I like plain text accounting. It has a nice simple appeal to me. I've worked on accounting software for SMEs and they are usually overly complicated and costly if you're just a small company with...
I like plain text accounting. It has a nice simple appeal to me. I've worked on accounting software for SMEs and they are usually overly complicated and costly if you're just a small company with less than 5 employees. But, you basically need to use one in order to run a business. The downside with just Ledger et al that I see is that they aren't synced and the UX isn't amenable to casual user's tastes. Editing text files is not the most consistent way to handle these things and easy to mess up. So I've been toying with the idea to create a fairly simple web based UI for recording transactions and generating the basic reports like ledgers, balance and a P&L report. Then have it store the transactions in plain text files. By integrating with e.g. GitHub or Dropbox or XYZ those services could be used for propagating the files between different clients. So essentially a minimal static js app without a backend! If git based you'd have version control and all that tracking basically built in. Could be expanded on with a bunch of separate scripts for e.g. bank integrations run from the client, generation of reports to submit to governments, and year end reporting.
In case a reader is unfamiliar with it, Fava is a web-based GUI for beancount, another plain text accounting system. The whole thing is just a pip install away.
In case a reader is unfamiliar with it, Fava is a web-based GUI for beancount, another plain text accounting system. The whole thing is just a pip install away.
What do you think about something lile MoneyStats? Curious because I just can't see plain text being robust enough for anything other than simple record-keeping, as opposed to being able to...
What do you think about something lile MoneyStats? Curious because I just can't see plain text being robust enough for anything other than simple record-keeping, as opposed to being able to project and put it together to make whatever inferences that probably get missed when you're getting that low-level.
I view plain text accounting more as a file format, i.e. how we store the records of transactions. This makes the data highly portable (which means you could easily switch between accounting...
I view plain text accounting more as a file format, i.e. how we store the records of transactions. This makes the data highly portable (which means you could easily switch between accounting software). The way you work with the data and how you actually record transactions is more of a matter of taste. I might like doing it from the command line, but I probably want another interface if I'm on mobile. Others might have different needs/desires.
I haven't looked at MoneyStats before so would have to dig a bit further to give an opinion.
If you have plain text, it is trivial to port between systems for different features. If you have proprietary binary blobs, you're at the mercy of the export options provided by your software. See...
If you have plain text, it is trivial to port between systems for different features.
If you have proprietary binary blobs, you're at the mercy of the export options provided by your software.
See also: The terribleness of having Adobe/Microsoft file formats for any doucuments older than a decade.
Speaking as a professional bookkeeper, I find this an interesting novelty. It does very little of what a modern accounting system is expected to do, and has expectations of a bookkeeper's...
Speaking as a professional bookkeeper, I find this an interesting novelty. It does very little of what a modern accounting system is expected to do, and has expectations of a bookkeeper's technical skills that are maybe more than a little out of touch, but I'm glad this exists. It's only really useful for the incredibly rare dual classed programmer/accountant, but good on them for developing something that worked for them.
That said, I feel like their features are a little disingenuous.
Modern systems create data only when you request it to or set up rules to tell it to do so. It never automatically changes that data at all. If the author felt like his system was changing things on him unexpectedly, that wouldn't have been because of the system. Not even in 2003 when he started developing this software.
Being currency-agnostic is not a good thing. A Dollar isn't a Pound isn't a Euro. If you need multicurrency transactions, that's something modern systems can do, and they'll offer currency value conversions for you based on the date of the transaction.
It's a cool little project, but the number of people who could actually use this to efficiently keep their books and run a business is probably in the dozens globally.
I like plain text accounting. It has a nice simple appeal to me. I've worked on accounting software for SMEs and they are usually overly complicated and costly if you're just a small company with less than 5 employees. But, you basically need to use one in order to run a business. The downside with just Ledger et al that I see is that they aren't synced and the UX isn't amenable to casual user's tastes. Editing text files is not the most consistent way to handle these things and easy to mess up. So I've been toying with the idea to create a fairly simple web based UI for recording transactions and generating the basic reports like ledgers, balance and a P&L report. Then have it store the transactions in plain text files. By integrating with e.g. GitHub or Dropbox or XYZ those services could be used for propagating the files between different clients. So essentially a minimal static js app without a backend! If git based you'd have version control and all that tracking basically built in. Could be expanded on with a bunch of separate scripts for e.g. bank integrations run from the client, generation of reports to submit to governments, and year end reporting.
In case a reader is unfamiliar with it, Fava is a web-based GUI for beancount, another plain text accounting system. The whole thing is just a
pip installaway.What do you think about something lile MoneyStats? Curious because I just can't see plain text being robust enough for anything other than simple record-keeping, as opposed to being able to project and put it together to make whatever inferences that probably get missed when you're getting that low-level.
I view plain text accounting more as a file format, i.e. how we store the records of transactions. This makes the data highly portable (which means you could easily switch between accounting software). The way you work with the data and how you actually record transactions is more of a matter of taste. I might like doing it from the command line, but I probably want another interface if I'm on mobile. Others might have different needs/desires.
I haven't looked at MoneyStats before so would have to dig a bit further to give an opinion.
If you have plain text, it is trivial to port between systems for different features.
If you have proprietary binary blobs, you're at the mercy of the export options provided by your software.
See also: The terribleness of having Adobe/Microsoft file formats for any doucuments older than a decade.
Speaking as a professional bookkeeper, I find this an interesting novelty. It does very little of what a modern accounting system is expected to do, and has expectations of a bookkeeper's technical skills that are maybe more than a little out of touch, but I'm glad this exists. It's only really useful for the incredibly rare dual classed programmer/accountant, but good on them for developing something that worked for them.
That said, I feel like their features are a little disingenuous.
It's a cool little project, but the number of people who could actually use this to efficiently keep their books and run a business is probably in the dozens globally.
https://plaintextaccounting.org has a lot of info about stuff like this, for anyone who is interested