As a newbie myself, I totally agree with Craig. I have a fairly simple ledger for my home finances at the moment. I will need to do much more complicated things with my consulting business in the future, but I'm just practising on the basics for now.
On the other hand, I have been doing lot of playing around with more complicated things in order to try to understand how ledger works. I really recommend doing that as well, as there are quite a few things that are not obvious until you try to do it. Some things I have tried: - tracking all my expenses as if it were done in a foreign currency (which it will be soon) - trying to figure out how to calculate capital gains with multiple currency exchange (quite tricky as it turns out) - developing a system to keep track of the coffee expenditures at work The third is similar to what you are doing. It is more challenging than you might imagine. One thing I have done which has helped me a lot is to generate a lot of fake data and try to see where it takes me. Like you say, it is hard to know what you want until you see what you can do. But it's hard to see what you can do, until you try to do it. On 13 October 2014 16:53, Craig Earls <[email protected]> wrote: > I recommend that you start simple. If you are not in the habit of managing > your finances in detail it can get overwhelming. What you are planning is > the equivalent of learning how to swim by tying an anchor around your feet > and jumping into the ocean. Start off with a simple account structure and > work from there. As you gain experience with the tool you can add any > information you want. > > Ledger can do amazing things. But it won't solve the human nature problem > of not wanting to spend the time to track things while there is more fun to > do. I totally understand the desire to track the cost of your favorite > stinky cheese. But you will not get much value from it if your data entry > is so onerous that you stop tracking. > > > > > On Monday, October 13, 2014, Roman Grazhdan <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> > What output do you want? >> >> I wish I knew! I've heard money are to be managed, so I'm looking for a >> tool. To build up a habit to write stuff down, I need it to be comfortable >> for me, which is command line/plain text. I also strongly dislike the idea >> of sending such intimate information to third party server to process and >> store, so Ledger looks good. And since I'm collecting information anyway, >> I'd like to collect as much as possible and then when I have data I'd see >> what I can do with it and how it can help me. I guess I'd be happy with >> basic balance reports and a way to relatively easily find out how my >> favorite sort of coffee gets more expensive over time, and that's it. >> >> On Monday, October 13, 2014 5:00:03 PM UTC+4, Craig Earls wrote: >>> >>> I think you need to come at this from a different angle. What output do >>> you want? Once you have a good idea of that, then you can figure how to >>> get ledger to give you the output, which necessarily sets the >>> representation. >>> >>> -- >> >> --- >> 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 [email protected]. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > > -- > Craig, Corona De Tucson, AZ > enderw88.wordpress.com > > -- > > --- > 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 [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- --- 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 [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
