dotfiles VS hledger

Have you tried `ledger xact` command? This helps to create new transactions based on previous ones. I have a small wrapper[1] for this, namely "la", which enables me to do something like "la coles 5" to create a new transaction like previous supermarket transaction with the today as date, same from and to accounts, and $5 as amount. If I want to change something, it could be as complete as "la [YYYY.MM.DD/M.D/D] coles grocery 5 credit". If someone has tens of transactions per day it is very likely they are all similar and only little extra adjustment is needed.

Also I use a credit card for most of my expenses, and there are only a handful of bank transfers per month from my access account. Every first day of the month I pull out last month's credit card statement and log all the transactions. It usually takes less than 30 minutes.

[1]: https://github.com/roylez/dotfiles/blob/master/misc/bin/la

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 and this [bash script](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/a3c300b/bake) have been replaced by this roughly equivalent [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Justfil...)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