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Bibliography

References and resources for Plain Text Accounting standards.

Primary Sources

Beancount

  • Blais, Martin. "Beancount Documentation." https://beancount.github.io/docs/
  • Blais, Martin. "Beancount Language Syntax." https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_language_syntax.html
  • Blais, Martin. "The Double-Entry Counting Method." https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_method.html

Ledger

  • Wiegley, John. "Ledger 3 Manual." https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html
  • Wiegley, John. "Ledger: Command-Line Accounting." https://ledger-cli.org/

hledger

  • Rothwell, Simon Michael. "hledger User Manual." https://hledger.org/hledger.html
  • Rothwell, Simon Michael. "hledger: Robust Plain Text Accounting." https://hledger.org/

Academic References

Double-Entry Bookkeeping

  • Pacioli, Luca. "Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita." 1494.

  • First published description of double-entry bookkeeping

  • Gleeson-White, Jane. "Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance." 2012.

  • Historical perspective on double-entry accounting

Accounting Standards

  • Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). "Accounting Standards Codification."

  • US GAAP reference

  • International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). "International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)."

  • International accounting standards

Technical References

Parsing and Grammars

  • Aho, Alfred V., et al. "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools." 2006.

  • Compiler design and parsing techniques

  • Brunsli, Max. "Tree-sitter: An incremental parsing system." https://tree-sitter.github.io/

  • Incremental parsing for editor integration

Data Formats

  • ECMA-404. "The JSON Data Interchange Standard."

  • JSON specification for AST serialization

  • ISO 8601. "Date and time format."

  • International date/time standards

  • ISO 4217. "Currency codes."

  • International currency identifiers

Numerical Computing

  • Goldberg, David. "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic." 1991.

  • Essential reading for decimal handling

  • IEEE 754. "IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic."

  • Floating-point representation standard

Plain Text Accounting Community

Websites

  • Plain Text Accounting. https://plaintextaccounting.org/

  • Community hub and resources

  • Awesome Plain Text Accounting. https://github.com/plaintextaccounting/awesome-plaintextaccounting

  • Curated list of tools and resources

Mailing Lists and Forums

  • Ledger Mailing List. https://groups.google.com/g/ledger-cli
  • hledger Mailing List. https://groups.google.com/g/hledger
  • Beancount Mailing List. https://groups.google.com/g/beancount

Import/Export

  • OFX (Open Financial Exchange). https://www.ofx.net/
  • QIF (Quicken Interchange Format). Historical Intuit format
  • CSV (Comma-Separated Values). RFC 4180

Visualization

  • Fava. "Web interface for Beancount." https://github.com/beancount/fava
  • hledger-web. "Web interface for hledger." https://hledger.org/hledger-web.html

Specification Documents

This Project

  • PTA Standards. "Plain Text Accounting Standards." https://github.com/pta-standards/pta-standards
  • This specification project
  • Semantic Versioning. https://semver.org/

  • Version numbering standard

  • RFC 2119. "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels."

  • MUST, SHOULD, MAY terminology

Citation Format

When citing this specification:

PTA Standards Working Group. "Plain Text Accounting Standards, Version 1.0."
https://github.com/pta-standards/pta-standards, 2024.

Contributing

To suggest additions to this bibliography, please submit a pull request or open an issue.