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I'd embrace plain text accounting more if it had a better schema. Ledger's is absolutely atrocious, and it drives my OCD nuts trying to use vim to "write" acco

I'd embrace plain text accounting more if it had a better schema. Ledger's is absolutely atrocious, and it drives my OCD nuts trying to use vim to "write" accounting entries. I think my ideal PTA would be some kind of jsonnet-based system where I can create/call functions to generate journal entries.

XorNot 2y ago
For a time I threw together a bunch of python scripts which did billing for me based on YAML files which struck a nice balance of readability vs programmability (since YAML turns into lines quite well and has less special character noise).
- mrngm 2y ago
  > less special character noise I hope you've at least once stumbled upon the existence of https://noyaml.com/ https://noyaml.com/ and/or, at the time, were familiar with the quirks regarding number interpretation.
wuming2 2y ago
GNU recutils should become the standard backend. Plain text db which has a powerful albeit simple records format, proper ids, enforces constraints, removes need of silly type conventions better defined in fields with %type, built in encryption. Foreign keys. Auto generated fields. Regex. No one in their right of mind will want to manually edit the data store holding critical accounting data. 99% of the times should be ETL with the odd visual check for inspiration.
- euroderf 2y ago
  A recutils clone in Go would be pleasantly hackable for whipping up some double-entry.
  - wuming2 2y ago
    The wheel is there already. Call librec from Lua and speed up your plain text accounting with LuaJIT.
    - euroderf 2y ago
      Lua oh noes. I pick a language and stick with it for years. Currently Go.
FredPret 2y ago
You never have to look at it. I have an Excel - one file a year - with a schema that makes sense to me, then a Python script to convert that to {year}.beancount. The script is triggered by fswatch. So I get a browser frontend with fava and data input in Excel. It’s non-trivial, but then so is any form of accounting.
BeetleB 2y ago
I suggest use some other tool for data entry, and as long as you can figure out its internal format, write a script to output to ledger. That's what I do with KMyMoney.
speleding 2y ago
ledger can validate that all account names are pre-defined, are formatted in a specific way with regard to decimal and thousands separator, their currency specified and a few more things. (None of these are enforced by default, but for any serious use of ledger you would want to set `--strict` in your .ledgerrc file) What else would you want ledger to enforce? We actually have a few very specific (to us) rules we enforce, but we do that via a ruby script. That's the power of plain text accounting: you can just whip up a small script to do validation for you.

XorNot 2y ago

For a time I threw together a bunch of python scripts which did billing for me based on YAML files which struck a nice balance of readability vs programmability (since YAML turns into lines quite well and has less special character noise).

mrngm 2y ago
> less special character noise I hope you've at least once stumbled upon the existence of https://noyaml.com/ https://noyaml.com/ and/or, at the time, were familiar with the quirks regarding number interpretation.

wuming2 2y ago

GNU recutils should become the standard backend. Plain text db which has a powerful albeit simple records format, proper ids, enforces constraints, removes need of silly type conventions better defined in fields with %type, built in encryption. Foreign keys. Auto generated fields. Regex. No one in their right of mind will want to manually edit the data store holding critical accounting data. 99% of the times should be ETL with the odd visual check for inspiration.

euroderf 2y ago
A recutils clone in Go would be pleasantly hackable for whipping up some double-entry.
- wuming2 2y ago
  The wheel is there already. Call librec from Lua and speed up your plain text accounting with LuaJIT.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    Lua oh noes. I pick a language and stick with it for years. Currently Go.

FredPret 2y ago

You never have to look at it. I have an Excel - one file a year - with a schema that makes sense to me, then a Python script to convert that to {year}.beancount. The script is triggered by fswatch. So I get a browser frontend with fava and data input in Excel. It’s non-trivial, but then so is any form of accounting.

BeetleB 2y ago

I suggest use some other tool for data entry, and as long as you can figure out its internal format, write a script to output to ledger. That's what I do with KMyMoney.

speleding 2y ago

ledger can validate that all account names are pre-defined, are formatted in a specific way with regard to decimal and thousands separator, their currency specified and a few more things. (None of these are enforced by default, but for any serious use of ledger you would want to set `--strict` in your .ledgerrc file) What else would you want ledger to enforce? We actually have a few very specific (to us) rules we enforce, but we do that via a ruby script. That's the power of plain text accounting: you can just whip up a small script to do validation for you.