free software, PTA and privacy enthusiast

MastodonMatrix

  • 12 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I totally agree with you that PTA is a-must to control finances but it not easy to analyze or understand in depth the financial situation (something that goes beyond the monthly or anual expenses, revenues, p/l… ). But information is there in the journals.

    I also migrated to just and it was a big change. I can think about the most useful-complex reports and make them available with a simple command to never forget them. And even when the report is displayed, the hledger command is displayed so I can remember/verify the meaning of the report. I have a bunch of reports I use often:

    • just common-expenses: all the discretional expenses (excluding taxes…) with my partner
    • just my-expenses: my personal discretional expenses (excluding taxes…)
    • just is: my overall inconmestatement
    • just is-job: my incomestatement of all the expenses (including taxes) against the revenues of my job. This report gives me my savings and I like this report because I prefer to assign the revenues of my investments to the ROI of my investments.
    • just roi: hledger roi ROI report of my investments

    I tried hledger-vega but it was a bit complex to maintain and to modify, but savings graph was really clarifying. It help me to understand what was really a saving in my journal.

    I will check https://hledger.org/scripts.html#hledger-combine-balances and https://hledger.org/scripts.html#hledger-bar. hledger-combine-balances is the first report I was interested in :).

















  • Firstly you must understand what is double-entry book keeping. Then, you can do double-entry book keeping wirh many tools, one of them is Plain Text Accounting (PTA) tools such as hledger.

    My personal path to PTA was firstly read the manual and use Gnucash. It is also a double entry accounting tool but not plain text. I understood accounting principles and then I moved to PTA.