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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

Is ledger something anyone has installed on a private cloud? I'm interested in using this with the cli but would love to know if there is a way to make it a little less centralized but still secure?

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We use ledger with git for distributed accounting work.

Ledger files are plaintext, works really great.

Also, if you encrypt it using GPG with multiple keys, it will allow only a few people to work with it. Probably best to write a script that does it because not everybody understands how GPG works ;-)

Additionally you can use CI for testing and validating the ledger files.

For example we check that expenses don't overrun their allocated budget, and that there is still enough months of runway in left.

Another option to consider is Fava. It's a web frontend for Beancount which is another plain-text accounting tool similar to ledger. There's no authentication or security on the frontend, but you could probably put it behind basic auth+ssl to start with.

https://github.com/beancount/fava http://furius.ca/beancount/

Keeping a copy of the journal in the Keybase filesystem (or Keybase git) could be a good/easy/safe way to do it.

This is what I currently do, and it works pretty well. I just have a regular git repo in keybase-git and have my ledger(beancount) files plus whatever scripts I need to import statements from various banks/credit cards.

The central point is the content of your data. Also incomplete datasets should still work fine with both ledger and this analytics tool. So, not sure how it could be less centralized than this.

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