2 ms·

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 le

by 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.

by dmoy 3y ago

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.