The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update

The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update

Posted Jan 13, 2009 21:36 UTC (Tue) by nas (subscriber, #17)
Parent article: The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update

Jon, I feel your pain. Account software universally sucks, AFAICT. I spent many hours in December fighting with Quickbooks and AgExpert Analyst. These are both expensive, commercial packages. First, the import/export capabilities are essentially non-existent. Second, they often make what should be simple operations impossible or near-impossible.

The least aggravating tool I have found so far is John Wiegley's Ledger. It is perhaps not right for you since it doesn't know anything about tax forms or laws. It is just a lean and mean text based double entry accounting system (mechanism, not policy).

John's ledger program has some quirks and I'm hoping that BeanCount will become a usable replacement. Unfortunately it seems like the hg code is broken (at least it didn't work for me). Martin Blais has a nice document explaining why double-entry accounting is goodness.

I have an idea of writing a GUI for basic transaction entry using Tkinter and making liberal use of the autocomplete entry field. Autocomplete greatly speeds up data entry if used well. Need more hours in the day. ;-)

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