to change data or recategorize or make any tweaks whatsoever you have the entire world of text manipulation tools at hand. You can write shell scripts and use IDEs (and believe it or not Github Copilot works REALLY well). It's just amazing to realize that the perfect accounting solution has been there the whole time and is vastly vastly SIMPLER than I ever imagined. I went through all the SaaS tools (Xero, etc.) and nothing felt right. Ledger just works and feels right.
- dmoy 3y ago
  I generally despise having to do double entry bookkeeping in the first place, but when I do (in some situations you have to), I use ledger (or hledger). Way less painful than QuickBooks if you're also a programmer or adjacent. > and believe it or not Github Copilot works REALLY well). And yes, this is one area where LLM can help. That valley between "manually duplicating these near identical entries is painful" and "but it's not painful enough to warrant a custom generator". LLM is often great for that kind of boilerplate. Gotta doublecheck the bejesus out of it though.
  - abhiyerra 3y ago
    I started setting up hledger this year and I’m with you for a small business it is absolutely great. Some notes: - The initial setup of the books is pretty time consuming especially if you have a lot of accounts. I recommend starting your most important accounts and adding as you go along. - Mass changing categories is just a search and replace so I have been getting pretty fine grained with the categories as I go along. - Being a small business the separation from business and personal is needed from a legal standpoint, but from a practical standpoint I live off an owner’s draw and a put cash into the LLC when investing in its growth. Having hledger have all my accounts, personal and business and being able to filter out appropriate reports has been great for seeing things like is the business a money pit or am I actually growing wealth over time. - I combine hledger csv output with Jupyter to generate the specific reports and charts I need. I.e business specific versus combined for taxes. This filtering also has me thinking of other ideas like figuring out which credit cards to apply for based on my expenses. Overall more fine tuned than what I have been able to achieve with Quickbooks over 8 years.
darkteflon 3y ago
A while back I switched over to using SQLite, a bunch of Python functions for munging and dBeaver as a makeshift GUI. My main focus is tax reporting rather than budgeting. The best my (awful) banks seem to be able to manage is old-fashioned CSV exports, so there’s little benefit from having something with the ability to call out to an API or import (US) standardised file formats. Anyone else doing it this way? Seems to be going pretty well so far and of course doesn’t require learning a new query language. I’m sure there’s a lot more to (h)Ledger than that, though.
peter_d_sherman 3y ago
Related: https://ledger-cli.org/features.html https://ledger-cli.org/features.html https://github.com/ledger/ledger https://github.com/ledger/ledger
abfar 3y ago
I've been using hledger for two years now, and I don't use any exported data from my banks. Here's my workflow: Everytime I make a transaction, I put a note on my phone. The note is a simplified version of hledger file format. Example: 24feb 12.5 cash food eating out at xx 6.5 bank1 phonebill 25feb ... and so on. As you can see, each block is started with the date, and each line corresponds to a journal entry. In each entry, the first item is the dollar amount, the 2nd item is the credited account, the 3rd item is the debited account, and the rest will be taken as the entry description. Every week end, I will parse this note with a Python script that I wrote, and put the output in the actual journal file. The shorthand account names in the note will be converted into actual account name (e.g. 'bank1' to 'assets:bank:bank1'), based on a dictionary file. I'd then proceed to manually check that all ending balances in hledger match with the actual amount in the real world. (It's pretty satisfying to see the numbers match.) After I've finished processing the note from my phone, that note will be archvied and I will start with a new note.
- notso411 3y ago
  [dead]
- abfar 3y ago
  Oops I messed the formatting for the example. Here we go: 24feb 12.5 cash food eating out at xx 6.5 bank1 phonebill 25feb ...
- faustlast 3y ago
  I used to do this. But now I only register cash expenses. The rest I rely on the bank to keep track of transactions and just use hledger csv rules to create ledger journals. I find it more convenient and since I deal with many bank accounts, I can check the balance on each bank report.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
marttt 3y ago
In my country, the numbered chart of accounts [1] is considered standard. A question to other (possibly European) Ledger users: have you ever considered this a hindrance or inconsistency regarding your use of the software? I've been using Ledger for almost a decade (tiny single-person "company"). At one point, though, I started migrating my stuff to PTA by OpenBSD dev Ingo Schwarze [2]. It is a small Perl utility and relies on the numbered accounts system in a separate file, so I do feel more on the same page with general accounting-related discussions and corner-case howtos in my country. I also like how PTA's reliance on account numbers also allows for a single-line oriented, very compact journal format [3]. This is great for further parsing with Unix tools. There was interesting discussion on PTA vs Ledger etc involving the author [4].FWIW, PTA is also linked on the plaintextaccounting.org website To be fair, because of little prior experience with accounting in general, I did somewhat mess up my initial system of accounts in Ledger. So the migration to PTA is also in a standstill at this point. But it is a nice system for people in countries where the numbered chart of accounts might be preferred. My only complaint is, the author might have written it in something as tiny and easily portable like Awk instead (for us occasional Windows users). But Perl, despite being "huge" in this comparison, is included in the OpenBSD base, and it is praised for text parsing, so the preference is understandable. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_accounts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_accounts 2: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/ https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/ 3: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en 4: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430 https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430
- speleding 3y ago
  My country also has a standard format (several actually). Ledger allows you to basically name any account anything you want, so you can follow that naming convention. The standard alphabetic ordering of `ledger balance` isn't very useful. I created a small script to sort the output into a format where the entries are listed in a more sensible order. One solution could be (I haven't done this yet) is prefixing each account name with the number from the standard format, that should result in the ledger balance being more useful.
  - 3y ago
ligurio 3y ago
There is an ofxstatement for converting proprietary bank statement to OFX format. https://github.com/kedder/ofxstatement https://github.com/kedder/ofxstatement
flandish 3y ago
I find I work best seeing a calendar with expenses on each upcoming date and the predicted acct balances. Have yet to find an open source replacement to this feature that Pocketsmith provides. I know I spent on junk, but I feel comfortable when I can predict it 3+ months in advance.

183 points by hggh 3y ago

Also see: hledger, a Haskell-based clone. The main benefit of using hledger seems to be better documentation, but I haven't tried ledger. Comparison of the two: https://hledger.org/ledger.html https://hledger.org/ledger.html I'm trying to start using hledger.

jesusofnazarath 3y ago
Hledger has a more sane query language, but its not as powerful as ledger's. Also probably less bugs than ledger. Ledger, however, lets you do pretty much anything you want and thats why i prefer it. of course its easier to make mistakes with it, but i prefer the freedom it offers.
lvass 3y ago
My ledger file works in both ledger and hledger, I tend to mostly use ledger as it's worked better within emacs for me. It's very rare that I even have to use the CLI. Ledger's docs are great.
notfed 3y ago
Can hledger be run in a Haskell repl? That sounds way more useful than a command line terminal. (Otherwise I'm not sure why it matters whether it was written in Haskell?)
- whateveracct 3y ago
  Yep it has a Haskell interface! That's one common feature of many Haskell CLIs - they tend to be a statically typed library thinly wrapped into a CLI.
  - wbadart 3y ago
    My favorite part of the (extensive) Haskell API is `Hledger.Cli.Script` [0]. It re-exports all the most commonly used functions and data types, meaning you're just one import away from everything you need to get started. [0]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hledger-1.32.3/docs/Hledger-Cli-Script.html https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hledger-1.32.3/docs/Hled...
- maxcoder4 3y ago
  >Otherwise I'm not sure why it matters whether it was written in Haskell? It's a common trope with less popular languages. Often when I check out some project on GitHub, the first "feature" in the readme is "written in rust".
chromatin 3y ago
A key advantage of hledger, and why I migrated from ledger, is that hledger internally orders transactions chronologically, whereas ledger inexplicably orders them in the order they appear int he file, irrespective of the date attached to them. This [ledger's approach] totally breaks the ability to break different transaction types into different files and then import all files into a master file.
- lvass 3y ago
  You can get this behavior with --sort d in argument or ledgerrc or setting LEDGER_SORT=d in your environment. Or merge files sorted by date with ledger -f file1 -f file2 --sort d print. I agree the default sorting is quite jarring, but practically every single time if some entry is out of place chronologically, for me it's because I input-ed the wrong date and the default sort makes more sense. The reason I have hledger installed is for check ordereddates.
  - speleding 3y ago
    My solution is to pick the file names in such a way that `include *.ledger` imports them in the right order (you need the latest version of ledger for that to work, in older versions the order was indeterminate)
peterhajas 3y ago
The other nice part of `hledger` is the web UI (`hledger-web`), which is handy for checking out your transactions.
faustlast 3y ago
In summary for me: hledger has better csv importing system and ledger has support for lots. I use both.
speleding 3y ago
ledger has a few powerful features that hledger lacks, for example in ledger you can create an "assert" statement that checks all your journal entries fall in the correct time period (easy to mess up if you copy/paste journal entries). But it's pretty easy to move between the two.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  hledger can validate date order, that seems to eliminate copy-paste-fail-to-update-date for me.

Jtsummers 3y ago

https://plaintextaccounting.org https://plaintextaccounting.org Includes a list of similar software and ports and their current status (active/inactive).

dbacar 3y ago

Just use Excel, man.

codetrotter 3y ago
In fact, let’s just use Excel for everything. Throw away all other software, you don’t need any of that.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Excel is the command line of the data manipulation world.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Except when Excel mangles your genomics. Or dates. Excel is the worst thing ever happened to data scientists. If sciencist knew awk/perl + gnuplot and basic C, most of the errors would't happened. From HN: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385
    - nequo 3y ago
      R is pretty good to boot, and has been around since the 1990s too. I would’ve said that Excel is the assembly of data manipulation and dplyr is the command line. The higher level of abstraction and the guardrails help.
jldugger 3y ago
I feel like GNUCash splits the difference. You still get a GUI and reporting tools, but you also get the benefit of local reasoning that double entry accounting provides: as long as every transaction is balanced the entire book is balanced. And the data model supports transactions between more than two accounts, which is extremely useful. My preferred backend is SQL based, so it's a relatively amenable to inspection and custom tooling.
3y ago

Temporary_31337 3y ago

I know that US finance is a bit behind but in Europe you can get a bank account with a nice app and even separate that into different pots or accounts free of charge. My bank automatically classifies expenses and you can of course export to csv for further analysis. I have two virtual debit cards one for personal and one for business stuff so all of the stuff ledger does is fully automatic.

__jonas 3y ago
Don't know about how it is in the US but what I enjoy about banks here is that basically all of them offer FinTS/HBCI/PSD2 or some other API to interact with the account so you can have a nice desktop app that automatically pulls info from all your accounts without ever having to interact with each banks online banking interface. For Mac for example, this one is very nice: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/moneymoney/id872698314?l=en https://apps.apple.com/de/app/moneymoney/id872698314?l=en
- Tijdreiziger 3y ago
  But you can’t use PSD2 APIs as an individual (at most banks), so if you want to use it, you necessarily have to entrust your financial data to a third party.
para_parolu 3y ago
The problem happens when you get more accounts of different types. Currently, I have around 40 accounts in ledger for me and my family. Multiple bank accounts, multiple brokerages, loans, tax optimization accounts, pension, etc. Some institutions have a good tools and some not regardless of country. I recall using european NyKredit was pain as much as bank of America. Ledger (or hledger in my case) helps to build structured “meta view” while still keeping my data private (from one vendor).
- bombcar 3y ago
  I used to have so many accounts, as I get older I get closer and closer to one account of each type.

koeng 3y ago

I use hledger for my solo-company. It is really great, and very easy to understand what is going on. Highly recommend.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

LVB 3y ago

I like the idea of plaintext accounting and have tried a few of these options a number of times, sometimes pretty earnestly, but have never landed on a satisfactory flow. I've always ended up spending quite a lot of time building out the tooling around trying to fetch from now more than a dozen accounts and then munge/categorize things acceptably. In the end, I just fall back to pressing "Download All Accounts" in the clunky-but-serviceable Moneydance (local data FTW).

Arcanum-XIII 3y ago
I have the same issue, but in Europe. Most bank don't offert a data export, so it's fun an games to try to get YOUR data. In Belgium we have CODA for companies... but they're slightly different for each bank. I've worked on this for a middleman and it's hell, between the source data sucking and the destination being cryptic. I don't understand this: why would anyone want to block this? There are no advantages. None. For either party.

nyrikki 3y ago

Double entry accounting is the original immutable event architecture. They call out that it is hard to learn, but most of that in my experience is because people don't realize that credit cards and debit cards. Just remember the formula: Assets= liabilities + capital It may be counterintuitive at first, but keeping that formula true is the requirement. Debits on the left and are positive Credits on the right and are negative. Using Excel and a cash basis has killed lots of companies where customers pay for services and products, which looks like income, while the related expenses haven't been paid for.

notfed 3y ago
> Assets= liabilities + capital Lol, that'd be nice! I think you'll want to edit that.
- nyrikki 3y ago
  Are you complaining about the order of the C and L terms? Because the accounting equation has been the same for centuries. Assets = Capital + Liabilities https://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/student/exam-support-resources/foundation-level-study-resources/fa1/technical-articles/accounting-equation.html#:~:text=Assets%20%3D%20Capital%20%2B%20Liabilities,owed%20to%20creditors%20(liabilities) https://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/student/exam-support-resour....
  - forkerenok 3y ago
    It took a second for me because I'm accustomed to people talking about Assets and Liabilities to describe the picture, so the equation in my head is the inverted one: Capital = Assets - Liabilities. I can imagine GP had a similar confusion.
    - nyrikki 3y ago
      Thanks for that explanation, Thinking about it. I was taught to call that proprietorship. Which was probably meant to remove that ambiguity. A - L = P We put it on the right side to say that was the Owners value. I never knew why they insisted on that but now I do.

globular-toast 3y ago

I've been using ledger for over a decade at this point. It's nice being able to plot my finances like total wealth over my entire adult life.

lvass 3y ago

I think all these tutorials and showcases showing CLI usage for plaintext accounting kinda miss the mark and ultimately hinders adoption. 99% of the times I interact with ledger is with the same 4 commands. The fact I have the ledger file open in emacs and use these commands from a keybind is what makes the experience great. Trust me, if you need to run some complicated analysis, (h)ledger has your back and you can find how to do it in the docs. Most of the time you don't so just go and start bookkeeping. You need your file populated to see any benefit, and they'll become obvious when you get there.

margarina72 3y ago
Do you have a good guide to start that you could recommend? It sounds quite simple when you mention it, but every time I tried to get started with Ledger with or without emacs, it always seemed too much of an undertaking and stalled pretty early... if you have a good workflow to recommend, that would be very helpful.
- ramses0 3y ago
  Just start with `hledger-ui` and like the article said: mess it up a bunch and keep fixing it or starting over. Pick one particular "zone" of finances (eg: monthly bills) and track only that part of it for a while. You'll figure it out!
- mbork_pl 3y ago
  May I recommend my ebook I linked to in another comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39494344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39494344)? You don't need a lot of commands to use Ledger successfully. 99% of the time, I only use one (`ledger bal`). The main thing is how to put stuff in your ledger file (and in fact, I devote most of the book to that). And, of course, the discipline to do it regularly (which I outsource to Beeminder).
- lvass 3y ago
  https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Principles-of-Accounting-with-Ledger https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Principles-of-Accoun... https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Keeping-a-Journal https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Keeping-a-Journal

raamdev 3y ago

I've been using Ledger for years now and with thousands of entries a year. I track investments, income, expenses, and budgeting. For mobile entry, I keep my ledger file on Dropbox and use the Drafts app and TextExpander on my iPhone to quickly append properly formatted ledger entries to the file from my phone, the moment the expense occurs. Every two to four weeks, I spend 10 minutes and use ledger-mode in Emacs to reconcile accounts with online bank / credit card transactions. It works really well and I love the flexibility and long-term portability of keeping my ledger in plain-text.

jimmcslim 3y ago
Can you share some more details on how you are using Drafts and TextExpander?
- raamdev 3y ago
  Sure! Here's what I do to add an expense from my phone: 1. Open the Drafts App on my iPhone. 2. Type "lfood", which triggers TextExpander with my ledger food expense snippet [1]. I make use of the TextExpander fill-ins feature [2] to automatically set the current date and to give me a list of dropdowns that I can use to change the account, but usually I just leave the default and only fill in the expense amount. 3. Enter the expense amount, select the credit card that I used from a dropdown if it's different from the default. 4. Trigger the 'Save to Ledger' action [3] that I created within the Drafts app [4], which appends the ledger entry to my ledger file on Dropbox. I created a short gif [5] showing this entire process in action. [1] https://i.imgur.com/NXEimql.png https://i.imgur.com/NXEimql.png [2] https://textexpander.com/learn/using/snippets/advanced-snippet-elements/advanced-fill-ins https://textexpander.com/learn/using/snippets/advanced-snipp... [3] https://i.imgur.com/LNDJNGi.png https://i.imgur.com/LNDJNGi.png [4] https://docs.getdrafts.com/actions/ https://docs.getdrafts.com/actions/ [5] https://ibb.co/vk45Kb7 https://ibb.co/vk45Kb7
  - jimmcslim 3y ago
    Fantastic, thanks for this!

compns8-ng 3y ago

Been using ledger and hledger for about four years, love them dearly. I find ledger + Emacs ledger-mode the most convenient for daily use. Hledger has a somewhat nicer way of formatting reports on the CLI, making it useful for creating ad-hoc reports and digging into your data.

zie 3y ago

Been using hledger & friends for a few days now: `2008-01-01 Opening Balance` hledger-flow is my BFF for managing this: https://github.com/apauley/hledger-flow https://github.com/apauley/hledger-flow Like others have mentioned plaintextaccounting.org is a great resource into the larger community.

rwbt 3y ago

I've been using hledger[1] - similar tool but has more features like balance sheet, income statement generation with a plain text file for the last 3 years and it's been working out great. Before that I used iBank (rebranded as Banktivity) and don't miss it at all. [1] - https://hledger.org https://hledger.org

gadiyar 3y ago

Any users of GnuCash here? Folks recommending Excel may be missing the value double-entry accounting brings.

somat 3y ago
As much as I dislike excel(mainly because of the weak data model), it can do double entry accounting just fine.
- mbork_pl 3y ago
  Do you have any templates? Happy Ledger user here, but I'd be curious to learn how people do double-entry accounting in Excel.
  - somat 3y ago
    Not really, I don't do much in excel anymore, And I probably should not be giving advice as I have no classical training in accounting. But the ledger docs have a pretty great introduction to basic accounting theory. It is not too difficult to apply this theory into whatever data storage engine you are using. https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Principles-of-Accounting-with-Ledger https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Principles-of-Accoun... the data page might be as simple as id|date|comment|from|from_amount|to|to_amount|balance_func() then a few report pages summing the values
    - yencabulator 3y ago
      That simple schema fails to represent split transactions. I went the superstore and bought groceries, computer gear, and a new battery for the car. Oh and my spouse handed me a $100 bill to cover some of the cost.
      - somat 3y ago
        Yes, a simplified schema like that fails to capture the entire semantics of a transaction. However, I find for personal finance I never need full transaction semantics and simplified two party semantics are much easier to enter and calculate. I will be honest, I use ledger and I like how it can express the complex transaction, however I also have to admit that I have never used them. If I were storing my finance data in a relational database or a spreadsheet, I would be very tempted to use the simplified two party model. I probably would not actually do it, but when I am elbow deep in code making sure to handle N-Party transactions correctly, I would be tempted. The author of the plain text accounting system(PTA) went with this simplified model and made a good case for it, one line per transaction is much easier to parse, for both the human reading them and the machine. note that PTA does support split transactions but they are the special case. https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/README https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/README

thisisthenewme 3y ago

I recently started using Ledger this year, and I've been really impressed with its utility for me. I think, for my personal needs, https://pypi.org/project/ledger-autosync/ https://pypi.org/project/ledger-autosync/ is a must-have. I don't want create my own transactions, and with the autosync extension, I can simply export my bank transactions as QFX files and then import them into my ledger file. In the past, I struggled to accurately track my spending, and typical banking apps were either slow or lacked good querying capabilities. Now, I can easily budget, track purchases, calculate my worth across multiple accounts, and more. I guess similar results might be possible with other accounting tool but Ledger perfectly meets my requirements. Also, it integrates pretty well with Emacs and I get to check my reports from there.

bbor 3y ago
Lmao I wrote my own csv translator using regex, because I thought this was a paid feature of stuff like Plaid only. You’re a lifesaver! How do you download your statements though? That’s still a small sticking point for me, and it sounds like you still need to individually go to each bank and pull each statement. Maybe I just have too many credit cards lol
globular-toast 3y ago
It looks like ledger-autosync isn't very good at guessing what accounts to use. I wrote my own machine learning thing to do that. However my scripts are a hodgepodge with manual work required. I wonder if I could integrate the machine learning aspect into autosync...

mbork_pl 3y ago

Shameless plug – last year I published a short ebook teaching the principles of personal accounting using Ledger: https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger. In fact, I've been using Ledger for about 10 years now (earlier GnuCash), and I like it a lot.

fhd2 3y ago

I've been using ledger for years, quite happily. My setup includes a whole lot of custom code for downloading transactions from my banks, PayPal etc and classifying them automatically. I use Ledger as the storage format and to generate reports. I find it simple, pretty easy to learn and powerful. The only thing I'm really missing are custom fields, I slam a lot of information about transactions into comments.

beej71 3y ago
I've just done the same thing. My inputs are CSV files from all over the place, and the output is a ledger file. Driven by make, of course. :) Processing the CSVs takes about one second per year of my data, so what I think I'll probably do is summarize it out to ledger format each year. I was using awk to do the CSV parsing, and it's blazing fast. But it gets a little bit unwieldy if you have to do multiple passes through a file or if a single CSV file has multiple sections. So I moved them to Python which is far more capable, but slower.
- fhd2 3y ago
  I use a Makefile as well :D Both to glue it all together and for the most common reports I need. For turning the CSV files into Ledger, I have a binary written in Common Lisp. Suppose I tried to make accounting exciting and it worked :P

a_gnostic 3y ago

Ledger

FerretFred 3y ago

Sounds like an interesting piece of software, but the real bonus (for me) is the site design: a model of simplicity and clarity!

bbor 3y ago

I love how this thread immediately filled up with all the accounting nerds on the site. Good to see you all again! I’ll do my part and throw in what I believe is the most popular modern take on this, beancount. I ended up going back to ledger but if the super old school interface and stack bother you, beancount might be nicer. Plus the beancount docs are just out-of-this-world good for learning double-entry accounting in general. Docs: https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_method.html#introduction https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... Comparison: https://beancount.github.io/docs/a_comparison_of_beancount_and_ledger_hledger.html https://beancount.github.io/docs/a_comparison_of_beancount_a...

cipehr 3y ago
I’ve been using beancount for almost 1.5 years now, and other than having to explicitly open accounts I love it! I use the fava UI to have all the nice modern visuals: https://beancount.github.io/fava/ https://beancount.github.io/fava/
visika 3y ago
beancount user here, I remember starting with ledger/hledger and then switching to beancount because of its nicer handling of investments (as in nicer towards the user); the "Philosophical Differences" highlighted in the docs reminded me of why I switched — and then there is fava which is cool to start with

nlh 3y ago

Allow me to gush about ledger for a moment -- I've been using it exclusively for my small business accounting for the past 3 years and it's absolutely spectacular and has been life-changing. For many years I suffered through QuickBooks because I just assumed that was the Only Way. The single biggest pain point (and it's hard to pick just one) is that QuickBooks makes it absolutely mind-numbingly difficult to bulk-change any entries in your ledger -- if you categorize 1000 items one way and your accountant later tells you to recategorize them, there is NO WAY (or at least there was no way when I did this in the early 2000s) to bulk recategorize items. So I remember the pain of having to manually change thousands of entries or, worse, doing indecipherable things like making single journal entries like "moving from X category to Y category". Discovering ledger was a breath of fresh air because the source data is just text! If you need to change data or recategorize or make any tweaks whatsoever you have the entire world of text manipulation tools at hand. You can write shell scripts and use IDEs (and believe it or not Github Copilot works REALLY well). It's just amazing to realize that the perfect accounting solution has been there the whole time and is vastly vastly SIMPLER than I ever imagined. I went through all the SaaS tools (Xero, etc.) and nothing felt right. Ledger just works and feels right.

dmoy 3y ago
I generally despise having to do double entry bookkeeping in the first place, but when I do (in some situations you have to), I use ledger (or hledger). Way less painful than QuickBooks if you're also a programmer or adjacent. > and believe it or not Github Copilot works REALLY well). And yes, this is one area where LLM can help. That valley between "manually duplicating these near identical entries is painful" and "but it's not painful enough to warrant a custom generator". LLM is often great for that kind of boilerplate. Gotta doublecheck the bejesus out of it though.
- abhiyerra 3y ago
  I started setting up hledger this year and I’m with you for a small business it is absolutely great. Some notes: - The initial setup of the books is pretty time consuming especially if you have a lot of accounts. I recommend starting your most important accounts and adding as you go along. - Mass changing categories is just a search and replace so I have been getting pretty fine grained with the categories as I go along. - Being a small business the separation from business and personal is needed from a legal standpoint, but from a practical standpoint I live off an owner’s draw and a put cash into the LLC when investing in its growth. Having hledger have all my accounts, personal and business and being able to filter out appropriate reports has been great for seeing things like is the business a money pit or am I actually growing wealth over time. - I combine hledger csv output with Jupyter to generate the specific reports and charts I need. I.e business specific versus combined for taxes. This filtering also has me thinking of other ideas like figuring out which credit cards to apply for based on my expenses. Overall more fine tuned than what I have been able to achieve with Quickbooks over 8 years.

darkteflon 3y ago

A while back I switched over to using SQLite, a bunch of Python functions for munging and dBeaver as a makeshift GUI. My main focus is tax reporting rather than budgeting. The best my (awful) banks seem to be able to manage is old-fashioned CSV exports, so there’s little benefit from having something with the ability to call out to an API or import (US) standardised file formats. Anyone else doing it this way? Seems to be going pretty well so far and of course doesn’t require learning a new query language. I’m sure there’s a lot more to (h)Ledger than that, though.

peter_d_sherman 3y ago

Related: https://ledger-cli.org/features.html https://ledger-cli.org/features.html https://github.com/ledger/ledger https://github.com/ledger/ledger

abfar 3y ago

I've been using hledger for two years now, and I don't use any exported data from my banks. Here's my workflow: Everytime I make a transaction, I put a note on my phone. The note is a simplified version of hledger file format. Example: 24feb 12.5 cash food eating out at xx 6.5 bank1 phonebill 25feb ... and so on. As you can see, each block is started with the date, and each line corresponds to a journal entry. In each entry, the first item is the dollar amount, the 2nd item is the credited account, the 3rd item is the debited account, and the rest will be taken as the entry description. Every week end, I will parse this note with a Python script that I wrote, and put the output in the actual journal file. The shorthand account names in the note will be converted into actual account name (e.g. 'bank1' to 'assets:bank:bank1'), based on a dictionary file. I'd then proceed to manually check that all ending balances in hledger match with the actual amount in the real world. (It's pretty satisfying to see the numbers match.) After I've finished processing the note from my phone, that note will be archvied and I will start with a new note.

notso411 3y ago
[dead]
abfar 3y ago
Oops I messed the formatting for the example. Here we go: 24feb 12.5 cash food eating out at xx 6.5 bank1 phonebill 25feb ...
faustlast 3y ago
I used to do this. But now I only register cash expenses. The rest I rely on the bank to keep track of transactions and just use hledger csv rules to create ledger journals. I find it more convenient and since I deal with many bank accounts, I can check the balance on each bank report.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

marttt 3y ago

In my country, the numbered chart of accounts [1] is considered standard. A question to other (possibly European) Ledger users: have you ever considered this a hindrance or inconsistency regarding your use of the software? I've been using Ledger for almost a decade (tiny single-person "company"). At one point, though, I started migrating my stuff to PTA by OpenBSD dev Ingo Schwarze [2]. It is a small Perl utility and relies on the numbered accounts system in a separate file, so I do feel more on the same page with general accounting-related discussions and corner-case howtos in my country. I also like how PTA's reliance on account numbers also allows for a single-line oriented, very compact journal format [3]. This is great for further parsing with Unix tools. There was interesting discussion on PTA vs Ledger etc involving the author [4].FWIW, PTA is also linked on the plaintextaccounting.org website To be fair, because of little prior experience with accounting in general, I did somewhat mess up my initial system of accounts in Ledger. So the migration to PTA is also in a standstill at this point. But it is a nice system for people in countries where the numbered chart of accounts might be preferred. My only complaint is, the author might have written it in something as tiny and easily portable like Awk instead (for us occasional Windows users). But Perl, despite being "huge" in this comparison, is included in the OpenBSD base, and it is praised for text parsing, so the preference is understandable. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_accounts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_accounts 2: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/ https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/ 3: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en 4: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430 https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430

speleding 3y ago
My country also has a standard format (several actually). Ledger allows you to basically name any account anything you want, so you can follow that naming convention. The standard alphabetic ordering of `ledger balance` isn't very useful. I created a small script to sort the output into a format where the entries are listed in a more sensible order. One solution could be (I haven't done this yet) is prefixing each account name with the number from the standard format, that should result in the ledger balance being more useful.
- 3y ago

ligurio 3y ago

There is an ofxstatement for converting proprietary bank statement to OFX format. https://github.com/kedder/ofxstatement https://github.com/kedder/ofxstatement

flandish 3y ago

I find I work best seeing a calendar with expenses on each upcoming date and the predicted acct balances. Have yet to find an open source replacement to this feature that Pocketsmith provides. I know I spent on junk, but I feel comfortable when I can predict it 3+ months in advance.