Eventually consistent plain text accounting (Hacker News)

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122258

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.
-- Tyler Cypriani

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It took me about 3 months to have the system. Once that's done though it was a breeze: 90+% of the transactions are simple yank-and-paste now.

It doesn't mean that it's not getting updates though, I try to improve how I track things continuously. It's just that it now requires way less maintenance that it did at the beginning. But I remember how it was pretty challenging to coming up with ways to track things for the first time, and I have accounting background so I guess it can be a bit more challenging at the beginning for everyone else.