The Surprising Ease of Plain Text Accounting
As a long time user of You Need A Budget I was a little dismayed that the next version would be a hosted service. I had tried similar services before (Mint, Buxfer, PocketSmith, etc) and never found the sacrifice of privacy worth it. All of them felt like they were solving problems I didn’t have.
With YNAB 4 now unsupported, I started looking for alternatives. Would I finally surrender to Intuit and start using Quicken? Was a Google Docs spreadsheet enough to get me through? I experimented with GNU Cash for a bit and found it very powerful but somewhat difficult to use. A search for other open source tools randomly led me to ledger and my interest was peaked.
Here was a tool that let me store my data in a plain text file and let me control how and where I wanted to store it. I dove into using it and it made a great first impression. I could open a regular text file and add/edit transactions. It calculated my balance quickly and worked alongside other UNIX tools.
Transaction Entry
After switching over to ledger as of the first of the month, I quickly found 2 shortcomings. Typing transactions into an editor was easy but repetitive. After some Googling I found an interesting solution. A compatible project called hledger existed and offered some user friendly tools beyond what ledger did. Most interesting was a tool called hledger add.
hledger add combined the power of pattern matching (for transaction descriptions and accounts) with tab completion to make entering new transactions dead simple.
Reporting
The second roadblock I hit was reporting on the changes to my net worth from month to month. Doing this with a spreadsheet was tedious but straightforward. After skimming hledger’s manual, I found the balance command. balance by default simply reports the current balance for all your accounts.
On top of that simple report, hledger balance also exposes some custom reporting option. I was able to assemble a command hledger balance ^assets ^liab --depth 2 -M -H that broke down my net worth monthly by top level account.
Conclusion
I have been using hledger for 5 months and can’t be happier. Its a well supported open source tool that does exactly what I needed while still being adaptable.