PTA: Plain Text Accounting
Recently I learned about PTA: Plain Text Accounting. You can record income and expenses with plain text, gather data programmatically, then calculate and visualize. Ledger, hledger, and Beancount are software tools that provide a way to express double-entry bookkeeping in plain text. They use similar plain-text DSLs, though Beancount is not directly source-compatible with the others.
Here’s a small example of Beancount syntax (Assume these accounts were opened earlier):
2026-08-03 * "Employer" "Salary" Assets:Bank 300000 JPY Income:Salary 2026-08-04 * "Cafe" "Coffee" Expenses:Food 600 JPY Assets:Bank What does it mean PTA provides a shared style of notation for expressing accounting activities in plain text. This is handy common knowledge in case we want to write down transactions quickly in a text file or even on a whiteboard. Similar to the benefit of UML.
