Prudent and Ledger

Prudent uses Ledger as the journal parsing and text reporting engine (you can use Ledger CLI directly for these purposes too) but the Prudent integrated environment consist of many other components.

Component perspective

From a component perspective, Ledger is one of the many components that make up Prudent:

  • Editor
  • Journal Aggregator
  • Calendar
  • Account Tree
  • Journal Parsing and CLI Reporting (user Ledger)

User perspective

From a user perspective, here's a few take on how it'll probably be different:

There isn't actually a lot of "texting" in Prudent

Text-based journals that Ledger support is incorporated in Prudent so that:

  • User's can have journals that won't require any specific software to read
  • Users can be assured that the journals will be useful throughout their lifetime, even if Prudent is no longer around
  • Text-based journals works great with version control
  • It is also easy to just find and edit texts than to "update a record in a database"
  • Users can also use Ledger CLI commands (within Prudent as well) if they want

Prudent users are not expected to manually enter transactions into these journals though but rather rely on automate add-ons (coming soon!). When you use Prudent when add-ons are available, you'll not find yourself entering a lot of, or any, text. Ledger doesn't mandate any particular way in which the journal come about but Prudent take the automation of transaction creation in journals very seriously.

You won't actually use Ledger much if you use Prudent

Prudent is a highly graphical application whereas Ledger is a command-line application. When you actually use Prudent, you'll be navigating your accounts and finances within a graphical domain that is more visual.

If you'd started off using Prudent in the first place and have no interest in learning Ledger, you won't have to. One of the objectives of Prudent is to allow people to benefit from the advantage of text-based journals without having to remember terminal commands. Having said that, Ledger is always there for you if for some reason you find yourself wanting to explore a custom command to create a special report for a unique informational need.

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