I generally enter my hledger data using a tool such as add or iadd. Yes, it would almost certainly be faster to import CSV files, but for the most part I prefer entering the transactions one at a time. However, I still like to make the data entry as efficient as possible when I am entering my transactions.
One way that I do this, as mentioned previously in this column, is to have multiple payee options for the same vendor when it can speed up data entry. I recently did this for a case where I had two types of payment to the same payee.
I will use a fictitious example, but it demonstrates the point. Let’s say that you buy things from the XYZ Acme company. But you also pay a monthly fee for some kind of membership fee. Also assume that you have a spending category for membership fees. Thus, in any given month, one of your payments will be for membership fees and others for household items or whatever.
So, buying a shovel might be entered as
2024-11-20 XYZ Acme
expenses:home $22.00 ; shovel
liabilities:CreditCard $-22.00
And paying the monthly membership fee could be entered as
2024-11-20 XYZ Acme
expenses:membership fee $20.00
liabilities:CreditCard $-20.00
The problem occurs when you are entering payments and the payment that you are entering will have a different expense category from the one you entered most recently. Specifically, each time you need to change to and from the membership fee payments, you have to manually enter the expense category. There is a solution, however.
You create two payee names:
XYZ Acme
XYZ Acme membership fee
Once you enter a transaction for XYZ Acme membership fee with the category of membership fee, your work is done. That is, a program such as iadd will default to the correct category and even the dollar amount you last entered, whenever you choose XYZ Acme membership as the payee.
If you spent money at XYZ Acme for something other than a membership fee, you select the payee XYZ Acme, and the default will be something other than membership fee for the spending category.
Again, the above assumes that you are using a tool such as iadd to enter your data.
In short, using multiple payee names helps grease the wheels for my hledger data entry.