[bingohbangoh]

Out of curiosity: has anybody used this to do business accounting?

I am intrigued by these ultra simple setups. However, most accountants -- the people who will ultimately help you once your business is sufficiently complex -- will use Quickbooks or some other established software.

[shubhamkrm]

Software Freedom Conservancy uses it for their non-profit accounting. They have published their workflow here: https://github.com/conservancy/npo-ledger-cli/blob/master/np...

[ska]

I've done this with gnucash, which isn't exactly the same but similarly unusual to them.

What I found was that unless you are using the same back end, most of them were going to re-enter everything anyways as they want to double check. So it was more important to have the accounts & conventions they expected, rather than the actual software.

In my case, the data entry cost was about < 10% of my bill, so moving to the same software as them wouldn't be a big saving.

I've not used beancounter, so I'm not sure how much (if any) work would be needed to get the same support I had in gnucash. Mostly the complexities of invoicing and taxes in multiple countries and currencies, payroll, etc. One big issue potentially is you'll need to be able to produce proper financial statements for your jurisdiction (at least, countries I'm used to). Not sure if/how that is supported out of the box so might be some work.

[cranium]

I started using Ledger for my small consulting business in Switzerland. Here, the internal accounting structure is quite flexible as long as you can output the balance sheets in the required format. My fiduciary asks for PDFs to verify the (legal) accounting norms anyway.

[nickray]

How do you map KMU Konten to ledger accounts (can you rollup?), and do you automate VAT accounting?

[cranium]

It's quite easily to map the accounts once you have the main categories mapped (I use the french naming so my german translation may be wrong):

- Aktiven <-> Assets - Passiven <-> Liabilities - Betrieblicher Ertrag <-> Income - Betrieblicher Aufwand <-> Expenses

I'm not sure I understand what you ask about rollup, but so far I haven't found a case I couldn't fit within Ledger. For VAT, I have a flat VAT rate that only applies to my turnover so it was simple to automate (reduce turnover by x% and put that amount into Owed VAT).

[fernovus]

> has anybody used this to do business accounting?

Keep in mind that these projects were born for personal accounting that use the cash-basis approach. Business are more complex and require an accrual approach, simplyfying we can say that they recognize revenues in a period only when these are certain, and recognize expenses related to these revenues in the same period, even if the expense occurs before or after the revenue.

You don't need to perform these steps for personal finance, you just "follow the money".

I'm enjoying plain text accounting for personal use but I struggle to see it applied in business use cases.

[trs-80]

You can use accrual basis in Beancount.

[uoaei]

On one hand you can tailor your bean-counting with fancy scripts that achieve exactly what you need. On the other hand you would need to spend probably lots of time writing and maintaining those scripts. Doesn't seem worth the hassle for the vast majority IMO.