plaintextaccounting VS actual

I use ledger: https://ledger-cli.org/

I believe this same plain text format is used by other tools, which you can find info about here: https://plaintextaccounting.org/ (In particular a lot of people seem to use hledger and beancount)

The ledger is written using a text editor. The purpose of the software is to add everything up, calculate the balances and make sure everything balances. I keep all of my 12 years of accounting in one file and haven't noticed any slowdown. But a real business would surely have many more accounts and may want to split files by financial year or something.

I use helper scripts to convert the data from my bank CSV downloads into ledger format. It uses machine learning to associate payees to accounts (e.g. "Tesco" gets filed to the account "Expenses:Groceries"). I haven't maintained the ML part although it works for me most of the time. In case it's useful, the code is here: https://github.com/georgek/accounts/

I invite you to hang out in the https://plaintextaccounting.org/#news-discussion -> chats, we like to discuss tactics.

My attempt at solving the same problem https://paisa.fyi. It builds on top of https://plaintextaccounting.org/ principles and is available as a CLI/Desktop App.

ledger, hledger, beancount: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

Gnucash

Firefly III

The plain text accounting options are by far the best if you're willing to give up automatic pretty navigation and graphing.

Same: see also https://plaintextaccounting.org/

...the gist is "ledger.exe" (crufty-old-C-program) is the "perl" of plain-text-accounting. The implementation _is_ the specification.

"HLedger" (haskell) is the mostly-compatible ("now you have 15 standards!") which cleans up a bit of the crufty accidents and is considered more "pure" and "correct".

Mess with it for funsies, and consider using `hledger-ui` for browsing. It's really really powerful!

Specifically this part is super cool: https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Commodities-and-Curr...

...and: https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Currency-and-Commodi...

Implied exchange rates, arbitrary commodities/inventory. It gets into really heady territory pretty quick.

Does anyone know of in the spirit of something like plain text accounting (https://plaintextaccounting.org/) but adapted to integrate the complexities of a wealthy family? I intend to implement something myself, but was interesting if there was anything else out there.

The point would be to design something that substitutes for Addepar but with a sensibly organized sqlite db and csvs as "first class" sources of truth (and scripts to handle a variety of common functionality).

So it is really an exercise in understanding the correct architecture of various hierarchies, relationships, and categories in the context of a wealthy family.

All the major software out there just does not seem very good, have a principled handle on the fundamental and primitive relationships and operations that describe a family's financial affairs (everything done on an ad hoc basis). And because of this, entail complete data/platform lock-in.

I use Beancount; learned at https://plaintextaccounting.org/.

I use ledger (https://plaintextaccounting.org/) to manage my transactions in plain text and then generate reports. I copy/paste the transactions from pdfs received monthly in an Emacs Org file and then convert them to ledger format using ob-lc (https://github.com/jayrajput/ob-ledger-convert). There is a steep learning curve, but the results are awesome.

There is some experimental work being done with SimpleFIN integration[1] for US banks but I can't comment on how well that works.

Personally, I add each transaction manually. It allows me to stay on top my budget.

[1] https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues/2272

If you know how to self host, or have someone to teach you, you should check out Actual, https://actualbudget.org

Please upvote the feature request: https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues/2042

ActualBudget

But several months ago I went back to check out Actual budget which was a sort of YNAB-clone whose author decided to release as open source. If you are comfortable with a bit of command line work, you can install it easily enough running as a hosted service in the free tier of a provider. I'm running in fly.io (docs for that are here). It was a bit fiddly trying to get set up for the first time, but the docs are detailed, and since I got it working it's been flawless and easy.

The repo is pretty active too, wonder if there’s a follow up blog post about the transition. https://github.com/actualbudget/actual