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Comment by hannibalhorn | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak to Transity, but I use HLedger for my entity (nothing fancy, just a single member LLC.)

I can keep my ledger in git, I don't need to pay for or even learn to use QuickBooks, I can quickly write a script to import data from basically anywhere, and I can use all the standard tools in my toolbox (grep, diff, python) to visualize and work with the data.

I'm sure mainstream accounting programs add value as the organization grows, but I spent a few minutes playing with Quickbooks and I was ready to just use Excel when I discovered the whole plain text accounting thing. And it's been working well for me.

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I used ledger to keep the books as treasurer for a small non-profit for a few years. It worked really well for me but the problem came with handing it off to the next person or thinking about involving an accountant to do the annual reports. Very few are going to be able to deal with a text file of journal entries. QuickBooks is the standard for all small business accounting, like it or not.

I've never actually used it (or Quickbooks), but does ledger have any way of exporting something that could imported by Quickbooks?

> Very few are going to be able to deal with a text file of journal entries. QuickBooks is the standard for all small business accounting, like it or not.

I always find this lowest-common-denominator as de facto standard depressing. It's how we end up with word processing documents as a standard for exchange and collaboration (and word processors are horrible environments to create in).

Ledger can output to CSV, so yes. But, not having QuickBooks, I couldn't tell you what it wants in the CSV and what needs to be altered from ledger's output.

I have recently learned a technical term for the scenario you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

"Informally, a strategy profile is a Nash equilibrium if no player can do better by unilaterally changing his or her strategy. To see what this means, imagine that each player is told the strategies of the others. Suppose then that each player asks themselves: 'Knowing the strategies of the other players, and treating the strategies of the other players as set in stone, can I benefit by changing my strategy?'

If any player could answer "Yes", then that set of strategies is not a Nash equilibrium. But if every player prefers not to switch (or is indifferent between switching and not) then the strategy profile is a Nash equilibrium. Thus, each strategy in a Nash equilibrium is a best response to all other strategies in that equilibrium.

The Nash equilibrium may sometimes appear non-rational in a third-person perspective. This is because a Nash equilibrium is not necessarily Pareto optimal."

Thanks for this. I've been pondering whether the word-processing/QuickBooks strategy is a Nash equilibrium (at least from my admittedly shallow understanding of the term). So lots of people produce documents using Word or LibreOffice - so that's their strategy. Some group of people produce documents using LaTeX. I'm not sure that I see how this is a Nash equilibrium. The LaTeX people in some situations might gain an advantage by switching to the Word strategy for better interoperability. The Word people (in almost all situations) could gain an advantage by switching to the LaTeX strategy for the sake of using a sane paradigm.

Rather the word-processing situation (and likely the QuickBooks situation, though I know much less about accounting software) seems to be something like maximizing the lowering of perceived entry cost (in terms of learning to use the software) over all other factors (with resulting increasing in complexity for more advanced functions and poor flexibility).

I have the same issue. In addition, for a medium-sized operation, it becomes necessary at some point for more than one person to be updating the system at the same time. That’s when I switched from GNUCash to QuickBooks Online.

I also have a single member LLC, but can't understand the advantages of using a cli tool over Quickbooks. Beyond the obvious transactions list and graphs of income and expenses, Quickbook self-employed estimates quarterly taxes and even allows me to make payments to the IRS directly via eftps.gov. At tax time, it exports all transactions tagged and categorized to TurboTax.

... and sends a copy of everything to Intuit.

from where/how are you getting your data in?

I'm not the parent, but it's fairly straightforward to get data into the ledger format.

I have written a handful of Python scripts to convert CSV credit card statements (Chase, credit unions, etc) to ledger. Additionally, pdfquery can be used to extract data from PDF statements.

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