Interesting post and Hacker News discussion:
Perhaps it's good to have some comparisons between different kinds of accounting software (PTA, spreadsheet, etc). There is a section explaining why choosing PTA over non-PTA, but to be fair we should have a section where the reverse applies
Sheets are great for prototyping, quick pivot tables and exploring the dataset whichever way. Google Sheets are great for doing this collaboratively.
But long-term, sheets are a maintenance and upkeep nightmare.
There are numerous examples of people posting on various personal finance forums to say: “Hey, i built this great spreadsheet! Just plug your numbers on page 1 and enjoy graphs and projections”. Oftentimes, there would be comments below asking “can you add or please?” but seldom “hey, great idea, here is a version where I added ”.
Would you take a complex spreadsheet constructed by someone else and evolve it in any way? I know I would not. You can’t see its functionality at a glance, and you can’t easily trace either data flow or control flow through it. You are forced to inspect it one cell at a time, painfully reconstructing the dependencies and backlinks. Heck, you can set your own spreadsheet that you wrote from scratch aside for a year, and then come back and have the same issue. And that is all before we come to testing, version control, etc, etc
There is a point after each complexity of the spreadsheet turns it into an unmaintainable mess, and that point is uncomfortably close to “just a bunch of numbers and a few simple formulas”.
1 Like
Spreadsheets are awesome. I personally use Libreoffice Calc and very occasionally Google sheets.
hledger and spreadsheets go pretty well together. I especially appreciate -O csv.