What is Reddit's opinion of Ledger?

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And if you're comfortable with the command line and want the 100% free and open sourced, ridiculously over-engineered version that gives you absolute control of everything, check out ledger-cli.

You really need an accounting system. You'll be glad later that you started early. We use Xero but really any of the top ones eg Freshbooks will do.

If you absolutely can't spend the subscription amount yet and you've got some leet hacker skills, then try out something like http://www.ledger-cli.org/ or one of it's ports. This will allow you to export to a more dedicated system down the road.

I use R on a daily basis, I work in insurance predictive modeling. The 30-second description of what that means is that I use regression to predict how much insurance claims are going to cost.

If you're not going to be using much statistical analysis and want to look into more general programming for accounting, I'd recommend Python over R. There's an open source ledger called ledger-cli, which has a Python implementation you can look at:

http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html

I’ll put together a readme to get it all setup but the machine learning piece is a bit automated to make it convenient for me.

Currently, this is how I’ve automated the machine learning algorithm:

1. Go to my bank and download my transactions.
2. Run a workflow from any iOS device that has the Workflow app.
3. The workflow script will upload the file via ftp to my local server then run a couple of script to clean up the data and execute the machine learning algorithm.
4. After this process, my classified transactions will show up in our system.

Obviously, I would like to make the machine learning execution less specify to my flow but it works for us right now.

I’m currently refactoring the app to use a database for everything instead of just ledger files so that we can update the transactions and budget from the UI. The lib I’m using to pull the data in from the ledger files doesn’t have functionality to write, just read. I actually don’t need to use ledger once it’s converted to using a database.

I'm trying out the idea of switching to ledger_cli from YNAB because I like the idea of having a human-readable text file as my underlying data structure.

I tried GnuCash before but found the UI too annoying.

With Notepad++, I'm able to get autocomplete on a lot of the categories so that I don't have to type out everything every time.

But the Windows binary is so gimped. :( It won't print everything and is missing some abilities. Because it's version 2.6 rather than 3.0, and I don't want to compile my own copy.

I use ledger to keep track of all of my income and expenditures. Ledger probably isn't for most people (for starters, it only runs on Linux), but I love the double-entry accounting format that it introduced me to (which is by no means unique). I would highly recommend you look into that and start applying it in your spreadsheets or use another program that enforces this convention. I find that it makes it abundantly clear where your money is going, giving you insight such as what you said about eating out.

As for how I handle my finances, I'm naturally quite frugal and only spend on things that I need. For that reason, I don't really budget my finances, I just make observations. I have a pretty high savings rate doing that, so I don't really feel the need to adjust my approach. It works for some people, but definitely not for everyone.

If you're a programmer who's comfortable on the command line, you might like ledger. I was going to write my own software until I found out this existed and fills the need for me perfectly. I use it for both expense tracking and budgeting.

Não acho que é pra todo mundo e nem necessário pra se controlar financeiramente.

Eu uso um sistema de bookkeeping(escrituração): o ledger-cli. Eu coloco cada operação lá e faço um arquivo por mês.

O sistema é bem aberto. Você pode criar as contas que quiser desde que obedeça ao princípio das partidas dobradas. No geral, foi bom pra aprender algo de contabilidade.

Não precisaria de tanta informação como o sistema dá, mas eu gosto de comonele funciona e ele já está na minha rotina faz uns 3 anos. Em dias com muita coisa eu gasto uns 10 minutos fazendo tudo. No geral, eu adiciono tudo em 3 minutos.E

Eu dou push dos meus arquivos pra um repositório git.

You could use the open source tool ledger-cli to track your business transactions and clients. The best thing about this tool is that everything is stored in plaintext, which makes it future proof. The main disadvantage is that you have to use the command line to use it.

If you need an iOS or Mac app, which does pretty much the same, you can use Finances. (Disclaimer: I’m the developer of the app.)

How do you get hold of the stock data and how are they integrated into ledger?

ledger-cli intrigues me as it integrates well with org-mode, but I'm not sure how to integrate historic currency conversion rates or stock prices.

I don't budget, per se. I keep track of all transactions and see if I hit my target.

I keep all my transactions in a text file and use ledger-cli. It's a command line open-source program, so it's for people who are used to that. (No GUI.) But it's free, I can edit it using any text editor (emacs, vi, or DroidEdit on the phone) and sync it through DropBox. And I can run custom reports on it to see things like: how much a particular trip cost, a graph of my monthly electricity usage, how much tax-deductible things I can claim each year, etc.

Nice. I'll have to check out those IM clients; I'm still using ZNC + Bitlbee + wee chat.

Couple more that I use daily:

Remind - calendar and alarm system with plain text storage. I have a line in my .bashrc that shows today's events.

wyrd - ncurses frontend for remind.

ledger - double-entry accounting with plain text storage, although I think it speaks GNUCash as well.

ledger and remind aren't ncurses, so don't quite fit into the topic, but I use them everyday and really like them both. Plain text files are still the simplest thing I've found that syncs across all my machines and is available everywhere.

it's annoying to have to keep 15$ on my card to make sure it's there when the order goes through.

Budgeting and balancing accounts, you're doing it wrong. I don't mean to sound like an ass, but I speak from experience.

• Take $x starting balance. Record it.
• When you buy something, subtract the amount from $x.
  
• The result is $y.
• $y is your new balance.
  

Use that as your record, not what your bank shows as "available balance". If your bank has a web interface, use that every day or two to reconcile your "usable balance" against what the bank says - and accommodate for any automatic payments or other transactions that may have hit the account.

I used to keep a spiral notebook around for this and reconciled it against the bank's web page records every day, but now I use Ledger (http://www.ledger-cli.org/) instead of a pen and paper.