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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... |
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.