[$] Counting beans—and more—with Beancount

It is normally the grumpy editor's job to look at accounting software; he does so with an eye toward getting the business off of the proprietary QuickBooks application and moving to something free. It may be that Beancount deserves a look of that nature before too long but, in the meantime, a slightly less grumpy editor has been messing with this text-based accounting tool for a variety of much smaller projects. It is an interesting system, with a lot of capabilities, but its reliance on hand-rolling for various pieces may scare some folks off.