Who's using ledger?

Who's using Ledger? (Preview)

If you’re a Ledger user, contribute your story here!

The author has been using Ledger to manage his personal finances since its creation in September of 2003. Previously I had used Quicken rather heavily, and then Gnucash, but always found there were certain custom reports I wanted that were exceedingly hard to achieve. Plus I was always finding mysteriously unbalanced money, which had to be reconciled into a Misc account. With Ledger, unbalanced sums are impossible, as they produce an error when attempting to parse the ledger file.

—John Wiegley

I’m a college student who just moved from the dorms to an apartment, complete with the myriad of new expenses entailed in growing up. I use Ledger to track my personal finances, including doing some fancy things I haven’t seen in other programs. I work as a contractor, so at the end of the year I get 1099s instead of W-2s, with no taxes taken out by my employers during the year. Using Ledger’s automated transactions feature, taxes are set aside from every paycheck automatically. This frees me from the burden of remembering to take taxes out manually, and keeps me informed as to how much money I really have, versus what my bank balance is.

The flexibility of Ledger’s reporting, and the ease with which I can enter transactions, has made my entry into double-entry accounting a breeze. I can use Assets, Expenses, and Liabilities with the flexibility and glorious power they were meant to have.

—spiffytech

I’m a software developer who has used Ledger to keep my finances sane for more than four years. It has been a huge help as I was getting myself back onto my feet after college, and even helped me pay my car off far earlier than anticipated. I wrote this article in 2010 about how I use ledger.

—peterkeen

I have being a heavy user of ledger, since I found it ~4 years ago. The most charming part is that everything is just a plain-text file. Though it looks simple, it really powerful and wonderful!

Ledger also inspire me to implement an accounting/banking system deployed in the way of SaaS. Users can access the system from web browser, or android/iphone app. And everyone’s finance data is stored in a seperate sqlite file. The data can be exported as a ledger file.

This is a free system, I do it for free. And the main philosophy is borrowed from John Wiegley.

—Denny([email protected])