[marttt]

> Bookkeeping using plain text files sounds both interesting and challenging.

It has quite a bit of a following; I personally would never switch back to some more "complete" application. I believe all the most popular implementations are listed here: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

[tero]

So many tempting options...

Can you recommend a tool and open your accounting workflow, marttt?

Are there any pain points, like filling tax forms or handling travel paperwork?

[marttt]

FWIW, I'm a single-person company with a tiny turnover and only a handful of expense categories. I've used ledger-cli for many years, but at one point, I started to migrate my data to pta [1]. The reason was that in my country (Europe), all reporting seems to implicitly rely on a numbered chart of accounts (something like "101 Cash", "201 Accounts payable" etc), and the journal format of ledger-cli is not built around this idea by default.

pta, however, does this numbering [2], so for filing taxes in my country, its journal format seems more straightforward in case auditors should have any interest in it. I also quite like its terseness (1 transaction = often 1 line, as compared to 3 in a ledger-cli journal -- gives a better overview and is somewhat better to parse further with sed or awk when needed [3]). Finally, it is a single Perl script, thus very portable and lightweight.

All that said, pta doesn't seem to have much of a following, as compared to ledger-cli, which, obviously, is a much more mature project.

There was also an interesting discussion regarding pta vs ledger, involving the author, OpenBSD dev Ingo Schwarze [4] -- well worth a read regarding the general plain text accounting philosophy also. Interesting stuff.

1: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/

2: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/pta/accounts.example.en?rev=1.3&conten...

3: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=...

4: https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=202009281234...

[tero]

Those pta example files you linked, marttt, really make the case for this software. It looks simple, transparent, auditable, versionable and unixy.

Dpifke, beancounter looks nice, big and well tought out. I bookmarked the docs/ to have a more troughout look at it later.

Update: Had a more detailed look on Beancount.

[dredmorbius]

LWN's editor Jonathan Corbett has looked into this matter much over the years with numerous articles on the topic.

The end-of-search post is here, with the final choice being GnuCash:

<https://lwn.net/Articles/925782/>

HN discussion (200+ comments): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36021197>

You'll find at least some of the other posts in the series, and related articles, here:

<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Alwn.net+accounting+software...>

[dpifke]

Not marttt, but I'm a big fan of beancount after using it for the past few years for my company's books. Recycling an old comment of mine that might be helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37937942 (more upthread from that as well)