Introduction

Plain Text Accounting is the practice of maintaining an accounting ledger in a format that values human readability, accountant auditability, and future file accessibility. The ecosystem of PTA tools includes programs which enable recording of purchases and transfers and investments, and performing analysis to produce registers, balance sheets, profit and loss statements, and lots of other reports.

The core tools of the Plain Text Accounting ecosystem is a workflow familiar to software developers who prefer command line tools, and text based file formats.

This is a guide to plain text accounting in Ledger.