Hledger 1.50

Best resource would assume competency in undergraduate-level math, but assume no financial competency beyond "you have a checking account, maybe a credit card, and are familiar with receiving income and making payments, and you understand the importance of keeping your bank balance above zero".

hledger, however, has support for adding 'posting dates' as specially formatted comments. What's really clever is how it automatically chooses which date to sort the reports by depending on the query!

For example, say I have a ledger that exclusively contains entries consisting of credits to a assets account (bank) and debits to an expense account (shopping). The date of the debit is earlier, because I acquired the goods at the shop. The date of the credit is later because it takes a while for the payment to clear between the banks. Some payments take longer to clear than others so the order isn't the same.

If I ask hledger for a report of all recent transactions that involve expenses, it will sort by the dates on the debit lines. But if I ask hledger for a report of all the recent transactions that involve assets it'll use the credit dates instead! This makes reconciliation with my bank statements so much easier and tidier whilst still keeping an accurate record of when I actually made the transactions.

It's like YNAB, but with less magic. Plus sophisticated features like a rules engine for automatically filling envelopes and cleaning up spare funds at the end of the month.

I host it on Pikapods for cheap, and connect to my bank accounts with SimpleFINs.

I've tried a lot of budget apps, and this is the happiest I've been with one in a long time.

Sure it means I can’t hire a bookkeeper to do my books anymore but it literally takes me like 15 mins to do my books since I can just add rules to my scripts as needed and most of my business now has a standard AR and AP.