Comment by alchemist1e9
Comment by alchemist1e9 5 days ago
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 agree with the first two of these, they are great. (And I bet the third is too, I've just never needed it.)
If I had to submit one tip it would be to set everything up with a Makefile or similar. I keep my transactions spread across quite a few separate files for different accounts, and the actual commands I issue to include the right files are very long. Similarly I have various plotting and summary scripts whose exact syntax I don't usually remember. But with make I can just "make cashflow" "make balance 'A=Checking'" "make balance-plot 'A=retirement'" and so on.