Austin Walker recently gave a talk at the Boston Emacs Meetup on using John Wiegley’s ledger program. Happily, there’s a video of the talk so we can all enjoy it. Ledger is a command line program but, of course, there’s a ledger-mode for Emacs so that you can handle everything from your editor, if you like.
What I like about the program is that everything is plain text. Ledger is merely a parser and report generator so it doesn’t change the data files at all. You can back them up with git or whatever method you use. You can generate them however you like. You can also massage the data with your own scripts in any way you like. Maximum flexibility and no data lock-in.
If you’re in charge of handling your finances and like to keep track of things, ledger seems like an excellent solution. It’s open source, uses plain text, and has an Emacs mode. What’s not to like?
Watch the video and see what you think. It’s 51 minutes, 33 seconds so you’ll need to schedule some time.