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I suppose the biggest barrier for me would be learning double entry bookkeeping as I'm not doing that just now. I wouldn't know where to start. Currently the above makes no sense to me.

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The syntax above can be learned easily enough, but double-entry boils down to: Each transaction shows both where money goes and where it comes from, the sum should be 0.

Where it goes and comes from are "accounts", which may or may not correlate to actual accounts like you might think of in personal finance. There are 3 categories of accounts: expenses, assets, liabilities. You own the second two, they are your cash, checking, savings, brokerage as assets and your mortgage, car loan, CCs as liabilities. Expenses are where you spend money outside of your own accounts.

Before getting to expenses, you may have accounts like this for your assets and liabilities:

  assets:cash       $100
  assets:checking  $2000
  liabilities:cc   $-100
  liabilities:car  $-10000

Whenever you transact your money goes from one place to another, so a car payment may look like:

  2021-09-05 Car Payment
    assets:checking    $-500
    liabilities:car     $500

Positive means that that account gets the money, negative it loses the money. Note that it sums to $0. If there were an interest component we may do this:

  2021-09-05 Car Payment
    assets:checking    $-500
    liabilities:car     $400
    expenses:interest   $100

Expenses are not owned by you. They can be broad categories or more specific. Maybe you have two residences and utilities at both:

  expenses:primary:electric:edison:1234 -- your account number
  expenses:secondary:electric:pandg:1234

I wouldn't go that far, I might do:

  expenses:house:electric:primary
  expenses:house:electric:secondary

But the choice is up to you, both work. Think of them as hierarchical tags.

I found the GNUCash manual to be an excellent introduction to double entry accounting for people with no accounting background. Even my ledger accounts are setup in the same way.

I'm not that familiar with the theory, in my case I just got started and now I'm used to it. Just to take the last example:

    2021-03-20 Sprouts
        expenses:food:groceries  $100
        assets:cash               $40
        assets:checking

This means you took 140 from your checking account, withdrew 40 that you now have in cash, and spent 100 in groceries. Does that still make no sense?

Honestly no. When I first read it I thought you'd spent 140 on sprouts which I thought was excessive, but each to their own.

Even though you've explained it I'm still struggling to make sense of it. The 3 indented lines don't related at all in an intuitive manner at least for me.

Understandable, they are using transaction balancing / elision

What they should be showing beginners is:

    2021-03-20 Sprouts
        expenses:food:groceries  $100
        assets:cash               $40
        assets:checking         $-140

How’s that?

A possible source of confusion is that in this context, "Sprouts" is likely the name of a supermarket (not a type of food).

I don't think the file format above is especially conductive to learning. In my experience, most people learn double-entry bookkeeping with T accounts; debit is on the left, credit is on the right, and total credit has to equal total debit.

If you're interested, this seems like a fairly decent guide: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-business/introduction-b...

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