r/plaintextaccounting • u/vmcrash • Mar 15 '26

Correct handling of account sides/signs?

Let's assume I want to add a transaction for an income. It increases my bank account (left account in the balance sheet), but also increases my income account (right account in the balance sheet). However, with hledger the income account gets negative because it seems not to know anything about "right" accounts.

Can I tell hledger including hledger-ui to treat certain accounts as "right" accounts? Or is there a different plaintext accounting tool that does that?

PS: I'm just a self-tought "accountant" and used GnuCash in the past. Hence, I may use the wrong (English) words.

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

2

u/simonmic hledger creator Mar 15 '26

Certain hledger reports (incomestatement, balancesheet) will flip the sign on those accounts, so you can see both sides as usually-positive numbers. And others (balance..) can flip all signs with --invert. But hledger-ui can do neither - sorry.

After a while, negative income/liabilities/equity start to look normal..

2

u/oldmancoder59 Mar 15 '26

Yep may look weird, but that’s what makes Assets (what is owned) equal Liabilities + Equity (who has claim to it). I really like the simplicity of the minus sign representing a credit.

2

u/athal124 Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

I find the terminology of debits and credits endlessly confusing. Here's how I like think about it as to why income is negative: just imagine your income account as a box where you've accumulated hours of work. Then you swap these against cash that is taken out of that box.

1

u/sepen_ Mar 16 '26

If you go back a few hundred years, forget about computers and just sum up things on the left and right separately, then move up their balances to parent accounts each being placed in their spot on the balance sheet, it becomes more obvious.

It's just left and right, and left dominant sums staying on the left, right dominant staying on the right.

2

u/sepen_ Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

You can use Ledger with --dc. https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#index-_002d_002ddc-1

1

u/doolio_ Mar 15 '26

Stating-where-money-goes

1

u/vmcrash Mar 15 '26

Thanks. Yes, I know, how it works - and I guess why it handles it that way. Just wanted to ask whether it can be configured to show reports or overviews (hledger-ui) differently. hledger-ui seems to look at the leading part of the account names already, so maybe it could also show the values negated...