Comment by candiddevmike 5 days ago
I'd embrace plain text accounting more if it had a better schema. Ledger's is absolutely atrocious, and it drives my OCD nuts trying to use vim to "write" accounting entries.
I think my ideal PTA would be some kind of jsonnet-based system where I can create/call functions to generate journal entries.
GNU recutils should become the standard backend. Plain text db which has a powerful albeit simple records format, proper ids, enforces constraints, removes need of silly type conventions better defined in fields with %type, built in encryption. Foreign keys. Auto generated fields. Regex.
No one in their right of mind will want to manually edit the data store holding critical accounting data. 99% of the times should be ETL with the odd visual check for inspiration.
> less special character noise
I hope you've at least once stumbled upon the existence of https://noyaml.com/ and/or, at the time, were familiar with the quirks regarding number interpretation.
ledger can validate that all account names are pre-defined, are formatted in a specific way with regard to decimal and thousands separator, their currency specified and a few more things. (None of these are enforced by default, but for any serious use of ledger you would want to set `--strict` in your .ledgerrc file)
What else would you want ledger to enforce? We actually have a few very specific (to us) rules we enforce, but we do that via a ruby script. That's the power of plain text accounting: you can just whip up a small script to do validation for you.
You never have to look at it. I have an Excel - one file a year - with a schema that makes sense to me, then a Python script to convert that to {year}.beancount. The script is triggered by fswatch.
So I get a browser frontend with fava and data input in Excel.
It’s non-trivial, but then so is any form of accounting.