Some lovely success stories, well worth a read for hledger fans. (I almost want to archive it here in case reddit ever goes away.)
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Hello! Pasting my original r/plaintextaccounting post here:
I just closed out my household's 2024 books and completed my first full year of plain text accounting with hledger and I am feeling pretty chuffed! I wanted to share here because no one IRL cares about my nerdy bookkeeping passion.
Plain text accounting with hledger has been a profound experience and transformed our household's relationship to our finances and financial planning. I am far from a "power user" or any kind of coder. I'm a mom with a basic understanding of terminal commands. (My dad is an early, old school pc guy who worked in Silicon Valley in the 80s, so I was raised with some can-do terminal level confidence and a healthy aversion to privatized, subscription-based, corporate applications.)
I got interested in accounting through my research background in the history of mathematics and science. This led me to Luca Pacioli and this fun little book by Jane Gleeson-White: Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance. This inspired me to enroll in an introductory accounting course at my local community college. Once I had this foundation, I started poking around for free/open source applications to start our household accounting and that journey led me to hledger.
I am eternally grateful to everyone who has contributed to and maintains hledger's documentation and made it accessible for a user like me.
I prefer hledger-web which is a beautiful way to look at our books. I have been able to keep up with journal entries and produce quarterly and now end-of-year reports and hledger has made it all honestly quite joyful. This in turn has transformed how I feel about handling our finances generally and more importantly how I feel about them going forward. Amazing!
I'm already looking forward to 2025 and some refinements to my categories but other than that, I wouldn't change a thing. It's perfect. Again, I bow to those who have made this possible. Thank you.
I’ve made a contribution to the cause here: https://opencollective.com/hledger
Edit:typos
Edit: add donation link
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In response to u/patricius who asked about my work flow and tips and caught me in an enthusiastic mood, I commented:
Happy to share! Apologies if this is more detail than what you are looking for, but we have found success in the details 
I aim to manually enter our household’s cash/checking journal entries at least weekly. It takes less than an hour. Often less than 30 minutes. Even less if I manage it every 3-4 days. It’s a habit now and I look forward to completing it.
There is an exponential effect on time required if I delay more than one week. Of course, I have thought about importing from electronic bank statements but it’s a level of engagement and data translation that doesn’t excite me. The routine mindful maintenance practice (I know it as “soji”) of journaling expenses and revenues has been a healthy friction that brings awareness to our spending as well as our earning.
I keep hledger-web open on the left side of my monitor and the browser window of the account info open on the right. I work at a desktop computer at a standing station because I am old enough to understand this is the way. I often keep my mobile nearby to drill down. (“What did I buy with PayPal?” “Who in Venmo-ing me?”) I eat candy while I journal. I like See’s Candy lollipops (or any hard candy) and keep a box on my desk specifically for accounting. I log lollipop purchases as an accounting expense! I am an animal and capitalism is my cage lol. It’s a silly reward system but sucking on sugar is tried and true.
I also pay my kid to occasionally do entries with me. This is also an accounting expense. And fun times familiarizing them with financial literacy.
I make my entries a little “out of order”
Date
Description
Amount
Debit
Credit
Since this is how my brain naturally organizes the information.
Memorizing debit-credit dynamics comes with practice. But I do keep a panel of post-it notes with my own FAQs under the monitor. “Debits always increase Assets, Expenses. Credits always increase Liabilities, Revenues.”
I also keep a list of sub account names and numbers that come up because decoding transfers should be easy.
I use Emacs to directly edit the journal file if I have made an error. Usually the date.
Monthly, I enter reconciliations for interest earning accounts (Revenue:Interest) Love when the bank pays me!
Quarterly I enter gains/losses on investment accounts. There seem to be a few methods people use to do this. I keep it simple:
If it’s a gain:
Date Investment returns
Asset:Investment account
Revenue:Investments
If it’s a loss I just reverse the debit and credit lines. Probably this isn’t GAAP (haha) but it meets our needs. We are conservative “Boglehead” approach investors so this is all generally straightforward and very boring.
Quarterly, I produce balance sheets and income statements. I print the terminal output to pdfs and convert the pdfs to csv in order to import the data into a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are fun! This has been our most useful tool for tracking and budgeting.
At the end of this year, I did the above for Q4. I then also created a year-long Income Statement and add this to my spreadsheet. This helps me reconcile the year by comparing totals across quarters to the full year statement and I did catch a very few stray calculations. (Usually from back logging something in a previous quarter after that quarter has ended.) Once everything is in order and balances, I add closing entries to the 2024 journal to zero out expense and revenues. Yay!
Last, I tuck 2024.journal into the 2024 folder with everything else and kiss it goodbye. Then I send a love letter to the hledger community on reddit (or forum.plaintextaccounting.org) The true angels among us also deserve dopamine reinforcement.
I tell hledger that we are on to 2025.journal and I manually enter (copy/paste) Opening balances. This I do in Emacs since it’s a long list:
Date Opening balances
Asset:Checking
Asset:Savings
Asset:Investment
Equity:Opening balances
There is an import feature that will move your opening balances for you but I’ve not mastered it and figuring it out takes longer than just punching it in.
I do keep a text document of notes to myself. Key bits of code and my quarterly/annual workflow in a text document. The daily stuff gets reinforced quickly but the quarterly/annual stuff does benefit from friendly reminders to myself.
Last tip: People often ask about mobile apps for journal entries. This is helpful when traveling for example. After some research I landed on just creating a google form with some preloaded common categories. After the trip, I import the form’s spreadsheet into my journal. Easy-peasy.
Hope this is helpful. Consistency really is key. Certainly accounting and plain text in particular attract people inclined toward detail and some minutiae. Nothing wrong with that! See how long this message is? But in some seriousness, I do think it is important to avoid a level of detail that is not actually useful.
For example occasionally we use cash! What do we use it for? I don’t know! What’s a receipt? It was probably candy or some silly equivalent. If I don’t know, I log the cash withdrawal as an expense (Expense:Cash) and move on. Cash back? I enter it as a lump some when it is distributed and make it its own revenue category (Revenue:Cash back) Kid deposits loose change into the bank? (Revenue: Cash float)
One goal for me this year is to simplify our expense accounts. Just because I can create 1000 little buckets does not mean we need 1000 buckets.
Accounting is an exercise in balance in so many ways. Tapping the dopamine reward system to reinforce the habit does work. My family hit a serious financial bump this year (double job loss) and being able to see our finances clearly and with confidence was literally invaluable for navigating the outcome with minimum anxiety and very much reinforced my commitment to plain text accounting.
My enthusiasm overfloweth 
Have fun!
Edit:formatting. Sorry I’m on mobile.
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I guess this is the best place for me to share this then.
PTA changed my life this year. But I wouldn't just tell you, I can show you
Keep up the good work. We love it.
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Cc'ing another interesting reddit thread.
https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/1huebx1/whats_your_work_flow/
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