Sometimes, one of the rewards for using hledger is non-financial. For example, just the other day we needed an electrician. One of the circuits — in fact, the one in the kitchen — had gone dead. Resetting the circuit breaker and other efforts didn’t solve the problem. So, having run out of ideas on our own, we decided to bring in a professional.
The good news is that we had used a company in the past that had done good work. The bad news is that I didn’t remember the name of the company. I have a poor memory for names, plus it’s so infrequent that we need an electrician that the chances of my remembering the correct name were close to zero.
However, I was quite certain that the name would be in my hledger data. First, I guessed that I would have characterized the previous expenses as repairs to the house. The exact category would have been expenses:house:repair. But no need to write all that in an hledger command. I could use the shorter house:repair. Below is the command that worked (minus the filename of my hledger data file):
hledger areg house:repairThe above command quickly showed me the names of people/companies that had worked on our house. In that short list was the name of the electrical repair company. I called. They came. Electricity restored.
It’s nice that hledger helps in more ways than just financial!
Upgrade to hledger 1.33
My thanks to the people who regularly update hledger. Also thanks to those who work with brew so that brew can install the latest version. I just upgraded to version 1.33. As with the last few upgrades to hledger, the upgrade process using brew went off without a hitch.