ledger-autosync VS hledger

as far as the ledger-cli google groups [1] go, they seem to think it is a proper journal file. It has been fairly tested with OFX imports (https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/OFX-Import) as well bank autosync (https://github.com/egh/ledger-autosync).

In fact, someone also wrote a book on this - https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/

I will defer if you are indeed building your own competing tool in this space which is better, but holding to the original point of my request - maybe it will be incremental to support your format if ledger-cli format is supported today. versus not supporting any disk format (or inventing a new one).

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/ledger-cli/search?q=double%20ent...

There is also ledger and ledger-import, together with other tools like >, ledger-autosync and emacs.

If you are willing to write personal tools, the very first IME will be a way to import transactions from your bank(s) out of the formats they offer, avoid duplication, handling "history changes" (for instance debit cards in most (all?) countries appear immediately then change when the payment processors gives details to the bank) etc. That can be a nice intro/base https://github.com/egh/ledger-autosync but for stocks is more complicated: much depend of your trading choices: if you do rare put/call bank export + "live" quote from Yahoo Finance might be ok, if you do day trading or scalping you need a more "near-real time" source of data, and that's are not free at least in EU (France/Italy/Sweden AFAIK), there are some SIM that offer rest APIs with various price policies...

ledger-autosync [1] tries to solve this problem, by pulling the data for you from supporting banks. If I understand things correctly, this [2] is the list of banks it can successfully pull data from.

[1] https://github.com/egh/ledger-autosync

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 .