Eventually consistent plain text accounting - Tyler Cipriani

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2024-11-13 02:30:03

Over the past six months, I’ve tracked my money with hledger—a plain text double-entry accounting system written in Haskell. It’s been surprisingly painless.

My previous attempts to pick up real accounting tools floundered. Hosted tools are privacy nightmares, and my stint with GnuCash didn’t last.

But after stumbling on Dmitry Astapov’s “Full-fledged hledger” wiki1, it clicked—eventually consistent accounting. Instead of modeling your money all at once, take it one hacking session at a time.

It should be easy to work towards eventual consistency. […] I should be able to [add financial records] bit by little bit, leaving things half-done, and picking them up later with little (mental) effort.

The sum of each transaction should be $0. Money comes from somewhere, and the same amount goes somewhere else—double-entry accounting. This is powerful technology—it makes mistakes impossible to ignore.

But a good chunk is going to the default expense account, expenses:unknown. I can use the hleger aregister to see what those transactions are:

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