#plaintextaccounting — Public Fediverse posts

A #hledger alias directive's effect ends at the file end because an alias is quite impactful.

hledger journals are supposed to keep working, and have the same meaning, no matter how you compose them, eg if you combine them with include or multiple -f's.

An account declaration having global effect is relatively harmless,
but an alias having global effect could break or subtly change your reports.

That's why hledger does this differently from Ledger.

#plaintextaccounting

Cleaning up years of inconsistent #plaintextaccounting entries, especially for those tricky investment transactions, can be a serious project. Best to divide and conquer, eg by commodity/account/year. Another division I've found useful is "theory vs editing" - first figuring out the right journal entry, then applying that style across all files. The first task requires thinking/discussion/docs. The second is more mechanical, and the right tools, and disciplined consistent data, can help a lot.

The plaintextaccounting github organisation is a place to collect funds to support general #plaintextaccounting resources like the website, forum, reddit, chat rooms etc.
I have updated the plaintextaccounting Finance page, which tells

- How you can donate, to support our general plain text accounting resources
- How the money is used
- The history and current state of the plaintextaccounting organisation's finances.

You can help ! https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/plaintextaccounting-project-finance-and-how-you-can-help/872

An example of rules converting aregister csv:

# expenses.rules - Extract reimbursable PTA expenses from user's default journal.
source | hledger -n -I areg 'expenses.*:pta' -O csv | sed -E 's/ \| [^"]*//'
skip 1
fields _txnidx,date,code,description,_otheraccounts,amount,_balance
account1 liabilities:sm
if discourse
account2 expenses:hosting

related docs: <https://hledger.org/hledger.html#csv>, <https://hledger.org/hledger.html#aregister>, <https://hledger.org/hledger.html#import>

#hledger #plaintextaccounting

It can be useful to transform some existing hledger data with csv rules. The best way is to use aregister, which provides one csv record per transaction.

Eg, transforming and importing new transactions from a foreign journal into your own:

hledger -f OTHERJOURNAL areg SOMEACCT -O csv | hledger import csv:- --rules RULES

Today's hledger main removes a small papercut here (aregister's "change" column is now "amount", which csv rules recognise more easily).

#hledger #plaintextaccounting