plaintextaccounting VS hledger

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.

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 .