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Finance

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Making Tax Digital and Plain-Text Accounting 30 July 2022

HMRC’s Making Tax Digital Making Tax Digital (MTD) is part of the UK Government’s plan for modernising the tax system for both businesses and individuals. For years, HMRC (the Government’s tax department) has had an online tax system that is infamously complicated and slow to use … Read more (3 minute read)

Plain Text Accounting Updated 11 June 2022

Over the past couple of years I have been intrigued (and sort of excited) about the ideas behind plain text accounting. To be excited about accounting is probably unusual but I love its simplicity and logic - and the power it gives you. Plain text accounting is essentially the practice of keeping …

Simple Ledger visualisations using Python 24 April 2022

If you’re a current follower of this blog then you may already know that I’m a bit of a fan of using plain text accounting for managing finances. I mainly use the Ledger text file format and CLI tool for bookkeeping and reporting on finances. This works great, and I can quickly and … Read more (7 minute read)

Reporting business accounts using Ledger 17 April 2021

As is the case with many countries, all businesses in the UK must report the state of their financial accounts to the relevant inland revenue service at their year-end (in the UK, this is HMRC). This is also the case if you are a freelancer or sole-trader (or if you’ve made other untaxed … Read more (4 minute read)

Command-line bookkeeping in Animal Crossing 23 May 2020

I recently stumbled across an article on Hacker News discussing the pros of basic personal accounting using GnuCash - a free and open-source desktop accounting program. The article was interesting as the data geek in me resonated with the notion of being able to query the information in useful ways, … Read more (26 minute read)