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Comment by speleding | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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