Welcome to Plain Text Accounting (PTA) community in Lemmy! A community to talk, ask and learn about accounting with tools like ledger-cli, hledger and beancount.
I am /u/zakozazz at Reddit now /u/zako at Lemmy. This community issues from discussions (1, 2) in the PTA subreddit due to the limitations of Reddit so that third party applications can use the API.
Please feel free to take part in this community!
What is plain text accounting and how does it differ from real accounting? My initial response is shock and horror because I’m picturing lots of financials in .txt and pdf files instead of excel like god intended…
Firstly you must understand what is double-entry book keeping. Then, you can do double-entry book keeping wirh many tools, one of them is Plain Text Accounting (PTA) tools such as hledger.
My personal path to PTA was firstly read the manual and use Gnucash. It is also a double entry accounting tool but not plain text. I understood accounting principles and then I moved to PTA.
So it is accounting software, got it.