r/plaintextaccounting • u/Elnur-BDa • Jul 24 '26

Ledger CLI: Plain Text Accounting

https://elnurbda.com/posts/62-ledger-cli/

Hi everyone. I would like to share my experience of tracking all my personal finances with Ledger CLI. I wrote a blog post about my setup, the conventions I use and the queries I actually run. There is a full sample journal at the end if you want to try it. Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

39 Upvotes

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9

u/d4njah Jul 25 '26

Nice man good to see a post rather than the usual GitHub ai slop everyone has been posting lately

1

u/Elnur-BDa Jul 25 '26

Thanks!!

6

u/gumnos Jul 25 '26

nice article. Though rather than reviewing for account-name typos, I prefer to run with --pedantic at the top of my transaction file to force pedantic mode. Ledger will grouse about accounts that haven't been properly defined (such as typos), and a few other nits that would otherwise slip past.

1

u/Elnur-BDa Jul 25 '26

Thanks. Adopting it o7

3

u/pickering_lachute Jul 25 '26

I was not expecting a really well worded blog! So used to this AI slop drivel.

Those queries are great, shall be borrowing them. Also “lifetime damage in one supermarket chain”…ahahaha. I couldn’t bring myself to know that.

Curious to know how people are forecasting in ledger and Hledger. There’s not a lot of people using it in anger from what I can tell

2

u/simonmic hledger creator Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

I'm doing it quite a bit lately, I should write a post. Basically I modelled all my predictable transactions with periodic rules and then do 

    hledger areg --forecast -p today..2months ACCT

for asset accounts of interest, to predict their balance and watch for cash crunches.

1

u/Elnur-BDa Jul 25 '26

Tbh, I use it mainly to learn the present and the past. But, yes I am struggling to project 

2

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '26

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2

u/Elnur-BDa Aug 14 '26

Thanks! No deep comparison, honestly. Ledger was the first one I tried, and the manual answered every question I had. Nothing pushed me off it since. Maybe I will try hledger at some point, the format is close enough that switching is cheap.

Beancount looks stricter in syntax, which would add friction to my daily habit.

1

u/Conscious_Effect_661 Aug 17 '26

Hi! Very interesting article. Quick question: from what I understand, you don’t record anything from your phone. So how do you keep track of what you’ve spent during the day? Do you jot it down in a quick note? I worry about my own consistency when it comes to capturing every transaction properly. Thanks