Notepad+++ workflow for Bookkeeping.
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Hello, im a bookkeeper and Im looking into incorporate Notepad+++ into my daily workflow and would love your input. Do you have recommended plug ings or built-in features that works well for bookkeeping? What is the best way to organize and clean bank statements so tools like the free GnuCash importer can read them cleanly and consistently?
Any tips, tricks or workflow optimizations that would be especially useful for bookkeepers or accountants working with structured data?
I m looking to avoid excel and LibreOffice for this part of my work. Im looking for a text based, precise and reproducible workflow, similar to why many developers rely on notepad+++.
Thank you in advance, and I appreciate any insights you can share.
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Do you have recommended plug ings or built-in features that works well for bookkeeping
For bookkeeping? I would be very much surprised if there were. Bookkeeping is all about tables and numbers, which are the weak points of text editors. But some bookkeeping-adjacent plugins that might be helpful could be “Expression calculator” (which allows you to use the editor panel as a calculator of sorts). And the Columns++ plugin makes use of “elastic tabstops” to help present and manipulate tabular data.
What is the best way to organize and clean bank statements
I am not sure what Notepad++ brings to the “organize” space. And I am highly doubtful that there are any modern bank statements in a text format, unless maybe as JSON or XML.
working with structured data
Again, not really the strength of text editors. There are some structured data formats, like JSON and XML, that are text based, and thus fall under the purview of text editors like Notepad++. And tools like JsonTools and XML Tools help with those (but, again, often purpose-built tools are better for such data than general text editors are, even with Notepad++'s awesome plugins).
I m looking to avoid … LibreOffice for this part of my work
Avoiding tools purpose-built for the task, especially excellent free tools like LibreOffice, seems to me to be shooting onesself in one’s foot. But the plugins I’ve recommended might make certain aspects of your self-inflicted foot pain more tolerable. Good luck
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@Charles-Fraichot said in Notepad+++ workflow for Bookkeeping.:
Hello, im a bookkeeper and Im looking into incorporate Notepad+++ into my daily workflow and would love your input. Do you have recommended plug ings or built-in features that works well for bookkeeping? What is the best way to organize and clean bank statements so tools like the free GnuCash importer can read them cleanly and consistently?
The format in which you acquire the bank statements is an important, missing piece in this question. If it is a text-based format (like plain text, HTML, JSON or CSV), then Notepad++, possibly with one or more plugins, might be able to help. If it is not text-based, Notepad++ won’t help.
It looks like GnuCash can import several formats. The only one of those with which I’m familiar is CSV.
Two plugins with CSV capabilities are CSV Lint and CSVQuery. I’m not very familiar with the first and know nothing about the second, but depending on what you need to do, they might help.
I wrote the Columns++ plugin partly because I just hate spreadsheet programs, and I wanted to be able to do simple spreadsheet-like things in Notepad++. Strictly speaking, Columns++ only works well with tab-separated values or files in which columns are physically lined up using spaces; but it can convert from and to CSV files using any separator and a number of specific quoting and escaping rules.
Any tips, tricks or workflow optimizations that would be especially useful for bookkeepers or accountants working with structured data?
I m looking to avoid excel and LibreOffice for this part of my work. Im looking for a text based, precise and reproducible workflow, similar to why many developers rely on notepad+++.
Depending on the input format and what you need to do, Notepad++ might help. However, when you say “precise and reproducible”…
As a text editor with a graphical user interface, Notepad++ is best for problems where you have to look at the source data, decide what needs to be done this time, for this particular data, and then do it. If “precise and reproducible” means you want to work out the rules and transformations in advance and then apply those same rules, consistently and repeatedly, to many batches of (present and future) source data, you would be better advised to look for a scripting solution.
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Thanks, i need help with csv files.
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@Charles-Fraichot said in Notepad+++ workflow for Bookkeeping.:
Thanks, i need help with csv files.
What is it you need to do with them?
You mentioned GnuCash, and it looks like it already has pretty flexible CSV support. What is it about your incoming files that won’t work?
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It’s mainly to organize and manipulate the .csv data quickly before importing it into GnuCash. I ended up finding a tool called Modern CSV that does exactly what I need.
Notepad+++ isn’t really what I’m looking for after all, but I appreciate the suggestion.
