The reason to use hledger or similar program is that it should give you some benefit. For me there are both large and small benefits to using hledger, and this last week there were two small ones that I was happy to experience.
First, a reputable company charged me twice for the same large purchase I made with them. I didn’t notice the error until I went to enter the duplicate transaction in hledger. As I started to enter the transaction using iadd, I noticed that the default amount value was exactly the same as what I was getting ready to type in. The only way that could occur is if a recent transaction with the same payee had been entered with this same exact amount. Oops. Time to look more closely at my online statement — I was charged twice for the same item.
I contacted the company by email and got a quick call back. They were very apologetic and told me that they were refunding the money and what time frame I should see the refund in my account. And the refund came through as they said it would.
Now, you can say that I probably would have noticed the problem when I reviewed my monthly credit card statement, and you would be right. However, I liked that I saw and resolved the problem sooner rather than later.
The second case of a benefit was when I solved a minor mystery. On a recent walk I noticed a piece of paper in my coat pocket. It turned out to be a receipt from a restaurant whose name I didn’t recall. My wife couldn’t identify it either. One complication was that there was no date on the receipt. Sometimes dates can help trigger a memory, but no luck in this case. At this point we were really wondering what this place was and we we wouldn’t have remembered it.
Once we returned from our walk, it was time to fire up hledger. In ledger mode, I was able to use C-c C-f with the name of the restaurant to narrow the transactions to just this one. Success. Now I had the date, thanks to the recorded transaction. I then used C-c C-f again, which now showed this transaction in the context of all the others around that date. Then the answer fell into place. We had taken a trip where we drove for two days, overnighting at a halfway point. At our stop we had dinner, and this was a restaurant we had found near our hotel.
In short, quickly resolving a billing error and then solving the mystery of the unknown restaurant were two times this last week that I was glad to harness the power of hledger.