PS Thanks meruru for mentioning http://plaintextaccounting.org. I started it to knit and grow our community, give more visibility to the non-Ledger projects like hledger, beancount and the rest, help answer VFAQs on IRC and mail lists, collect best practices, etc.

That site is also worth checking out for more hledger materials, such as comparisons, talks, slideshows, and blog posts. Eg Andreas Pauley's quick intro slides (https://pauley.org.za/functional-finance-hledger) or my slow "Hands-on with hedger" talk and FLOSS Weekly appearance.

I've been using ledger (the original one) for the last couple of months, and I'm loving it. I'm way into the whole plain text accounting thing.

I guess it's the most obvious question in the world, but: what are the big reasons I should switch to hledger? What do you see as the primary advantages of hledger over ledger?

As hledger's proud parent, having preferred it for my needs since the early releases, I can talk about this for a long time. :) The https://hledger.org/FAQ addresses it, as PhilippGille mentioned. I still find it hard to answer concisely. Let me give it another shot:

Here are some things I've tried to do differently with hledger compared to Ledger. I feel we've had some success with all of these:

Project:

- be actively maintained and contributed to

- build out Ledger's concepts a bit more selectively/thoroughly/to a higher level of polish, taking advantage of hindsight, a fresh codebase, a well-suited language

Docs & design:

- all behaviour fully specified and documented

- all docs up to date and accurate

- practice documentation-first design and development

- more intuitive, learnable, consistent concepts and UX

- be usable for less-technical users as well as techies

- be easy to get started with as well as efficient for regular use

- explicitly try to model accounting concepts and help meet real world accounting needs

Software:

- be robust and dependable, with few user-visible bugs

- be easy to install and run well on all major platforms

- provide APIs/libs enabling more plain text accounting hacking among Haskellers

- be readable, clear, and a useful source of algorithm & architecture ideas for other implementors

- remain maintainable and cost effective over the long term

- achieve a long lifespan and provide a safe long term format for accounting data

Technology:

- clarify whether Haskell is good for real-world apps (yes!)

- learn more Haskell by building a real-world app (yes!)

- attract contributors by being a Haskell project (yes)

Out of time for now, I hope it's not too hand-wavy..

"be robust and dependable, with few user-visible bugs"

Not wanting to come across as too argumentative :). I'd prefer if there had to be bugs that they were user visible.

Good point. By "user-visible" I mean "any real problem a user could recognise if it was pointed out to them". Such as a wrong sign, wrong decimal digit, or behaviour not agreeing with the docs.

This answer in their FAQ contains some differences: https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/wiki/FAQ#features

Just curious, do you guys have any power users? Like large companies? Also, what does the distant future look like for hledger?

Large companies don't usually post everything manually. They journal adjustments, but the day to day entries will be made automatically by their ERP from systems like Purchase to Pay.

There is no reason to post things manually with (h)ledger, it's a command line tool so it's perfectly scriptable.

Our company uses a plethora of (mostly) ruby scripts to get data from banks and the billing system API and a few other sources like exchange rates websites and converts the output into ledger files. And then another bunch of scripts takes the output from ledger and sends it to the API for, for example, the government VAT payments. (Our company is by no means big, but multinational with business in 7 currencies).

There are a number of test and assert statements along the line to do sanity checks with a manual review since sending out incorrect values could potentially be expensive / illegal. It works great. The whole thing is stored in git so any changes are auditable. We need some of the power features of ledger though, so I doubt ledger will work for us, but I'll give it a spin.

Actually large companies are mostly manual compared to most small/medium size companies. Just too many processes to just generate correct journal entries in SAP from purchase, sales, operations, production and distribution. Moreover adjustments, inventory counting methods, purchase, sales require creative use of manual processes, excel and laborious job of account reconciliation at closing (which indeed is just a snapshot report at point in time). I have yet to see a multi-national SAP installation which automatically ingest banks, financial institutes reports and generate account reconciliation entries, government reports automatically.

I feel combined with machine learning and storing hledger records in some large databse, it can become a powerful automated accounting system which SAP and large vendors can just dream of.

I actually built this for my own usage: https://github.com/j3k0/ledger-guesser

Works quite well

hledger power users (AFAIK) import most entries from CSV downloaded from financial institutions. I have this scripted to run nightly from cron, so the new entries are there awaiting finalisation when I open the journal in the morning.

wtvanhest, not that I know of. It's hard to collect good usage data without nagging people. I hear from small business owners, the occasional accountant, and I have the impression there are other business/institutional users that don't interact.

Distant future is hard to predict but here I go: hledger or any good parts of its design are still around and still providing value. Any past data kept with hledger is still readable and easy to convert, with or without a working hledger. Highly polished and efficient UIs are available everywhere they're useful. Data import and multimachine syncing are routine and just work. Data hygiene/security and personal privacy are routine and just work. Performance is high, "big data" is no problem. Resource usage is low, these tools continue to work in the turbulent and resource-constrained future. There is a strong global community of financially literate, capable, empowered, prospering individuals and organisations using efficient high quality universally available accounting tools to promote, enforce and create widespread transparency and societal insight in finance, business, politics and every ecological issue.

Thank you for your work. (Does that count as a question?)

I appreciate it!

Thanks for this. A few questions comes to mind:

1. What was the motivation to create this instead of extending ledger?

2. How to track time?

You're welcome. Re 1, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20020196 above. Re 2:, check out the timeclock and timedot manuals on hledger.org front page (I use the latter) and my https://hledger.org/Time-planning.html hacks in the cookbook and more https://plaintextaccounting.org/#time-logging tools and https://plaintextaccounting.org/#time-tracking tips.

Excellent. As someone who never learned accounting, I don't know how far I would go, but I would try anyway.

Are there any iOS apps that interop with hledger? I've been using iQIF [0] for a bit, but it only exports things in QIF format.

[0] http://www.iqif.info/iQIF/

Use this https://github.com/giacomos/qifparse combined with https://github.com/quentinsf/icsv2ledger to automatically generate journal entried in ledger-cli format which can be used by hledger directly.

You can also fork and modify it to generate hledger format files directly.

Check out the parser extension approach at https://Prudent.me

Would you mind trying out https://cashier.alensiljak.ml/ and provide feedback about how it works on Apple devices? It is meant as a less-maintenance alternative to native apps and works offline if "added to desktop", which is a browser feature for Progressive-Web Applications. The source is here - https://gitlab.com/alensiljak/cashier - if you wish to provide some feedback or have a look at the code. Currently it can record transactions and export in ledger format. Perhaps more functionality is added if a need arises.

Basically any that export CSV. There are several that are specifically hledger-aware, but they might be all on Android so far, I forget. See https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/wiki/Mobile-apps for more on this topic.