You’re welcome.

I understand that being able to write software and be deliberate about accounting gives you a closer relationship with your financial situation.

For me the issue is that there are no guardrails around the plaintext accounting model, which means that you have the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot.

My current accounting software as rubbish as it is, stops me from making stupid mistakes, credits instead of debits for example. Plaintext accounting won’t.

So either you need to never make a mistake, or have a way to figure it out.

All that kind of safety net doesn’t exist. You can still make the books balance, but at some point you’re going to find a hole and spend weeks fixing it, or the taxman will and you’ll be paying a fine.

I exported the line items from my current software into plaintext accounting, even made it balance and match my actual accounts.

Then I needed to write an invoice and had to make my own, from scratch and manually enter the data twice, once into the invoice, another into plaintext accounting, giving me the chance to make an error twice, perhaps even a different one on either process. And that’s just one invoice.

I have considered writing my own accounting software from scratch, or forking something, but that’s not going to pay for food, so I kept looking instead.

It’s not a great place to be, either from a business perspective, or a mental one, but that’s where I’m at.