Title: Port of the week: ledger

	Title: Port of the week: ledger
	Author: Solène
	Date: 02 May 2018
	Tags: unix
	Description:

	In this post I will do a short presentation of the port
	productivity/ledger, an very powerful command line accounting
	software, using plain text as back-end. Writing on it is not an easy
	task, I will use a real life workflow of my usage as material, even if
	my use is special.

	As I said before, Ledger is _very_ powerful. It can helps you manage
	your bank accounts, bills, rents, shares and others things. It uses a
	double entry system which means each time you add an operation
	(withdraw, paycheck, ...) , this entry will also have to contain the
	current state of the account after the operation. This will be checked
	by ledger by recalculating every operations made since it has been
	initialized with a custom amount as a start. Ledger can also tracks
	categories where you spend money or statistics about your payment
	method (check, credit card, bank transfer, money...).

	As I am not an english native speaker and that I don't work in banks
	or related, I am not very familiar with accounting words in english,
	it makes me very hard to understand all ledger keywords, but I found a
	special use case for accounting things and not money which is really
	practical.

	My special use case is that I work from home for a company working in
	a remote location. From time to time, I take the train to the to the
	office, the full travel is

	[home] → [underground A] → [train] → [underground B] →
	[office]
	[office] → [underground B] → [train] → [underground A] →
	[home]

	It means I need to buy tickets for both underground A and underground
	B system, and I want to track tickets I use for going to work. I buy
	the tickets 10 by 10 but sometimes I use it for my personal use or
	sometimes I give a ticket to someone. So I need to keep track of my
	tickets to know when I can give a bill to my work for being refunded.

	Practical example: I buy 10 tickets of A, I use 2 tickets at
	day 1. On day 2, I give 1 ticket to someone and I use 2 tickets in the
	day for personal use. It means I still have 5 tickets in my bag but,
	from my work office point of view, I should still have 8 tickets. This
	is what I am tracking with ledger.

	2018/02/01 * tickets stock Initialization + go to work
	Tickets:inv 10 City_A
	Tickets:inv 10 City_B
	Tickets:inv -2 City_A
	Tickets:inv -2 City_B
	Tickets

	Tickets:inv -2 City_A
	Tickets:inv -2 City_B
	Tickets

	Tickets:inv -4 City_B
	Tickets:inv -2 City_A
	Tickets

	At the point, running `ledger -f tickets.dat balance Tickets` shows my
	tickets remaining:

	4 City_A
	2 City_B Tickets:inv

	Will add another entry which requires me to buy tickets:

	Tickets:inv -4 City_B
	Tickets:inv -2 City_A
	Tickets:inv 10 City_B
	Tickets

	Now, running `ledger -f tickets.dat balance Tickets` shows my tickets
	remaining:

	2 City_A
	8 City_B Tickets:inv


	I hope that the example was clear enought and interesting. There is a
	big tutorial document available on the ledger homepage, I recommend to
	read it before using ledger, it contains real world examples with
	accounting. [Homepage link](http://www.ledger-cli.org/)