Tutorial – Plain Text Accounting

Plain-Text Accounting (PTA) is a method for doing bookkeeping and accounting with ordinary text files. In a previous issue, I described how to implement a PTA system using an open source tool called hledger [1] [2]. This time, I'll show you how to simplify PTA with a text-based interface called hledger-textual [3] (Figure 1).

Figure 1: How much money do you actually have? How much debt do you have? Hledger-textual makes the answers to these and many more questions immediately visible.

PTA is the simplest computer-based version of accounting, and it has the benefit of being future-proof: Because the data appears in plain-text files, you won't have to worry about any specific application or file format becoming obsolete and disappearing.

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