With just some minor typing, I quickly boosted my hledger bottom line. Here’s how I did it.
First, to understand how I did this, it is important to note that I use the comma as a thousands separator, and the period (or full stop) as the decimal separator.
Here is what I did. Instead of typing $-2,266.21 for some income, I entered $-2,266,21. as the amount. The result was that hledger interpreted $-2,266,21. as $-226,621. The result was that my typo resulted in a number that was 100 times the amount it should have been.
Of course, I noticed the error immediately when I ran the aregister command to verify the hledger total against the bank account total. This is one of the advantages of accounting: figures have to match. In this case my total amount in my accounting was nowhere near the amount in my bank account. When the numbers don’t match, it means that there is a problem to correct, which is what I did.
It would have been nice to have had my income multiplied by 100. But more importantly, it’s vital to have some kind of system like double entry accounting to root out erroneous numbers. I want to make plans based on fact, not fiction!