Program your Finances: Command-line Accounting

bugsplat.info

75 points·zrail··10 comments

Ahh, fuck! Drew Crampsie (http://tech.coop/index) runs a Lisp friendly VPS hosting company and he said they use Ledger for their accounting.

I took a look at Ledger and decided it was too clumsy to integrate C++ into Lisp at the FFI level, specially for a web app (you don't want bad C/C++ bringing down the house) so I have been putting off wrapping Ledger as a service for months now, and decided to write my own toy accounting utilities in Lisp, which in turn call out ledger, instead.

What I didn't know what was Ledger has a Common Lisp version (cl-ledger) written by the author himself. Facepalm!

cl-ledger is sort of on indefinite hold. I don't know if it ever got the point of feature parity with cpp-ledger, but it might have gotten close. Ledger v3.0 will have comprehensive python bindings, which is one step closer especially for a webapp.

edit: on second look it seems to have feature parity with v2.6.1, which would get you pretty far.

I just contacted johnw and took over the maintenance of cl-ledger.

Nice! Good to hear.

A huge OMFG thanks to zrail for posting this. I had never heard of ledger, and had just started coding my own CLI-capable double-entry accounting system from scratch. Diving into Ledger now, and thrilled. Thanks again.

Glad I could help! The mailing list is very good if you have questions.

The haskell port is HLedger:

http://hledger.org/SCREENSHOTS.html

It's funny, I've never actually looked at haskell, let alone HLedger. I think maybe I'll take a look.

Here's the ledger 2.6 manual as html (http://joyful.com/repos/ledger/doc/ledger.html); for ledger 3, see the command-line help for latest options.

I made a similar tool for my own use, in Python.

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