hledger VS beancount

A simple TUI to view various financial reports of your personal finances. Uses hledger[1] under the hood for the accounting stuff.

[1]: https://hledger.org

For historical interest (though to compare you really need to work with them over a period of time), here's a thousand line [Makefile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/2d35b1051/Makef...) that was converted to a [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/43c93eb37/Justf...). And here's the kind of template I used for multicommand shell scripts when trying those ([ft](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/43c93eb37/bin/f...), [tt](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/43c93eb37/bin/t...)).

I'm surprised that there is no mentions of a great hacker-friendly plain-text accounting software called `ledger` https://ledger-cli.org/ in this thread. It has amazing documentation when it comes to understanding basic principles of double-entry bookkeeping and goes through many typical situations and usecases. There are also several forks, most popular and advanced is `hledger` https://hledger.org/ (h is for Haskell), which provides some neat features out of the box, such as a simple web interface. All of them are very primitive compared to "professional" accounting software, but in return it offers great opportunities for hacking around while ensuring validity of your books.

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

I can offer this (warning, crufty real-world scripts ahead!): these [make](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Makefil...) [files](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Makefil...) and this [bash script](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/a3c300b/bake) have been replaced by this roughly equivalent [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Justfil...) (some old things were commented out, some new things were added).

I'm only a few weeks in, and just has its own learning curve, but I'm very pleased overall. Cognitive load is down, usability is up, robustness is up.

As far as I can tell this is without the planned C++ rewrite though, and the documentation at https://beancount.github.io/ still says to use v2.

Is there a point in migrating already?

On average for calendar year 2024, it was $35 a day, living in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. For two people. My guess would be this is on the higher end of things, but I'm curious about others. Another factor is I am 95kg, 15% bf and train 6 times a week, so I eat a lot. (I beancount[1] my finances.)

[1]: https://beancount.github.io/

Have you had a look into plain text accounting like e.g. https://beancount.github.io/ ?

Also written in Python, loads of tooling around it. Might be even good to “just” as the database.

[1] https://plaintextaccounting.org [2] https://ledger-cli.org [3] https://beancount.github.io

I used Beancount + Fava for a web UI for years. It stores everything in plaintext files, but the downside is you either have to manually enter everything or probably write a script to import csv/qfx from your bank(s).