Simple Expenses Utils

I use this program to convert from a simple daybook format such as

2018-01-01 MON
Spent 10 SGD on groceries
Spent 5 SGD on stationery

and converts this to the ledger-cli journal format:

# 2018-01-01 Monday
# Spent 10 SGD on groceries
2018-01-01 on groceries
  Undescribed  10.00 SGD
  Assets:Cash:SGD

# Spent 5 SGD on stationery
2018-01-01 on stationery
  Undescribed  5.00 SGD
  Assets:Cash:SGD

Motivation

For personal accounting in plain text, tools like ledger-cli are excellent.

My personal accounting workflow currently involves an intermediate format for recording transactions, and then translating this to a ledger-cli journal.

e.g. I prefer to initially describe transactions like:

2016-01-01 MON
Spent 100 on groceries
Spent 30 on games

TUE
Spent 2 on breakfast

Prerequisites

Use haskell stack to manage installing haskell for this project.
To run the executable specifications under features/, install ruby and gems cucumber, rspec.

Build

Haskell Stack

To build the program, run:

stack build

Test

To run the in-process unit and integration tests, run:

stack test

To run the out-of-process end to end tests, run:

cucumber

Alternative Solutions

ledger-cli's xact

https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#xact

The xact command simplifies the creation of new transactions. It works on the principle that 80% of all postings are variants of earlier postings.

An example of invoking the xact command:

$ ledger xact 2004/4/9 viva food 11 tips 2.50

As far as I can tell, xact offers a much more comprehensive way to add a new transaction than this project.

rgoulter / expenses-utils