Thank you Richard. Starting to learn Emacs has been on my list for a while now, so I guess this is a good chance as any!
On Sun, 21 Feb 2021, 07:53 Richard Lawrence, <[email protected]> wrote: > Tomás de Almeida <[email protected]> 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ledger-cli/CABO43G1rUnokPrdZCuaJSLaS%3DFmXe5BTUFVmu6dEGO1vTugVNA%40mail.gmail.com.
