Post #3609675

2026-07-05 18:05 UTC

@cliffle@hachyderm.io Interesting. I am designing accounting software, to be written in Rust and also plain text based. I've decided to use the format that is used by ledger (the cmd line tool, www.plaintextaccounting.org), wonder if you looked into ledger and what your thoughts are on the format?

Replies (1)

@cliffle@hachyderm.io 2026-07-06 19:33

@mere@infosec.exchange well it sounds like we should keep in touch! 😄 I took a look at the format last night, the best reference I could find was actually hledger's docs: https://hledger.org/1.52/hledger.html#journal-cheatsheet It seems pretty reasonable, and in a lot of ways cleaner than what I've got. It also has a _lot_ of features, far more than I currently support. (In particular I don't support multiple currencies or cost-basis tracking.) But a subset of it might be useful! It sounds like the Ledger family of tools is based on a model of taking a source file, like a CSV, and importing it by modifying a journal file (in Ledger's format), so that you can assign transactions to accounts and add tags and stuff. That's reasonable! But I'm doing something a little bit different: I'm trying to check in the exact files from banks or credit cards or whatever, unmodified, and use them as the source material without duplicating their contents anywhere. So I have sidecar files to add metadata, but the CSV/XLS/PDF/QDF file is always the source of truth. Is this a good idea? I don't know! It's been working for me so far, but wanting to do this is why I haven't seriously attempted using any of the PTA-family of tools. No shade, they seem great.

Open ##4477300