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Comment by mindcrash | Hacker News Reader

Pity this doesn't follow the PTA (Plain Text Accounting) "standard" but invented its own DSL.

Especially because there is a wide range of apps, ranging from CLI to web and even mobile, which can be used for PTA and due to the fact that they acknowledge the same standard are interoperable:

https://plaintextaccounting.org/#software

The most well known ones being

- hledger (https://hledger.org/),

- beancount (https://beancount.github.io/),

and

- ledger (https://ledger-cli.org/)

Important note: All free and open source

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I was just checking it out.

         $2145.00  Assets:Checking
        $-1000.00  Equity:OpeningBalances
          $192.00  Expenses
           $65.00    Food:Groceries
          $127.00    Unknown
        $-1337.00  Income:Salary
  ---------------
               0

Nice, I missed that. I'll consider making it PTA-compatible!

Only issue I have is with the indentation-based subitems.

I'd rather keep it restricted to top-level groups for clarity.

PTA is more or less a collection of formats. Beancount, for example, uses a colon-separated account name per transaction line, such as "Income:Work:PrimaryJob:HolidayAllowance" (excluding the quotes). There are a couple of fixed main accounts (such as "Income"), and the user can arbitrarily define subaccounts (in this example "Work:PrimaryJob:HolidayAllowance").

Although I see your point in wanting clarity, if the format supports arbitrary subaccounts, you can use the tool itself to limiting the number of subaccounts to show (e.g. with 1 you would only see the accumulated amount in all accounts in the "Income:Work" hierarchy). This still fits your use case for clarity, but allows other users to expand the budgeting tool to their needs.

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