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So can this be used for business books and records? A lot of the documentation I’ve shifted through since Intuit sh*ttified their product made me think that this the ledger open source accounting is more of a quicken like personal finance product.

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double entry book keeping can be used to track any resource of any size, though it's particularly good at tracking money of any size.

The upside of a "real database" like postgres is when you need multiple people in the books making changes at the same time. Until your accounting department grows into multiple people, Beancount, hledger or any plain text accounting system would be fine.

If those multiple people are updating the files via VCS, or via UIs that enforce append-only updates, it's still reasonably fine.

Totally agreed, you can push the envelope pretty far if you are careful and knowledgeable. It just gets a lot easier and less error prone if you use a DB like PostgreSQL though.

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