hledger VS beancount

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 and this [bash script](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/a3c300b/bake) have been replaced by this roughly equivalent [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Justfil...)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.

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/2047 . Thanks!

For help getting started or more info, see https://hledger.org and join our Matrix/IRC chat or mail list: https://hledger.org/support . Newcomers, experts, contributors, sponsors, feedback are welcome! For more about plain text accounting, see https://plaintextaccounting.org .

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).

beancount -> https://beancount.github.io/

The beancount documentation has some good background material, and the concepts apply to ledger as well.

I track my personal finances using beancount. I have a plugin that I wrote for myself, which in beancount is a python module that is installed in the same python environment as beancount is.