One challenge for me is finding ways to effectively communicate hledger information. That is, sometimes you need something other than a standard hledger report. Of course, many times the standard hledger reports do the trick, but other times you need something different.
For example, I recently wanted to illustrate some credits that we were getting against certain payments. I used one hledger “print” command to get the original payments, and schematically they appeared as:
payment 1
payment 2
Then another “print” command for the credits resulted in (again, schematically):
credit 1
credit 2
Note that credit 1 is associated with payment 1, and credit 2 with payment 2.
Therefore, it seemed to me clearer if the information were arranged in the following way.
payment 1
credit 1
payment 2
credit 2
To accomplish this, I pasted the output of the two commands into a word processing document. I used a fixed space font so that the transactions would have the same good alignment they had in my original text file. (Note, if your transactions are in Emacs, ledger-mode-clean-buffer is a convenient way to quickly align your transactions.)
Then, it was just a matter of cutting and pasting to put the transactions in the order shown just above.
Final note: one sign of a clear report is that the reader quickly grasps the idea. Don’t judge the success of your report by how long the person spends on it, but by how little time it takes them to understand the information.