FWIW, I'm a single-person company with a tiny turnover and only a handful of expense categories. I've used ledger-cli for many years, but at one point, I started to migrate my data to pta [1]. The reason was that in my country (Europe), all reporting seems to implicitly rely on a numbered chart of accounts (something like "101 Cash", "201 Accounts payable" etc), and the journal format of ledger-cli is not built around this idea by default.

pta, however, does this numbering [2], so for filing taxes in my country, its journal format seems more straightforward in case auditors should have any interest in it. I also quite like its terseness (1 transaction = often 1 line, as compared to 3 in a ledger-cli journal -- gives a better overview and is somewhat better to parse further with sed or awk when needed [3]). Finally, it is a single Perl script, thus very portable and lightweight.

All that said, pta doesn't seem to have much of a following, as compared to ledger-cli, which, obviously, is a much more mature project.

There was also an interesting discussion regarding pta vs ledger, involving the author, OpenBSD dev Ingo Schwarze [4] -- well worth a read regarding the general plain text accounting philosophy also. Interesting stuff.

1: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/

2: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/pta/accounts.example.en?rev=1.3&conten...

3: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=...

4: https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=202009281234...

LWN's editor Jonathan Corbett has looked into this matter much over the years with numerous articles on the topic.

The end-of-search post is here, with the final choice being GnuCash:

<https://lwn.net/Articles/925782/>

HN discussion (200+ comments): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36021197>

You'll find at least some of the other posts in the series, and related articles, here:

<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Alwn.net+accounting+software...>

Not marttt, but I'm a big fan of beancount after using it for the past few years for my company's books. Recycling an old comment of mine that might be helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37937942 (more upthread from that as well)