Plaintextaccounting Alternatives

plaintextaccounting reviews and mentions

• My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024)
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Mar 2025

  Yeah, the site and service seem to be trying to attract a range of people. However, `beancount` and the other `ledger-cli` like tools are all just plain-text files with a semi-rigid markup for recording transactions.

  https://plaintextaccounting.org/ is the resource for most of them, and has good resources for making them work for you. It's not for everyone, though, many people just prefer spreadsheets or apps, and that's fine.

• Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2025

  https://plaintextaccounting.org/

  Quite a bit of a ramp up to get used to it, but no other tool outside of spreadsheets comes close to flexibility.

• Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Sep 2024
• Ask HN: Best option for lightweight data persistence for simple local program?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 May 2024

  Text files are fine.

  Check out plain text accounting:

  https://plaintextaccounting.org/

• Double-Entry Bookkeeping as a Directed Graph
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Apr 2024

  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/

• Pandoc
  17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jan 2024
• Ask HN: How Do You Budget?
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Dec 2023

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

• Trakk: expense trakking app
  2 projects | /r/personalfinanceindia | 6 Nov 2023

  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.

• Mint is shutting down, and it's pushing users toward Credit Karma
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Nov 2023

  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.

• Why plain text accounting over tools like excel or other accounting software, apart from version control?
  1 project | /r/plaintextaccounting | 27 Oct 2023
• A note from our sponsor - InfluxDB
  www.influxdata.com | 13 May 2025

  InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now. Learn more →