On: Plain Text Accounting

[sundarurfriend]

That's a nice tool, this is a feature I enjoyed in Mint-like proprietary tools I used to use previously.

What's your workflow with it? Do you run `ledger-guesser <transaction details> >> journal_file.txt`? I'd somewhat prefer typing out the details in an editor, but I suppose I could type a bunch of transactions one per line in a file and xargs that into ledger-guesser.

What does it do when your transaction is of a new type that it wasn't trained on? Does it have a confidence threshold below which to tell you "I cannot guess this one"?

[jek0 → sundarurfriend]

I never run it manually.

I plug this tool in my scripts that import transactions from banks (and stripe).

The scripts extract transaction details (amount, payee, currency), then they use `ledger-guesser` to create ledger entries and add them to the journal.

The generated entries are "uncleared". Then I manually "clear" the entries. Review. Commit. (You can also use a tag for reviewed transactions if you already use ledger's "cleared" indicator for something else).

For the best results, I have 1 journal per bank account. So I have different training data for each bank account.

There's no confidence threshold. When there is a new type of transaction is encountered, the guesser will chose the account with the highest probability.

The guesses are made based on the words found in the payee (and date). Unknown transaction have generally a few known tokens. Example: "INCOMING TRANSFER FROM NEW_CLIENT"... The classifier will probably classify that entry as "Incomes:OurLargestClient". In that case I have just to fix that entry to change the client, all the rest is good, it still saves a good amount of typing.