Comment by chriseidhof
Comment by chriseidhof 4 days ago
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.
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.