Is there a reason to homeroll your accounting like this vs using one of the plain text accounting tools and their scripting interfaces?
Take Ledger: I've approached it repeatedly over the years, but I always struggled with it. Not because of double-entry accounting: that part I get. It's everything else that's confusing to me, because the tool - like every other tool in this space - seems to be written for an American audience that eats Equities, breathes Liabilities, commutes between Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable, and do 99% of their finances through the stock market.
For a simple person from middle of nowhere in Europe, this is a completely alien mental framework. I think in terms of having dollars, paying in them, getting paid in them, occasionally borrowing them to or from someone else. Every time I read through Ledger's docs, I stumble on the same set of problems, like "wtf is this whole accounts payable / accounts receivable business", or "if this is a small-scale accounting/budgeting tool, why half of the docs are about managing stock prices?!".
So yeah, I end up doing most of my personal finances with ad-hoc Emacs Lisp in an Org Mode document, or throwaway Excel sheets, and each time I do it I understand ever so slightly more about finances. For anything non-trivial, I just mail an accountant.
I think "personal accounting(wrong word)" is like the note-taking-app-craze ! It's yet to be solved for the 'common-man'.
I'm talking about a 'first-practical' THEN 'correct system'. Versus the current 'First CORRECT then practical' philosophy of the current solutions (Money, Sage, Pastel etc)
Every few years I go "THIS" year I'm going to do proper finance records with one of the accounting programs like a real adult !
Then I'm soon bored to tears or frustrated by all the things I don't know about accounting (my fault not the subject's fault) or the apps
I then quickly revert to a "money-in-bank / days-left-in-month" 'accounting-system' and a fin.txt in Dropbox where I write down some things...
As compared to Ledger, the journal entries are much less verbose, mostly fitting on a single line: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=...
As you can see, it also utilizes traditional account numbers (listed in a separate Chart of Accounts file) instead of Ledger's Account:Subaccount form. PTA also has Debit and Credit, so all amounts are positive, whereas Ledger uses "+" and "-".
For me, the PTA approach feels much safer, since basically everybody (including the auditors) in my country are probably used to this kind of system and a numbered Chart of Accounts. Less confusion.
Interestingly, while converting my .ledger file to .pta, I discovered a lot of mistakes that seem to be linked to either the system Ledger uses -- or, rather, me not understanding it. I was also fairly inexperienced with double entry accounting when I started with Ledger. But replacing +/- with Debit/Credit accounts pointed those errors out, somehow.
Here's the author discussing PTA and comparing it to Ledger&friends. Also a great discussion on plain text accounting in general: http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=2020092812343...
I could use liber office calc for my accounting as well.
But for playing with code it is perfect combo for a problem I can tackle and a problem I am interested enough to solve. For accounting my own things I am also quite safe not much harm that can be done :)