Re: Question Regarding Creating Workflow For Automatic Formulas For Finance Based Org Spreadsheet

[Neil Jerram]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2022 at 10:31, Neil Jerram <neiljerram@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2022 at 03:42, Samuel Banya <sbanya@fastmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Ah, Ledger is way too complicated for what it's worth. I've seen videos on 
> > YouTube about it, and every person who's praised it is pretty much too 
> > smart enough to be able to explain it in simple terms.
>
> I have similar observations.  I don't (so far) see that Ledger (or
> alternatives) offers enough added value to be worth incorporating in
> my workflow, compared to directly processing the raw data.
>
> The value that would be of interest to me is:
> - Classifying/grouping transactions at analysis time (not entry time)
> according to a set of rules/regexps etc.
> - Drawing insights by analysing past expenditure, with that kind of
> classification.
> - Using such insights as part of future budgeting.
> - An overall functional approach, where the raw data is never changed,
> and the other inputs to an analysis can be tweaked on each run.
>
> I wish plaintextaccounting.org had a forum/ML for discussing this kind
> of thing, as it isn't specific to any of ledger/hledger/beancount in
> particular.

I have been reading the Ledger manual, and wanted to follow up because
it turns out Ledger (with ledger-autosync) actually *can* do the
workflows that I'm interested in (above).

- ledger-autosync can read my OFX files and output Ledger transactions
with Expenses:Unknown everywhere.

- Ledger supports account definitions with regexps, that mean "if you
see a transaction with *Unknown, and the description matches this
regexp, treat the *Unknown as actually this account".

- Then I can execute whatever reporting I need.

So, although it's not Ledger's primary use case, it seems Ledger can
operate "functionally" with the OFX files as the raw data and account
definitions saying how to categorize those, and considering the
generated Ledger journal to be ephemeral.

Assuming I don't run into gotchas, I reckon that makes me a Ledger
convert, and I can discard all my own code.

Best wishes,
     Neil