Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zachlatta 3885 days ago
We use Ledger for all of our accounting (it's not too much... yet) and we've been using comments in Ledger to keep track of our receipts.

Example:

    2015/02/05 Clipper Card
        Expenses:Transport:Public Transportation               $20
        Liabilities:Reimbursement:Zach Latta
        ; Receipt: 52fae6a40afaf2a79bfdef92f5e1b6d3.pdf
Each receipt filename is <md5 hash>.<extension> and they're all tracked in a private GitHub repository.

Here's a link to our repo with more examples: https://github.com/hackedu/finances/blob/master/main.ledger
1 comments
cgb_ 3885 days ago
I do something similar, although I name my receipts/documents with yyyymmdd-friendlyname.pdf for ease of lookup.

For my IT consulting business, I also wrote a wrapper that rejects entries that don't have a receipt tag which allows me to catch any entries that I haven't complied 100% with my practices (and tax office won't get upset in an audit).

I also autogenerate the ledger entries from the receipt name (and prompt for description/expense account/$$ with logic for handling common items like fuel etc).

I've played with PDF metadata so my entire receipt scanning => ledger is automated from just the PDF document but haven't reached a satisfactory setup there.

link