These ledger formats have what feels to me an overly verbose multi-line structure for each transaction.
For 20 years, I have been using a format that combines a diary and ledger. The 'to' and 'from' accounts are either bank/asset accounts (sav, cc, hl for home loan, ...) or spend categories (snack, shopping, clothes, ... ). Each year I finish 31 December with a `# Closing balances` section for each bank/investment/pension account, then start a new text file `2019.txt` with an `# Opening balances` section before 1 January's entry.
Here is a typical day's format:
# 2019-05-27 Mon
2.50 sav>lunch Cafe Nero - Coffee
100.00 sav>cc Transfer - Credit card repayment
amt from>to forex: shop - desc [txn #]
# Diary
* <topic> - <what>
* Times - Sleep 01:00-06:00 5h. Run 45m. Work 08:00-18:00 10h.
* Work - Meeting with xxx on xxx. We agreed to xxx.
* Friends - Lunch with xxx
* Note - Running shoes are Asics GT-2000, size 48, model T500N.
# Links
* Hledger: Robust plain text accounting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012499
For the first 5 years, I was single and reconciled everything down to the cent, using an AWK script to generate totals to match against my bank statements.
When I got married, all our accounts switched to joint ones. I didn't want to track my my partner's side of our spending. So these logs became more a personal diary than a fully reconciled ledger. Anything I want to remember long-term goes either there or secured in a password safe.
You reinvented the accounting daybook: Shops doing paper accounting never went through the hassle of double-entry accounts for each sale. Instead, each was a single line in the day’s journal, and closing for the day involved reconciling the till with the sales journal, and entering the entire day’s revenue as a single transaction in the master account book.
I agree. They are too verbose. One line is enough.
I actually think personal logs are useful for all things, not only money. In my business we use a text-file with logs for all the events, money, business stuff that happens, and then there's a program that reads all the lines, parses them and turns them into a final "state" of the company with everything that is being done and so on.
From that we generate dashboards, reports and stuff.
For 20 years, I have been using a format that combines a diary and ledger. The 'to' and 'from' accounts are either bank/asset accounts (sav, cc, hl for home loan, ...) or spend categories (snack, shopping, clothes, ... ). Each year I finish 31 December with a `# Closing balances` section for each bank/investment/pension account, then start a new text file `2019.txt` with an `# Opening balances` section before 1 January's entry.
Here is a typical day's format:
For the first 5 years, I was single and reconciled everything down to the cent, using an AWK script to generate totals to match against my bank statements.When I got married, all our accounts switched to joint ones. I didn't want to track my my partner's side of our spending. So these logs became more a personal diary than a fully reconciled ledger. Anything I want to remember long-term goes either there or secured in a password safe.