Systems that use immediate strict categorization don’t work for some people. At a company I worked at we went with a two-phase approach. A person would write notes (literally iphone notes) in the following format:

  Apr 5 24
  -50 Alice tools
  -220 Bob home project

  Apr 2 24
  +20 Bob returned loan

Note that time goes “up” to avoid scrolling too much on open. Later we loaded it into a script which would parse dates, detect keywords and make templates for proper double-entry. It would detect both the outer “agent” and the internal analytics and also put the original text as a comment. What it couldn’t detect had to be manually categorized and (sometimes) added to the script. Of course the script used editable lists for correspondence, not only hardcoded values. These lists were person-specific, so that Alice and Bob wouldn’t have to sync their vocabularies.

I cannot imagine any of the people at that company filling this

  9/19 (1234) comment here
    Cat1:cat2:cat3
    Cat4:cat5

every time money moves and they are in a queue, in the car, talking to someone, etc. They’d simply resort to smaller notes again in the notes app or in the chat, or would try to “remember” it, to fill properly at the end of the day (more likely week).

I've been using ledger (ledger-cli) from the moment I first became self employed (almost twenty years ago). While far from perfect, I'm very happy about it. It's nice that everything is in plain text, which means that I can script things, read everything in VIM, and easily extract data. For one of my two current companies, the ledger file is 2MB of plain text and contains the transactions from 2016 onwards.

While I personally didn't find much value in lots of different "accounts" (categories), it's still been indispensable in keeping track of everything.

Learning double-entry bookkeeping (which tools like ledger use) was really fun (and not that hard in hindsight) and probably a skill that is useful for the rest of my life.

Plain Text Accounting has become significantly easier to do for me on a regular basis, thanks to LLMs. Specifically: importing bank statements into hledger and avoiding manual entry.

I use a JSON file to map bank entries to my hledger accounts. For new transactions without mappings, I run a Python script that generates a prompt for Claude. It lists my hledger accounts and asks for mappings for the new entries.

Claude returns hledger journal entries based on these mappings, which I can quickly review.

Then another script prints out hledger journal entries for that month's bank transactions, all cleanly mapped. It takes me just a few minutes to tweak and finalize.

I can also specify these mapping instructions in plain-language which would've otherwise been a fragile hodgepodge of regexps and conditionals.

I've been using Beancount, really enjoyed learning it, writing tools for data import and having a hands-on experience with accounting. But it's been almost a year since I last imported data, I planned to do it monthly but it's a bit of a chore (it takes 30 to 60 mins despite a lot of it being automated).

I use ledger for all bookkeeping and accounting for personal and many LLCs. If you’re a terminal rat and cli master, use vim or emacs, sed/awk know the basics, script in bash/python/perl/ruby regularly then just learn ledger and double entry accounting and switch to it and I suspect you will be much happier than whatever you are doing today.

A few basic tips:

- reckon is helpful for importing transactions quickly. https://github.com/cantino/reckon

- use “include” to break up the problem.

- bal —-dc is something US accountants might recognize a bit. but more likely than not they are incapable of understanding negatives correctly in the way ledger uses them, so easier to just write a few scripts to convert it to DR CR style for them. I’ve been shocked at how little abstraction accountants I’ve dealt with are capable of.

I've written a series of posts on practical "recipes" for how to use Ledger (one of the leading plain text accounting systems) effectively in more complex situations beyond the basic tutorials: https://felixcrux.com/blog/ledger-practices

Plain text accounting is cool but I think one of the biggest barriers for people is downloading bank data into a standard format.

The banks are never going to embrace much more than CSV or excel files... the various data aggregation platforms (yodlee, plaid, etc...) are not open source or hobbyist friendly.

Back in ancient times there was a company called Wesabe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesabe) that wrote software that did bank syncing on your desktop. Mint.com basically put them out of business but I still think about that approach. I think it could work for open source.

Has anyone else?

Straight domain:

* 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022005

* 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420797

* 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11164330

Various other mentions of the concept:

* https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Plain+Text+Accounting

I’d appreciate hearing how others have used the various plain text accounting tools for their own use. Are you legitimately using it to inform yourself of your spending habits and taking corrective action? Is it simply for tracking your expenses, revenues, net worth, etc? Or is it simply about the process? I can certainly see the appeal of such an orderly, structured process.

Every time I’m reminded of plain text accounting, I have either an irresistible urge to immerse myself fully into the process, or feelings of guilt for not staying committed to my previous attempts. Right now, it’s mainly guilt, since I’ve not updated my personal ledger in a month and a half. Ultimately, I think I’m unsure about why I’m using it, and eventually feel like I’m logging transactions just for the sake of it.

The cookbook section is rather unfortunately named in the context of accounting :^)

I've wanted to explore this so that I've got records of all my transactions which I can feed to generative AI when it eventually becomes capable enough.

E.g. "Using my financial records, help me set a budget which allows me to do XYZ within ABC bounds."

I wonder if anyone else has done this yet?

I’m a huge ledger fan (hledger specifically) and have used it to run my entire accounting life for the past 8 years or so.

A few tips:

* Resist the urge to break up your various accounts into too many separate files. I tried that and went back to one file per account per year (aka “venmo-2024.hledger”). Also helps with below…

* GitHub CoPilot is remarkably and shockingly good at working with ledger files. It will do the balance addition/subtraction on following lines almost perfectly. Also, if you need to manually enter a new line, you can often just enter a shortcut one-line comment and it’ll fill the entire entry, aka:

; 10/1/24 -$250 for new business cards

Is there an text editor that is able to autocomplete the categories in hledger format ? It would be great to type Assets:: and then get a list of the possible categories, but I haven't found any editor or extension that does it.

I love PTA and have been doing it for years, using beancount, fava and emacs.

The main benefit for me is keeping track of everything, including pensions, RSU vests and so on.

I have some scripts that help me connect to banks and translate the transactions into the correct format with some crude rules based categorisation, along with scripts that convert CSV files from investment accounts etc.

It’s a lot of effort at first but I’ve got the system down now to maybe 10-15 minutes work once a week to keep everything updated.

I'm looking for a plain-text solution that also knows about inventory (counts, FIFO, dollar cost averaging) along with invoices/POs (AP/AR.)

Also, I wish they would use words like "debit" and "credit" instead of trying to hide this under +/- notation. It makes translating from real financial documents or scenarios into plain-text reports somewhat painful because we're not speaking the same language.

I just switched off of ledger because multiple accountants and tax preparers didn’t know what to do with it even if I hand generated profit and loss reports.

Quickbooks online has gotten pretty good. I honestly wouldn’t recommend these plain text tools anymore. Quickbooks has become almost a standard.

Has anyone tried training their own personal machine learning model to take export from their Bank+receipts and auto categorize everything? It seems like it'd be a fairly simple classification model that wouldn't require too much training...

Not entirely related to this but, I always wanted to download my transaction information from the banks and keep it locally on a periodic basis so that I can keep track of the transfers I have done to a sepefici account. From a business perspective this is very much helpful, but not able to find any free and opensource solution for it. Have done something using Python , but updating it in a periodic basis is difficult considering there is no API there to provide this data.

How does PTA perform with a medium long ledger, say 1m transactions. Basic checks like summing the ledger, how long does that take?

    $ hledger -f examples/1Mtxns-1kaccts.journal stats
    Main file           : .../1Mtxns-1kaccts.journal
    Included files      : 0
    Txns span           : 2000-01-01 to 4737-11-28 (1000000 days)
    Last txn            : 4737-11-27 (990974 days from now)
    Txns                : 1000000 (1.0 per day)
    Txns last 30 days   : 31 (1.0 per day)
    Txns last 7 days    : 8 (1.1 per day)
    Payees/descriptions : 1000000
    Accounts            : 1000 (depth 10)
    Commodities         : 26
    Market prices       : 1000000
    Runtime stats       : 80.23 s elapsed, 12465 txns/s, 2584 MB live, 7679 MB alloc

Wow, I had no idea accounting was such a big thing outside of like, actual full time accountants.

Doesn't using anything but some ultra well known service amplify the consequences of failure?

Like, isn't the IRS going to think any tech related error is more suspicious than if you had used some cloud thingy?

for folks running their own businesses, have you managed to switch from xero to ledger/beancount? anything to look out for?

xero keeps raising their prices every few months, which is annoying (the whole attitude of 'you won't switch anyway, so we'll do whatever we want').

Welcome again to PTA, HN friends!

I set up the plaintextaccounting.org site in 2016, to grow a more organised info hub and community around ledger (2003), hledger (2007), beancount (2008), and the many related apps and resources. I'm happy to answer questions; there's also a FAQ on the site.

I don't spend as much time as I'd like making the site and docs better. Feedback and help is always welcome. Stability, efficiency, and longevity are all important, which is one reason it remains fairly simple.

This style of tools and workflows for bookkeeping/accounting, which I named "plain text accounting" for convenience, but was first popularised by Ledger starting in 2003, has a number of aspects; it's not so easy to explain briefly. I think a key one is the use of textual domain specific languages for interacting with the accounting software's internal data model. I mean the various file formats of the PTA tools (describing data), and also the tools' command line interfaces and related scripts and idioms (describing reports or actions).

Textual languages are more expressive and flexible, version controllable, and modular/scriptable/glueable than GUIs, which tend to be more static in their capabilities. Note once you have one text DSL, it's relatively easy to add more, eg custom formats that better fit your needs. And such DSLs need not preclude GUIs; they can be an alternative (perhaps assisted by smart editors/IDEs), complementary, or a foundation.

-Simon

I see a lot of people in here using hledger or beancount over ledger. Could somebody explain the differences? Looking to get back into PTA, but am facing some choice paralysis now.

In the past I've tried various free accounting tools, but sadly none of them could track account/card numbers (EDIT: while processing bank statement exports). I don't need to track my many bread and pastry purchases, but I'd like to track things like investments, split lunches, rent from flatmates etc.

I have multiple accounts and I need to track transactions between them, and also distinguish them for all other transactions. Could anyone here recommend a tool that deals well with this?

I'm partial to semi-ad-hoc plain-text bookkeeping, which I already do for other things, but I'd be happy for any recommendations.

Emacs org mode is useful for this. Its plain text tables have spreadsheet capabilities and you can cross reference other tables, to separate out things.

I'm not using any of these tools yet, although this article popped up at just the right time because Quickbooks and my bank conspired to miss a bunch of transactions that I'm cleaning up now... but that's beside the point.

The strategy I've used for different accounts/categories is to make accounts that match the expense categories that the Canada Revenue Agency wants on my tax return. Early on when I was getting into it I made a bunch of accounts for logical categories (Hosting Expenses, Prototype/Manufacturing Expenses, etc) but then after a few years of trying to map those categories into CRA categories... I just realized I could pre-categorize them appropriately and make my taxes simpler at the end of the year.

When I sold my house, the escrow company mailed me a refund check of about $3000 on the closing. I never got that check. Guess how I found out about it, 5 years later, when I started using ledger-cli?

+1 for ledger. It has been the best one I've used. The fact you can script it is f'ing amazing. My taxes have been on-point for 2+ years now since I started using it.

In thinking a bit more, I think the biggest pain point for me is one with plain text in general: it supports no attachments. I have my own system to refer to specific files and built a Mac app that lets me drop a file on a transaction, then it copies that file into a specific folder and adds a tag to the transaction. This could be done so much easier if the data would be sqlite, but then you obviously lose the ability to edit it directly in your text editor.

I wish banks weren't actively sabotaging data export. I wrote some scripts for this in the past, reverse engineered the login with OCR, cleaned up the invalid entries, but... It's just too much effort to maintain this. Once the mobile confirmation started being required, I just gave up.

Exactly my experience but with GnuCash. I used to do it weekly, if you miss one or even two or three weeks it's not too bad, but beyond that the effort required to catch up just snowballs. It's also been about a year since I've imported. I've been meaning to get around to reviving it, and the only way I can imagine doing it is to break it up into smaller chunks, like uploading one month at a time over a few days.

If you're willing to hold your nose a little bit, Plaid[0] might be worth looking into. They have (had?) a testing tier which is more than enough for personal uses (100 linked accounts).

[0]: https://plaid.com/

Use teller.io, it’s super easy to setup imo (compared to Plaid). I use it to sync my chase bank + credit card statements on a gsheet.

hledger has tooling to transform fairly arbitrary CSV into transactions it understands[0]. I haven't tried it yet, but after spending 4 hours over multiple days helping my SaaS bookkeeping company troubleshoot their bank connection problems[1], you can better believe I'm willing to put a little time in trying this out.

Every damn time I reconcile transactions I end up fighting their system that I can't see the workings of or fix myself. It's getting to the point where the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I'd sooner deal with the CSV myself given a half-way decent set of tools to do so.

[0] https://hledger.org/1.40/hledger.html#csv

[1] No, they weren't willing to refund me any money; this is "typical", in their words.

I recently discovered Paisa, which is basically a nice UI over ledger-cli. Import is very convenient. You upload csv (or similar), see the preview, then write a script which converts each row into ledger text format. There is linting and everything. When you like the result, just save the script so you can import again anytime. It also supports downloading commodity prices if you use it to track stocks and similar.

Charts are not generic enough for my taste so I'm exporting data elsewhere, but for data entry it is great.

I have run into issues where CSVs are not correct/aligned with PDF statement data that banks are legally obligated to provide. In addition CSVs almost never have balance data. So I download the PDFs and extract data from them. This is much more painful than it needs to be- providing a sensible machine readable PDF involves just following a few simple rules to ensure the 3 or 4 transaction fields, and the few needed statement fields (dates and balances) are extractable without fragile heuristics. There is no conflict between branded and human readable vs machine readable.

The UK has Open Banking, a standardised API for accessing banking data:

https://www.openbanking.org.uk/

In my country any transactions are reported using sms. So implemented a system using Tasker to catch these sms and store it in a CSV file. This CSV file is put inside a folder which is synced using SyncThing to my desktop.

I had plan to process these data and add to an accounting system, but didn't get a chance, and then my mobile crashed and I lost the Tasker action. Now I'm not getting any motivation to implement it again

I’m always using it for spontaneous group accounting, e.g. three guys vacation. Because for group expenses it’s much easier to split the check later in the day or the week. We just accumulate the web of debts and sort it out on demand. It’s very hard to track such chaotic expenses otherwise.

Same for business expenses, I just pay with my card for equipment, services, etc. Later I report it up and get cash/transfer back (doesn’t work for some countries/businesses).

My personal eaten-shitten expenses I know from my bank and experience, there’s no need to account for these.

Every time I’m reminded of plain text accounting, I have either an irresistible urge to immerse myself fully into the process, or feelings of guilt for not staying committed to my previous attempts

You must have financial motivation, not emotional. Once you know that if you give up on accounting, your buddy will happily drink through hundreds of bucks, or your company will get a free hdmi cable, you enter the damn sum without hesitation. Personal accounting doesn’t work because you only can lose analytics, not money.

I'm self employed and use it (Beancount, as I like the more strict approach) for my business accounts and also for my stock portfolio. Fava, the web UI, is very handy for reporting and visualising things, though I also have a few scripts to automate certain processes like importing transactions from Wise and tracking exchange rates. I really don't have the discipline to use it for daily personal expenses or budgeting though.

I don’t use it as some motivational tool to change spending habits or whatever but I do like to keep a record of all my accounts and assets, I think it gives me a better understanding of my whole financial picture and I create ‘virtual’ accounts within some cash savings account that divides the balance into pots for things I’m amortizing like car maintenance or insurance

I use it for many things (i use hledger)

- Tracking pending payment from clients

- Keeping track of my expenses in various sectors, food (groceries, eatout), books, magazine subscriptions, etc

- Keeping track of my current balance accounts across various currency deposits

- Loans I give to people, and gifts I give to people

- Creating virtual envelops to segregate my savings account money for my goals like travelling, buying gifts for someone, investment goals, etc

This has helped me tremendously

- for reducing my eatout habits and eating more at home by realising just how much I was wasting money by eating out daily, and inputting the saved amount into compound interest calculator to realize potential lost income and wealth from putting those into an index fund account

- to keep track of pending payments from clients and calculating my real cashflow against cashflow based on expected income

- reduce my impulsive spending, by tracking my savings account money with virtual envelops aka 40% for investment goals, 1% for gifts, etc, it helps me to not just see a big balance on my account and start spending it away seeing that money as segregated chunks in my mind helps me stay in my lane.

- I have a program that generates all sorts of charts to track my wealth growth over time, expense growth and decline across categories, which I then dump into a webpage with my notes on how the changes were a net positive or negative outcome on my life, I do it annually to decide what i’ll do next

- I also have a python script that takes my ledger file and converts it into an excel sheet to send it to my chartered accountant to file my annual taxes

I also maintain a separate ledger file for my business (I dont maintain that one manually, I just export the data from accountant’s software, to do my own calculations at home)

- I use it to calculate cashflow projections to predict how my expenses might potentially grow with rise in revenue

- Track categories of spending to spot anomalies in spend across departments

- Calculate whether I should hire more or raise marketing spend, calculate metrics like ROIC (Return on Invested Capital)

The double entry helps me catch discrepancies in accounting if any, by importing bank statements and generating a ledger from that, I have accounts separated by usecase (discretionary spends, employee perks, business inputs) , with each one getting deposit from main account weekly. I use that to calculate if somethings odd and books are all cool.

I have had trouble before with an accountant running pseudo expenses on my books without telling me, just to impress me by showing a high taxes saved, without being transparent, landed me in court once, with a huge fine with late penalties.

Now I dont trust accountants and make sure I double check no matter what.

Plus I have a lot of automation scripts and stuff, imports from stripe account, imports from bank statements, accountant’s own ledger, etc

I match them all with python scripts and try to look for discrepancies.

I love plain text accounting, as a programmer it works for me, I automated a ton of it, and I have tons of my own macros and shortcuts in my code editor(vim) to make things very easy and simple,

I love it overall, I built out my own system on top of hledger across the years.