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Plain Text Accounting

accounting

accounting is tracking the flow of valuable commodities, such as money or time. It clarifies activity, priorities, obligations, opportunities. It can reduce stress and even be enjoyable.

double-entry bookkeeping is a process for doing this reliably. For every movement of value (a transaction), both the source and destination are recorded. Simple arithmetic invariants help prevent errors.

In traditional double-entry bookkeeping, value at any point in time is tracked in various accounts, classified as asset (owned), liability (owed) or equity (invested). Two more classifications track changes during some period: revenues (inflows) and expenses (outflows).

Transactions consist of debits (increases to asset or expense accounts, or decreases to liability or equity accounts) or credits (decreases to asset or expense accounts, or increases to liability or equity accounts).

..with text

Ledger and the other Ledger-likes inspired by it are minimalist software tools for efficient double-entry accounting. This site introduces them and their way of doing things.

Accounting data is valuable; we want to know that it will be accessible for ever - even without software. We want to know when it changes, and revision-control it. We want to search and manipulate it efficiently. So, we store it as human-readable plain text.

We simplify debits and credits by using signed numbers instead - positive for inflows to an account, negative for outflows from an account.

We define arbitrary account hierarchy to suit our needs. This scales smoothly from simple to complex scenarios, and from high-level overview to fine detail.

Ledger-likes are, at least in part, command-line tools. This makes them efficient to use and very scriptable and flexible.

Ledger-likes also, at their core, tend towards functional operation: they read the input data without changing it, and output a report. This simplicity makes them easy to understand and to rely on.

questions ?

who is this for ?
Techies, power users, and do-it-yourself-ers, at least for now. If you need a rich GUI and lots of structure, you may prefer a more traditional GUI tool.

what are the alternatives ?
GNUCash or other FOSS tools, proprietary tools like Quicken/Quickbooks, online tools like Xero, spreadsheets, paper accounting.

why is this better than QuickBooks ?
Your data remains accessible. No yearly fees. Free software you can change. Cross platform. Scriptable. Efficient. Simple.

how do I communicate with my accountant ?
Clean up text reports by hand, print them as PDF, import CSV reports to a spreadsheet..

what if my accountant only uses QuickBooks ?
You'll need a new accountant, or a duplicate set of books in QuickBooks, or to pioneer *ledger -> QuickBooks importing.

can I use this to do my taxes ?
You can use this to track and gather the data for tax reporting, with suitable accounts. Fill out and submit tax forms with another tool, or by hand.

Ledger-likes
Ledger C++. The original.
hledger Haskell
Beancount Python
Abandon Scala
Ledger in Go Go

Inactive:

related tools

docs

discussion

common tasks

data entry

reconciling

reporting

forecasting

budgetting

shared expenses

time tracking

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