
Ledger Basics and Habits (2014) - lelf
http://matthewturland.com/2014/03/29/ledger-basics-and-habits/
======
yegle
[http://plaintextaccounting.org](http://plaintextaccounting.org) if you want
to find similar apps.

I use Beancount. Great community and an awesome web UI beancount-fava.

~~~
isxek
Probably also worth mentioning hledger[0], the Haskell version of ledger which
has a limited but growing number of features. They also provide a text-based
(hledger-ui) and a web-based (hledger-web) interface.

For my simple needs, this is the one I use.

[0]: [http://hledger.org/](http://hledger.org/)

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traviscj
I have tried a couple of times to get into ledger-cli, and what generally
happens is that get really frustrated with "post-date ambiguity". In other
words: do I enter a credit card transaction or check as the day I wrote it or
the day it cleared? If I do it the day I wrote it, my balances are impossible
to reconcile. If I do it for the day it clears, my balance view is ignoring
things I know are about to happen. It is even worse when for self transfers,
where there is an origination date, a "change visible in originating account"
date, and a "change visible in the target account" date.

I guess I could get around it by having "in flight" accounts that deduct the
money from the originating account, but at that point it is basically
quadruple entry accounting, which seems like an excellent way to make a
complete mess of it.

~~~
smichael
This isn't as big a problem as you think. There are several ways you can
handle it, including:

\- use your dates. Most people don't need to reconcile every day, and you can
pick a day where there are no pending transactions, or few enough to be easily
understood.

\- use the bank dates. This happens automatically if you import converted bank
data.

\- use both dates. Eg, your date as the main transaction date, and (when
helpful), the bank's date on the bank posting(s) only.

\- there's also a primary/auxiliary date feature, but I think it's unnecessary

------
lifeisstillgood
I think something like this will be useful to me - if I can make the time. I
have a online accounting package and have to manually upload stmts from my
bank (which I have to manually download ) - and sometime back they broke their
own matching algorithm such that the same amount on same day with same ref
will be counted twice and. Have no means to delete one of the transactions.
This causes no end of pain.

A simpler way might be to write to ledger and then from there upload to
whatever "analysis" package I want

But ... The investment in time is huge and I don't want to find myself
trapped. Any feedback on this or others ?

~~~
yegle
Having a plaintext ledger of yourself is always worth the time invested. The
author of Beancount (another plaintext accounting tool) wrote a doc comparing
Beancount and ledger
[http://furius.ca/beancount/doc/comparison](http://furius.ca/beancount/doc/comparison)

Personally I use Beancount because the BQL query language and the beancount-
fava project. Just look at
[http://fava.pythonanywhere.com/income_statement/](http://fava.pythonanywhere.com/income_statement/)
and see it for yourself.

