Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Allow me to gush about ledger for a moment -- I've been using it exclusively for my small business accounting for the past 3 years and it's absolutely spectacular and has been life-changing.

For many years I suffered through QuickBooks because I just assumed that was the Only Way. The single biggest pain point (and it's hard to pick just one) is that QuickBooks makes it absolutely mind-numbingly difficult to bulk-change any entries in your ledger -- if you categorize 1000 items one way and your accountant later tells you to recategorize them, there is NO WAY (or at least there was no way when I did this in the early 2000s) to bulk recategorize items. So I remember the pain of having to manually change thousands of entries or, worse, doing indecipherable things like making single journal entries like "moving from X category to Y category".

Discovering ledger was a breath of fresh air because the source data is just text! If you need to change data or recategorize or make any tweaks whatsoever you have the entire world of text manipulation tools at hand. You can write shell scripts and use IDEs (and believe it or not Github Copilot works REALLY well).

It's just amazing to realize that the perfect accounting solution has been there the whole time and is vastly vastly SIMPLER than I ever imagined. I went through all the SaaS tools (Xero, etc.) and nothing felt right. Ledger just works and feels right.

> I suffered through Quickbooks because I just assumed that was the Only Way

Suffering through QuickBooks is literally a product feature. Like, when they were porting it to the online version, bookkeepers got upset that the web version didn’t have many of the frustrating quirks of the desktop version that they’d spent decades learning to deal with. They see their having learned the bizarre ins and outs of the software as a moat that keeps their clients from doing their books themselves, so many/most require their clients to use it. And Intuit is far more responsive to the interests of CPAs/bookkeepers than it is to the end users who pay for it.

Source: I worked in Intuit’s SBG and was really surprised when I heard that from some of the product people. I’m so used to being user-focused and searching out ways to be more user friendly that it never occurred to me that, in a 3-sided market, making the software hostile to the user could be a selling point.

I generally despise having to do double entry bookkeeping in the first place, but when I do (in some situations you have to), I use ledger (or hledger). Way less painful than QuickBooks if you're also a programmer or adjacent.

> and believe it or not Github Copilot works REALLY well).

And yes, this is one area where LLM can help. That valley between "manually duplicating these near identical entries is painful" and "but it's not painful enough to warrant a custom generator". LLM is often great for that kind of boilerplate. Gotta doublecheck the bejesus out of it though.

I started setting up hledger this year and I’m with you for a small business it is absolutely great.

Some notes:

- The initial setup of the books is pretty time consuming especially if you have a lot of accounts. I recommend starting your most important accounts and adding as you go along.

- Mass changing categories is just a search and replace so I have been getting pretty fine grained with the categories as I go along.

- Being a small business the separation from business and personal is needed from a legal standpoint, but from a practical standpoint I live off an owner’s draw and a put cash into the LLC when investing in its growth. Having hledger have all my accounts, personal and business and being able to filter out appropriate reports has been great for seeing things like is the business a money pit or am I actually growing wealth over time.

- I combine hledger csv output with Jupyter to generate the specific reports and charts I need. I.e business specific versus combined for taxes. This filtering also has me thinking of other ideas like figuring out which credit cards to apply for based on my expenses.

Overall more fine tuned than what I have been able to achieve with Quickbooks over 8 years.

What's your plan if you need to share the books with someone else (tax authority, accounting firm, etc)? Can ledger export it some industry-standard format that will let you share this information?

Or, at the end of the day is the default interchange format in this space just CSV?

Is there even an industry standard format? I've been dumping CSV to my accountant and I plan on doing the same for the tax authority if they came knocking.

Something tells me they can't be too picky about such things. My experience with the tax authorities in three countries now tells me they'll take whatever odd format data you hand them.

There is not. Financial accounting is built on random csv-ish formats and pure brute force. Half the time we can't even agree on using the same date format within the same dataset. One of our banking partners even require macros (yes, excel vba macros) to be enabled for their data to make sense. It's madness, but if you want to make money, you can't be picky with the data formats.

Norway actually has a national standard called SAF-T

https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/business-and-organisation/sta...

> SAF-T Financial is a standard format used in the exchange of accounting data. SAF-T, or Standard Audit File-Tax, is the result of a joint development collaboration between the business community, the accounting sector and the Norwegian Tax Administration, based on a recommendation by the OECD.

My business is over 15 years old by now and our ledger use has grown to encompass 7 different currencies and multiple corporate entities (by calling ledger with different includes we can generate a combined ledger across entities, very nice, try doing that with one of those online tools).

So at some point you are going to have to deal with an accountant who will not typically know what ledger is. The solution is actually very simple: we wrote a small ruby script that generates an excel file that contains a balance and profit and loss statement in a format they are familiar with. That's the cool think about everything being text based, it's really easy to pipe the ledger output into a script and into a gem that generates an Excel file and add some styling.

The raw journal files are also in a format accountants can easily comprehend, they didn't actually look at those in our case, but if they want to know where the Excel comes from they are welcome to audit them.

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