Sort your Ledger journal with Emacs

Sort your Ledger journal with Emacs
===================================

Last edited: $Date: 2022/01/02 21:17:01 $

Ledger for plain text accounting
--------------------------------

Ledger (https://www.ledger-cli.org/) is an open source
powerful, double-entry accounting system that you access from
the command line.

It is the original form of plain text accounting
(https://plaintextaccounting.org/).

The advantages of plain text accounting are:

- plain text format, so you can use your favorite editor
- makes it easy to create scripts to minimize the amount of work
- excellent for usage with a version control system
- completely transparent to the user, no "black box" doing
incomprehensible things
- light weight application
- open source, so no vendor lock in
- works fine on BSD and Linux

See also the [Wikipedia page on
Ledger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledger_%28software%29).

Even if you have no legal obligation to register your
financial transactions in an accounting system, you can
benefit from using Legder.

It is easy to setup, doesn't take much time to maintain and
gives you a very good insight in what you have spent your
money on.

Version control
---------------

For version control I have developed the habit to use a
combination of RCS
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_Control_System)
and Git.

RCS is an old revision control system, that works only on
local files. I use this as a safety-net. During my work I
frequently commit the changes in the journal in RCS. This
gives me a number of save-points, I can revert to, in case
this might be necessary.

When everything is OK, I commit the changes to Git. This way,
my Git repository is not clobbered with small changes,
correction of errors and so on.

I use this method for almost anything I write, including my
ledger journal.

Emacs cooperates very well with RCS. The default key binding
for this is `C-x v v` (vc-next-action). Hit this to rotate
through check in and check out. Log entries are stored with
`C-c C-c` (vc-finish-logentry).

In case you want to rename a file that is under the control of
RCS, use M-x vc-rename-file.

Ledger-mode
-----------

At the start of the new year it is time to close to books on
the previous year.

To minimize the amount of work I start with downloading a CSV
file with the bank-account transactions.

A simple Perl-script creates a ledger journal from this CSV
file.

A shell script creates ledger journal entries from my outgoing
invoices. These invoices are in Postscript, the shell script
combines a mixture of grep, awk and ed.

After a concatenate of the invoice journal entries to the
bank-account transaction journal entries, the only thing left
to do, is to sort the ledger journal in chronological order.

For this, the Emacs ledger-mode works great!

I have named my journal 2021.ledger.

In Emacs I have set the variable ledger-default-date-format to
"%Y-%m-%d", which results in YYYY-MM-DD as the date of the
records.

This is the workflow:

- open 2021.ledger in Emacs
- Emacs recognizes the format and activates ledger-mode
- `C-x h` (mark-whole-buffer) marks the entire buffer as
active region
- `C-c C-s` sorts the journal entries in chronological order

[Ledger-mode](https://github.com/ledger/ledger-mode) can do
much more, I use only a fraction of its possibilities.

See also the ledger-mode page at ledger-cli.org
(https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger-mode.html).