The end of the accounting search

Posted May 9, 2023 11:17 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: The end of the accounting search by paulj
Parent article: The end of the accounting search

It's mentioned in the article (and previously as well across the saga IIRC). The main issues seem to be around reporting and check printing features. There was also a complaint about files getting big, but I do one file per month to keep active files smaller at least… There is noticeable lag when `hledger` reads everything though, so something that uses a cache may be better suited.

There's also the issue of what the accountant on the other side of the equation can use. I doubt `ledger` and friends are in that toolbox.

The end of the accounting search

Posted May 9, 2023 13:00 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

LWN did do an article looking at ledger - but that's ~10 years ago. The plain-text-accounting movement seems to have made a lot of progress and developed a lot more tools around then. Including Web UIs.

Certainly, the idea of a clean, well described, human-readable, text format to write and easily manipulate your accounts in seems interesting (nothing prevents tools building other caches and indices around this). Particularly when "vendor lock in" is such a common complaint with accountancy systems.

The end of the accounting search

Posted May 9, 2023 14:05 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> Certainly, the idea of a clean, well described, human-readable, text format to write and easily manipulate your accounts in seems interesting

Until you're a big company and have auditors sniffing around wondering why it's so easy to manipulate the figures ...

Okay, there's ways around it, but many accountants are much happier if the means of editing things aren't there ... Of course we know anybody can get round it all, if they wish ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

The end of the accounting search

Posted May 9, 2023 14:39 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

The same people who have "email Word docs and Excel spreadsheets with sensitive data to partners" as core working practices, IME. But, those people are generally going to use Intuit, Sage, Xero, or somesuch.

Note that by "manipulate" I meant "write tools to transform (reduce, visualise, collate, extract, etc.)". ;)

The end of the accounting search

Posted May 21, 2023 22:55 UTC (Sun) by ProsaicHacker (guest, #165233) [Link]

I did a contract that had me creating cost value Journal Entries for buildings owned by the organization over the previous 100 years.

Due to IT's bizarro restictions on installing tools I used a lot of portable apps including a screen control language
the directly use the UI of the accounting app to insert and delete records from the pre-production DB.
In a important demo of the system,the director of account noticed a flaw in the form of a internal tracking number.
It was a dash in the wrong place.
While they were discussing plans to hire a data entry person to do Journal Entries back out the transaction and reenter a new one,
I unload the database, fixed the mistake with Perl, and reloaded it. They watched me do it and were in horror that it could be done even in pre-prod. They thought all system were immutable.

I never did that kind of thing in front of accountants again.