Comment by marttt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marttt | Hacker News Reader

In my country, the numbered chart of accounts [1] is considered standard. A question to other (possibly European) Ledger users: have you ever considered this a hindrance or inconsistency regarding your use of the software?

I've been using Ledger for almost a decade (tiny single-person "company"). At one point, though, I started migrating my stuff to PTA by OpenBSD dev Ingo Schwarze [2]. It is a small Perl utility and relies on the numbered accounts system in a separate file, so I do feel more on the same page with general accounting-related discussions and corner-case howtos in my country.

I also like how PTA's reliance on account numbers also allows for a single-line oriented, very compact journal format [3]. This is great for further parsing with Unix tools. There was interesting discussion on PTA vs Ledger etc involving the author [4].FWIW, PTA is also linked on the plaintextaccounting.org website

To be fair, because of little prior experience with accounting in general, I did somewhat mess up my initial system of accounts in Ledger. So the migration to PTA is also in a standstill at this point. But it is a nice system for people in countries where the numbered chart of accounts might be preferred.

My only complaint is, the author might have written it in something as tiny and easily portable like Awk instead (for us occasional Windows users). But Perl, despite being "huge" in this comparison, is included in the OpenBSD base, and it is praised for text parsing, so the preference is understandable.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_accounts

2: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/

3: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en

4: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430

PTA's journal syntax looks very not-human-friendly, who wants to memorize those category numbers.

I'm sure you can create ledger accounts that match your required chart of accounts.

The example account tree you linked to seems very business oriented, and driven by interests of stakeholders & tax authorities. Ledger gets used by private individuals too, and not everything is tracked for the goal of standard business report.

Personally for me, if I had to use such a standard account tree, then I'd need to use a second system of classification for the things I am interested in.

Example 1: I have 3 heating and 2 cooling mechanisms in this house, with very different costs to operate. Each device gets a separate account. For the pellet stove, I also need to keep track of consumption to buy the right amount of fuel before the next winter, so there's even non-currency items tracked in my accounting. That doesn't sound like it'll fit in a standard scheme.

Example 2: We own a van built as a recreational vehicle. I want to track the expenses related to that (potentially expensive) hobby, whether trips, consumables, equipment or repairs. But at the same time, it's just a vehicle, and has "normal vehicle" costs just like the regular car.

My country also has a standard format (several actually). Ledger allows you to basically name any account anything you want, so you can follow that naming convention.

The standard alphabetic ordering of `ledger balance` isn't very useful. I created a small script to sort the output into a format where the entries are listed in a more sensible order. One solution could be (I haven't done this yet) is prefixing each account name with the number from the standard format, that should result in the ledger balance being more useful.

Yeah, I have thought about account numbers as prefixes in the past as well (or some other syntactic hack for integrating the chart numbers into Ledger's account names) but didn't really try it.

A small shortcoming of Ledger in relation to this seems to be that it is not very comfortable to modify your initial accounts system later on, e.g. modify the hierarchy of things when you found some mistakes, etc. In the numbered chart of accounts system (which you have in a separate file, like PTA does), this seems easier.

I would also confirm that spotting accidental data entry errors is also easier in a single-line oriented journal like PTA. In Ledger, one entry consists of at least 3 lines, which is quite verbose.

Obviously, a more seasoned diy-accountant probably simply doesn't make any errors of this kind, or automates these tasks to an extent, so there's that. :)

Nonetheless, Ledger is obviously still a remarkable piece of software. I also recall some philosophically interesting blog posts by the author John Wiegley, on maths, thinking in general or something similar. He is obviously a brilliant mind.

To prevent accidental data errors I "include lib/accounts.ledger" in every file, a list of all allowed accounts (see documentation for the format), and then add "--strict" to my .ledgerrc" file.

Reorganising an account to go in a different place is just a global search/replace across all ledger files. I would say a search/replace is easier than what you would have to do in a different accounting system, but it's also more dangerous. It's a good idea to have a bunch of asserts in place in addition to the --strict mode to make sure that "ledger balance" still produces sensible results when doing that.

> a list of all allowed accounts

Oh, this is a great find, thanks very much for pointing it out. I admit I haven't (at least not in recent years) looked into Ledger's manual, so I was not aware or had forgotten about this possibility. This one would, indeed, solve a lot of potential problems or confusion.

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