Plaintextaccounting Alternatives

plaintextaccounting reviews and mentions

• What Are You Working On?
  25 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jun 2026

  Reworking my ERP so is becoming more a "system" than an "app" and has composable units to build any kind of business transaction.

  Think like https://plaintextaccounting.org but with more metadata so it can model the flow from manufacturing/production to sales.

  Is build with Rust and hope to launch this year.

• Show HN: Fungible – A local personal finance app in the terminal
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 May 2026

  It might be too late, but have you thought about using something like ledger/beancount for the storage?

  Having a nice tui/plaid sync for plaintextaccounting would be nice.

  https://plaintextaccounting.org/

• Minimal Viable Programs (2014)
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2026

  Though see the Plain Text Accounting[0] movement for something maybe more unixy than Gnucash. I download .csv files from my bank and credit card issuers and import to hledger. hledger has its own rules engine for filtering/transforming imported entries, but you could also preprocess the files using any unix tool before importing if you needed to.

  0: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

  1: https://hledger.org/

• Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2026
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Sep 2024
• 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.

• 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
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  www.saashub.com | 15 Jun 2026

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