“Plain text accounting is a way of doing bookkeeping and accounting with plain text files and scriptable, command-line-friendly software.”
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Crazy coincidence, I’ve been working on a CLI and terminal-based bookkeeping app. I didn’t know about most of these, but the exercise of building my own (with a lot of help from Claude) was fun and worthwhile. I have a little preview here: https://nigel.rygn.io. (The Mac DMG isn’t built yet but it’s super easy to build with Rust.)
Similarly, I built one in TypeScript over the last two months, just for my own use so it can be as quirky as it wants to be. It outputs a static site that I can share with my accountant via Cloudflare or a ZIP file.
Right now transactions are specified in TypeScript rather than in plain plain text which creates opportunities for nice account-specific shorthands (e.g. "always apply this tagging" etc.).
As someone who has operated a bookkeeping service for over 30 years, I was curious about what Plain Text Accounting is and how it operates. Until I got to this:
“Getting started. First, to clone your repository locally, you can create an access token set with proper Git operation permissions on the access token management page.” https://app.beanhub.io/repos/beanhub/example/
I know I’m kind of old-fashioned (can’t help it; I’m old) but this is just more tech-talk gobbledygook that undercuts the premise of “plain text” right off the hop. If you need a language tutorial before you even get started, does it matter how useful it is? Clearly, plain text does not mean plain language.
geeks love text :-) but that doesn't mean normal people understand the text they create!
Best I can tell, you can run any of these Plain Text Accounting systems on your local PC with a local text file just fine.
Of course then the next question is, how do you back up that text file? How do you look back at changes over time? How can you recover/revert mistakes you might have made in an earlier edit?
You can always copy your text file to another computer or use OneDrive/Google Drive/etc. as your backup mechanism; many of these providers will also let you restore or compare to older versions.
In the world of software engineering, we have established practices for tracking changes to text files that are source code. For anyone already familiar with those tools, we might as well use them with non-source code text files like accounting data as well. Presto (optional) gobbledygook.
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