Plain Text Accounting using Hledger

This is my starter template for tracking my finances. It is based on plain text accounting, which has the following advantages and disadvantages.

• Pros
  • Customization. You can build whatever you want the way you want it.
  • Manual labor gives intimate knowledge of your finances. Although, we try to automate all repetitive tasks away!
  • Privacy.
  • Open Source. Be inspired by other people.
• Cons
  • You need programming experience.
  • Needs a lot of time to set up.
  • If your financial life is very complicated, it might reach its limits.
  • Less fancy pre-built web UIs. paisa or fava are probably the best ones available.

Before continuing read about full-fledged-ledger, which this repo is based on. It will do a good job of motivating you to get started! In case you would like to learn more about plain text accounting or doubly entry accounting, read Command-line Accounting in Context. Even though the document covers beancount, I really enjoyed reading it.

Setup

1. Install the necessary CLI tools via brew.

brew bundle

2. Install Haskell tooling GHCup. I use cabal to build executables.

3. Download the latest version from puffin if you want a nice TUI.

Usage & Conventions

The most important commands are saved in the justfile. View them using just -l.

• Create accounts by running just add <institution name>.
  • Downloaded CSV files will be put into ./import/<institution>/in.
  • You will have to write conversion scripts (in2csv and csv2journal) and rule files.
• Generate all reports by running just generate.
• Go through uncategorized transactions by running just resolve. This will require fzf, ripgrep, and miller.
• Launch the TUI (puffin) by running just view.
• Generate a ROI report for a given asset by running just roi <asset-name> -Y.
• Journals are split by year. To allow for both all.journal and <year>.journals we need to include opening journals and closing journals. For more info check the guide.

Editor Config

Nvim

• Install vim-ledger as a plugin.
• Run :TSInstall ledger to enable nvim-treesitter for hledger.

Useful Guides

• full-fledged-ledger
• Personal Dashboard

Future changes

• Use Grafana and Prometheus for a dashboard?