Plain text accounting just feels right

I’ve been quite hooked on hledger for the past couple of months. I don’t know, it just tickles my senses just the right way.

There’s something about having your life laid bare in front of you in a plain-text file of a couple of thousand lines. You can see where everything is going.

After a session of adding your transactions you add maybe 10-20 transactions, and you run hledger bal <account>. You then look as your banking app and the number on your banking app matches the number on your terminal to the cent. That feels right, just, right.

If there you are a couple of dollars off, you can go back in your banking app, your ledger, and see where the mistake is.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve learned some things:

• Depending on the bank, a transaction will show the date that it was made, or the date that it was settled in the banking app. This grinds my gears massively. I hate trying to remember the coffee I bought on a Monday just to realise I actually bought it on Wednesday but the transaction didn’t settle until almost a week later.
• In Sydney, public transport charges made with bank cards are $1 at the beginning, they stay pending for many days, and after a while, they are corrected and settled to the correct amount. This is even more infuriating to track, but I guess it makes more sense and I’ll give it a pass because in Sydney you have to tap off when you leave the train/bus so the system knows what to charge you. I understand the complexities here. Still, it should be amended and settled much faster, maybe next day?
• Those $1 charges when verifying a card can be annoying but they will go away eventually, for example when putting a card on file in Paypal or similar.
• Hledger does have a Pending transactions feature, but I am not gonna start using it. I barely can justify spending the time I already spend tracking my finances. I already have a job.
• Coffee runs add up. Fast.
• Easter and Anzac are budget murderers. My April would have been such as success story if it wasn’t for those 2
• It’s a lot easier to make changes in your spending patterns when you know where money is going. To an extent. Again, I’ve been trying to cut back on my coffee spending for a while but so far I’ve only been able to look at the screen and nod “uhu-, yes, this is what it’s costing me. Too bad”. I wish it was easier but I only have so much energy in the day to keep track of my spending with a CLI tool and prepare coffee for one using the machine. Maybe I should invest in a drip coffee maker.
• Navigating your ledger file in Nvim feels like a superpower. Lookups are fast. Amending a transaction is a matter of seconds. Run the CLI tool again and everything is up to date. Any modern computer will be able to handle a few thousand lines of text in miliseconds. Such a better interface than the bank apps.

All in all, Hledger has been a blast. I will keep doing it as long as I can. Maybe I’ll get bored of it, but my financial life is getting more complex by the second it seems so having a tool that helps me make sense of it all seems like a good idea.