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   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format</title>
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  14  <h1>
  15      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  16
  17  </h1>
  18
  19 </div>
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  22     <div class="entry">
  23       <div class="title">Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format</div>
  24       <div class="date">18th December 2012</div>
  25       <div class="body"><p>A few days ago I came across
  26 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
  27 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
  28 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
  29 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
  30 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
  31 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
  32 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
  33 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
  34 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
  35
  36 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
  37 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
  38 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
  39 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
  40
  41 <blockquote><pre>
  42 2004-05-27 Book Store
  43       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
  44       Liabilities:Visa
  45 </pre></blockquote>
  46
  47 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
  48 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
  49 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
  50 Spang</a>,
  51 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
  52 Keen</a>,
  53 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
  54 Cantino</a> and
  55 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
  56 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
  57 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
  58 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
  59 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
  60
  61 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
  62 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
  63 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
  64 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
  65 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
  66
  67 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
  68 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
  69 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
  70 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
  71 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
  72 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
  73 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
  74 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
  75 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
  76 </div>
  77
  78       <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.</div>
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