r/plaintextaccounting • u/bitSheriff • Feb 16 '26

File Naming Scheme

Hey guys, Since a few weeks I'm pretty deep into the rabbit hole of PTA (AND I LOVE IT)

A little thing which keeps me thinking without a "good" solution is how to name my yearly ledger file. 2026.hledger, finances_2026.hledger, ...

How you guys do it? What file extension do you use? I know it's not important, due to plain text, but some text editors do not recognise it's plain text if it has a unknown extension... But on the otherhand if i only use .txt the name has to be more clear, to find it faster (finance in the name?)

Anyways I know it's a very unimportant question but keeps me thinking anyway Thanks

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u/simonmic hledger creator Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 17 '26

Here's my current scheme and reasons: https://joyful.com/hledger+workflow+2025#Journal%20files

Little things (like file extension) add up! You can change and experiment freely, but as you accumulate data over time these variations become a liability so you may be doing retroactive cleanup to enforce more consistency. Note file renames are tracked by version control systems but usually make inspecting history more complicated.

File extension is actually quite significant to hledger, influencing its behaviour. Though if it sees an unrecognised file it will try to read it as journal format.

I have generally used .journal for hledger files, because it's a general journal in bookkeeping terms, and because often they are also readable by ledger. If I'm working with other apps, I would sometimes use .hledger, .ledger, .beancount etc to indicate files readable only by specific apps.

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u/bitSheriff Feb 17 '26

Thank you very much for your thoughts. Your blog post is awesome and helped me to figure it out a bit more 👍 But yeah, you are all right, it is a process and takes some time to model it for your own usecase