Program Your Finances: Command-Line Accounting

https://www.petekeen.net/keeping-finances-with-ledger

by edward • 11 years ago

93 32 11 years ago

ende2• 11 years ago

I like command line access, but the critical weakness of nearly every accounting application (cli or gui) is manual data entry. The number crunching is the easy part. The hard part is automating data entry through transaction gathering.

subverting• 11 years ago

Using a debit card api would be useful for that. Dont know if they exist.

ende2• 11 years ago

I think we're getting close. I'm really hopeful that someone like Simple (https://www.simple.com) will eventually release an API for their service.

z1mm32m4n• 11 years ago

For one off transactions, I have no problem using a text interface. However, a sort of companion app that converted receipts and bills into ledger parseable bills would really help with mass data entry. Does anyone know if something like this exists?

peteretep3• 11 years ago

ReceiptBank is probably a good starting point. Non-free.

tincholio• 11 years ago

There's hledger (a ledger clone of sorts written in haskell)[0], which comes with some facilities for automatically assigning expenses to accounts via "rules files". I've made (and a couple of sed / awk scripts) one that handles upwards of 90% of my stuff from the files I download from my bank.

It also has a web UI, so you can use that to add transactions if you don't like using a text editor.

[0] http://hledger.org/

kam• 11 years ago

https://github.com/cantino/reckon imports CSV to Ledger, with Bayesian automatic categorization.

jareds3• 11 years ago

I use this for my creditcard statements, works pretty well.

kraymer• 11 years ago

Most of bank websites (in France at least) provide .QIF downloads, so I coded a tool to semi-automatically add categories to qif transactions by matching keywords from your past transactions history : https://github.com/Kraymer/qifqif

I use it with GnuCash but could work with ledger as long as ledger importer links categories with accounts.

couchand• 11 years ago

I do the same thing with ledger: it takes only a few lines of script to convert the csv export to ledger's file format, then a few minutes matching up transactions that did't match.

Since ledger's input format is so flexible, it's pretty straightforward.

zrail5• 11 years ago

Manual data entry is the only thing that has kept me on track for eight years. I tried the automated stuff but I never connected with my money so I never took it seriously which led to letting it get completely out of control.

Tracking every penny by hand is drudge work at first but at this point is habitualized. I have a visceral understanding of my cash flow which let's me do things like quit my job with confidence instead of panic.

rsaarelm• 11 years ago

I pay most of my daily shopping with a debit card and my Finnish bank will give me a plaintext dump of all the transactions that's a few regexp operations away from becoming a CSV file that can be imported to hlegder.

ams6110• 11 years ago

I love ledger, but it's only useful in some situations. I made the mistake of using it to manage the account of a non-profit I was helping with a few years ago. It worked great, but when it came time to hand over to a new bookkeeper it was sort of a pain because almost nobody who's not a programmer is going to want to use a text editor and command-line utility software.

iamcurious• 11 years ago

The other book keeper just needed the data to keep. Why did the tool you used matter?

draven• 11 years ago

It might have been feasible to migrate the data to another account management software using a script to export ledger data to a widely supported format like QIF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken_Interchange_Format)

zrail5• 11 years ago

Dumping a CSV out of ledger is trivial (I do it every day). Surely the new bookkeeper could work with a spreadsheet.

aptwebapps• 11 years ago

Could use a [2010] tag. The github repo has moved - https://github.com/ledger/ledger - and the referred to version 3 is out.

zrail5• 11 years ago

Fixed both issues. Thanks.

peteretep3• 11 years ago

    > Ledger is almost the most boring, austere accounting
    > program you could think of.

This does not strike me as a good way to get yourself doing accounting properly. I am anal about keeping dual-entry accounting, but part of the fun is the graphs, and part of what keeps me sane is auto-import from all sorts of sources.

I use MoneyDance, which is like GnuCash only much less ugly.

symfrog• 11 years ago

Auto-import with Ledger is trivial and programmable. You should have a look at the ledger convert command.

Another major benefit is that Ledger data is stored in plain text files and can be put in a git repo.

Currently I have more than 7 accounts across various regions (Ledger has great currency support) and I am able to process a full month of transactions in under 10 mins. Ledger so far has been the most painless system I have ever used.

There is also a great Emacs mode (ledger-mode).

peteretep3• 11 years ago

    > Auto-import with Ledger is trivial and programmable. You 
    > should have a look at the ledger convert command.

That's good to hear

    > Another major benefit is that Ledger data is stored in
    > plain text files and can be put in a git repo.

I don't think I've encountered a situation where that would be useful.

    > Currently I have more than 7 accounts across various
    > regions

I am running 37 accounts in 4 currencies. Some of these represent checking accounts, some are CC accounts, some are stocks and shares, one or two are assets that I'm depreciating over time, there's an informal loan owed to me, a loan I have been given from a bank, and I use a couple of virtual ones as a budgeting mechanism. On top of that, I have about 60 various categories (which are - I guess - another type of virtual account) for various sources of income and expenses. Many of the above are hierarchal in nature. About 1/8th of my transactions are actually one-to-many transactions rather than one-to-one. This represents my personal accounts, and not my business accounts, which I let FreeAgent + an accountant handle the gnarly details of.

While this may sound complicated, it is in fact incredibly convenient, and it's exceptionally easy to pull out (or put in) almost any kind of data I want.

The GUI autocompletes my transactions as I create them, remembers how I like to categorize stuff, comes with a lot of built-in graphs, syncs to my iPhone (although the iPhone app is a bit naff), will automatically create transactions for me on a monthly basis if I want, and presents me with a dashboard.

I am just about old enough to remember people dismissing colours in their xterm's as being too hipster and distracting, and also about old enough to remember some people proudly saying `lynx` was all they needed from a text editor.

I cannot imagine why I - and I spend almost all day in a `screen` session already - would want to hand-edit my transactions in a text-editor and use a CLI tool.

edejong• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, MoneyDance does not provide for split transactions. I use that quite a lot in GNUcash. My monthly salary is split up in 7 different components (income, taxes, insurance, reimbursement for work-expenses, bonuses, pensions and payment on checking-account).

It would really make the accounting messier, would I have to split this in separate transactions.

I would be willing to pay (or help develop) a good, versatile accounting program for personal finances and small businesses.

Loic• 11 years ago

If you want to do personal accounting, you should also try KMyMoney: https://kmymoney.org/screenshots.php

I have been using it since 2008 (for family accounting) and you can input all your data and do everything with the keyboard only. No dataloss (backup is easy, just a single file), pretty fast and the software is well maintained.

This is just my 2cts from a long term user of a personal accounting software (before I used MS Money and Quicken, but for the long term, open source is in that case way better).

motters• 11 years ago

Program Your Finances: Command-Line Accounting

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