Vimcash is a text-based accounting system using the vimjournal file format. It uses a double-entry model, but provides a convenient shorthand for single-entry records:
20200906_1830 |- USD 2 clothes CASH sunnies @market
20200907_2000 |- USD 4.5 hardware CASH aima earphones x3 @mr-diy:sorya-centre
20200907_2000 |- USD 2 sport CASH silicon swimming caps x2 @mr-diy:sorya-centre
20200908_1445 |- USD 30 tax CASH visa extension @immigration-office
20200909_1700 |- USD 6.25 travel CASH bus to the city @sla-hostel
20200911_1010 |- USD 1.25 hardware CASH laptop charge repair @route-33
20200911_1355 |- USD 14 accomm CASH khmer house bungalow @khmer-house
By convention, asset and liability accounts use capital letters (for the balance sheet report) and income and expense accounts are in lowercase (for the profit and loss statement).
Although the above records look like single entry, they all have two accounts, so are really double-entry. We just put them on one line. Sometimes a transaction involves more than two accounts (or more than one currency). In that case, you can list the splits one per line and reference the special split account :.
20200912_1500 |= USD 390 CASH : atm withdrawal @aba-atm
20200912_1500 |- USD 5 fees : atm withdrawal fee @aba-atm
20200912_1500 |= AUD 544.62 : CITI atm withdrawal @aba-atm
Records with the same timestamp using the : account are considered to part of the same transaction. Especially complicated transactions may require two split accounts, but these are rare. You can use :1 and :2.
Vimcash allows you to use any currencies, but does not try to convert them for reports. Thus, your reports may include different currencies.
The basic format is:
YYYYMMDD_HHMM |[type] [currency] [amount] [debit account] [credit account] [description] [tags]
The type may be one of the following:
* investment
+ income
= transfer
- expense
x divestment
The investment and divestment types are used to calculate returns of investment, but otherwise the types do not affect reports. The balance sheet and profit and loss reports are based on debit and credit accounts, so you still have to get them in the right order.
For a description of the tags, please see vimjournal. They do not have any signifance in vimcash.
Vimcash is still a work in progress. At the moment, there are just a few Kotlin functions that I run from the Kotlin shell.
- Vimjournal: a simple text format for organising large amounts of information.
- Vimliner: the simplest outliner for VIM.
- More stuff you never knew you wanted.