We are building clarity, balance and financial fitness together, with plain text and nimble tools. Welcome!
What is Plain Text Accounting ?
Plain Text Accounting, or PTA for short, is a way of doing bookkeeping and accounting with plain text files and scriptable, command-line-friendly software, such as Ledger, hledger, Beancount and others. There is a website introducing it, which you may want to take a look at first: plaintextaccounting.org.
PTA forum
This site, forum.plaintextaccounting.org, was created by @simonmic in March 2024 to provide a discussion/support hub that is community owned, with a more stable future and a more pleasant and modern user experience. Here's more about the motivation. (See also: Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit)
We are here to discuss accounting and accounting software, with a plain text angle; and to help each other with getting started, general bookkeeping questions, best practices, and building financial fitness and a healthy empowered relationship with money. Money is fundamental in our society and we can make a positive impact by bringing what clarity and balance we can to our financial affairs.
(And we have plenty more favourite topics; time tracking, investing, taxes, tools, etc!)
How can I help ?
We are diverse, both technical and less-technical, from all over the world, and facing many different financial challenges. So try to be kind with others, and let's grow a calm, friendly, powerful community here. Real names, avatar pictures, bios etc. are welcome. You'll find some great tips in the site FAQ. Keep it fun, be excellent towards each other, and happy accounting!
Donations to cover site costs and support the workers are appreciated! See Finance.
Quick tips
Did you know:
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The forum has fast keyboard shortcuts.
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You can enable mailing list mode in your user preferences and read/post to the forum in your email client.
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You can follow the forum in your feed reader by subscribing to one of these feeds:
- https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/latest.rss?order=created all topics
- https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/posts.rss?order=created all topics and replies
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The forum software is Discourse and there is a useful Discourse New User Guide.
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#plaintextaccounting on Matrix is the place to chat about this site, and new topics are announced there.