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What's your plan if you need to share the books with someone else (tax authority, accounting firm, etc)? Can ledger export it some industry-standard format that

What's your plan if you need to share the books with someone else (tax authority, accounting firm, etc)? Can ledger export it some industry-standard format that will let you share this information? Or, at the end of the day is the default interchange format in this space just CSV?

mths 3y ago
Is there even an industry standard format? I've been dumping CSV to my accountant and I plan on doing the same for the tax authority if they came knocking. Something tells me they can't be too picky about such things. My experience with the tax authorities in three countries now tells me they'll take whatever odd format data you hand them.
- delusional 3y ago
  There is not. Financial accounting is built on random csv-ish formats and pure brute force. Half the time we can't even agree on using the same date format within the same dataset. One of our banking partners even require macros (yes, excel vba macros) to be enabled for their data to make sense. It's madness, but if you want to make money, you can't be picky with the data formats.
- anon948987 3y ago
  Norway actually has a national standard called SAF-T https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/business-and-organisation/start-and-run/best-practices-accounting-and-cash-register-systems/saf-t-financial/ https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/business-and-organisation/sta... > SAF-T Financial is a standard format used in the exchange of accounting data. SAF-T, or Standard Audit File-Tax, is the result of a joint development collaboration between the business community, the accounting sector and the Norwegian Tax Administration, based on a recommendation by the OECD.
speleding 3y ago
My business is over 15 years old by now and our ledger use has grown to encompass 7 different currencies and multiple corporate entities (by calling ledger with different includes we can generate a combined ledger across entities, very nice, try doing that with one of those online tools). So at some point you are going to have to deal with an accountant who will not typically know what ledger is. The solution is actually very simple: we wrote a small ruby script that generates an excel file that contains a balance and profit and loss statement in a format they are familiar with. That's the cool think about everything being text based, it's really easy to pipe the ledger output into a script and into a gem that generates an Excel file and add some styling. The raw journal files are also in a format accountants can easily comprehend, they didn't actually look at those in our case, but if they want to know where the Excel comes from they are welcome to audit them.

mths 3y ago

Is there even an industry standard format? I've been dumping CSV to my accountant and I plan on doing the same for the tax authority if they came knocking. Something tells me they can't be too picky about such things. My experience with the tax authorities in three countries now tells me they'll take whatever odd format data you hand them.

delusional 3y ago
There is not. Financial accounting is built on random csv-ish formats and pure brute force. Half the time we can't even agree on using the same date format within the same dataset. One of our banking partners even require macros (yes, excel vba macros) to be enabled for their data to make sense. It's madness, but if you want to make money, you can't be picky with the data formats.
anon948987 3y ago
Norway actually has a national standard called SAF-T https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/business-and-organisation/start-and-run/best-practices-accounting-and-cash-register-systems/saf-t-financial/ https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/business-and-organisation/sta... > SAF-T Financial is a standard format used in the exchange of accounting data. SAF-T, or Standard Audit File-Tax, is the result of a joint development collaboration between the business community, the accounting sector and the Norwegian Tax Administration, based on a recommendation by the OECD.

speleding 3y ago

My business is over 15 years old by now and our ledger use has grown to encompass 7 different currencies and multiple corporate entities (by calling ledger with different includes we can generate a combined ledger across entities, very nice, try doing that with one of those online tools). So at some point you are going to have to deal with an accountant who will not typically know what ledger is. The solution is actually very simple: we wrote a small ruby script that generates an excel file that contains a balance and profit and loss statement in a format they are familiar with. That's the cool think about everything being text based, it's really easy to pipe the ledger output into a script and into a gem that generates an Excel file and add some styling. The raw journal files are also in a format accountants can easily comprehend, they didn't actually look at those in our case, but if they want to know where the Excel comes from they are welcome to audit them.