Out of the many issues I've had "scaling up" automation has been fairly easy for my specific case. It's worth bringing up because it is unlikely that a large Ledger would be entirely written by hand. Whether you are dealing with stock values, or bank and credit card statements automation ought to be the first priority.
Ledger's goal is to provide reporting on the data files, but creating those files is left as an exercise to the user. Perhaps this is another place where a UI could be useful, as an editor that compliments the command line reporting. I'm surprised when I hear from many Ledger users that they hand create so many txns. When forced to manually enter, I use yasnippet, but 99% of my txns are created programatically. I utilize a single credit card as often as practical while traveling, so that I can import that data reliably from my bank. Using this as my primary data feed ensures I catch any unusual transactions (ie: fraud, cancellation fees, etc). I wrote CSV2Ledger to automate the import of CSV data into the Ledger format, and to automate as much account, category, file and metadata matching as I possibly could. This is such a common task that Ledger and Hledger have some new automation options, and there are many competing projects for importing data into Ledger. Automation requires that I have a well defined storage method; in my case importing only to a single transient queue file with manual relocation to permanent storage distributed across multiple files. I'm heavily dependent on deduplication because my CSV files I download often have overlapping date ranges. I added the ability to tag each txn with an md5sum of the original CSV to CSV2Ledger for this purpose, and use rough text matching (ie: grep) with optional caching to prevent duplication. I hope to look into using OFX files later and the unique ID they assign each txn at the bank instead of md5, but thats a future item. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Russell Adams [email protected] PGP Key ID: 0x1160DCB3 http://www.adamsinfoserv.com/ Fingerprint: 1723 D8CA 4280 1EC9 557F 66E8 1154 E018 1160 DCB3
