Hi, Richard! Thanks for the feedback. I guess I need to clarify a few 
points but raising them here is a good opportunity to others to get 
acquainted with the idea.

On Monday, 13 May 2019 15:23:18 UTC+2, Richard Lawrence wrote:
>
>
> I too would like a better way to capture transactions on my phone when 
> I'm on the go. 
>

For the "new transaction", you can currently have a look, if you're an 
Android user, at the equivalent form in Android MMEx, 
http://android.moneymanagerex.org/. While being satisfactory at the moment, 
it's Category-oriented nature, and data schema, are an incompatible anchor 
to using it more along Ledger-alikes.
But, the point is that the form there, from home screen to completing a 
transaction, takes me normally a couple of seconds. The most-used Payees 
are normally on top, typing max. 2 letters finds me the one I'm looking 
for. Selecting a Payee automatically selects the last-used Category, etc. 
Quite convenient, with minimum taps on the screen.
I want the same (or better) functionality in Cashier.
 

> For me, it's not important to see balances or other reports on the 
> phone.  But it would be really great to have a quick way to enter data 
> at the moment that I make the transaction, so I don't have to carry the 
> receipt home (or remember the amount if I don't get a receipt). 
>

My ideas was to import "bal" and "payees" output from ledger. This would 
provide: account names, their book balances, and commodities. Plus the 
names of payees. To me that's enough.
I don't want to rewrite ledger, especially since it can run on Android in 
Termux, anyway, so all the reports are already available there through 
Termux shortcuts and widgets. But seeing the current balance (book + 
entered) is quite a convenience.
 

> I have a separate file that defines my accounts for ledger's --strict 
> option.  It would be great to pass this file to an app so that it could 
> help me quickly select the right accounts to define the transaction. 
>

The idea with the "payees" output is to be able to search through them and 
select, like in MMEx. This might also propose the full last transaction 
contents. We'll see when we get there.
 

> The tricky part is then getting that data into a ledger file on my 
> computer.  I would be somewhat reluctant to trust yet another 
> third-party server for this.  It would be great if I could e.g. copy and 
> paste it from an email (or an IMAP-based "Note", available on iOS) on a 
> server I already have to trust, or if the app could briefly upload data 
> to a server I run from my local computer when I want to sync. 
>

Ahem, I have no intention of hosting any servers for this, nor would I host 
my data in such a way. The idea is to use PWA as a set of technologies that 
allow, as I've mentioned, extremely easy updates, *offline* storage and 
execution, and export functionality. I have yet to check what the best way 
would be to share the entries, but a simple file download might suffice for 
starters. This is intended to be shared and transported somehow to the real 
ledger book. That's way outside the scope of the app. 
One option would be to export the entries, and have a mobile.ledger file 
that includes the export file (in Downloads), along with the copy of the 
real book, and a set of scripts that can run "source" and other 
verification options using Ledger in Termux.
Oh, I see you're an iOS user. I'm sorry for you. ;)
But, in any case, the goal is to export the transactions text file and then 
the user somehow merges it with the "real" book.

So, at this stage, it is to be only a quick-entry assistant. Actually, when 
I think about it, I find it even convenient to use as a regular entry 
mechanism, just because of the easy of selecting payees (I like when the 
names match fully, that makes the reporting easier later on), and accounts 
("categories"). Auto-assigning commodities should also happen when an 
account is selected. However, this might be an issue for multi-commodity 
accounts, which I have never used before but are allowed by Ledger.
One step at a time, anyways.

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