Tomás de Almeida <tomasalmeid...@gmail.com> writes: > I was thinking about doing something very simple and barebones. Akin to > having job that extracts and parses daily transaction reports from the > company's bank account into the main ledger data file. > > I imagine some of the transactions would be easy to automate as writing > them into the proper category: repeat customers, periodic fees of > subscribed services, etc. > > The "new" transactions would always be a mistery on which category they > should be parsed, so they would go into a "to insert manually later" file > that we would hsve to take a look from time to time.
I don't have any experience using ledger to manage a business, but I thought it would be useful to add here that you shouldn't underestimate the power of a good text editor to help with this automation. Customizing your editor to help with data entry can save you a lot of time and effort without taking a human who has all the necessary context out of the loop. For example, I use ledger-mode for Emacs, which provides great features like completion of account names. I also have various abbrevs setup for common transactions, so that I can just type e.g. "atm" and get a transaction filled out for a typical ATM withdrawal, for which I can then adjust the amount if necessary. I have written custom commands to automate other things too, like adding the exchange rate on a certain date. You can go really far with this kind of mostly-automated-but-human-adjusted data entry. Writing custom scripts can be a lot of work (depending on what the incoming data looks like) and as you note, there will probably be many cases where more context is needed to categorize something properly. At least for me personally, it works better to start with editor customization, and only move to a fully-automated script in cases where I'm sure I will not need to do any manual review. -- Best, Richard -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ledger-cli+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ledger-cli/87blcdq2kz.fsf%40aquinas.
