Plaintext to cryptotext to git “Encrypted Plaintext Accounting”? Isn’t that conflicting?

Yesterday, I played around with some accounting software called hledger. Accounting might sound like boring busy work to most people but the type of accounting this falls into is what drew me in in the first place. And that type is called “Plaintext Accounting”. I’ll get into what that means later.

After messing around with hledger by setting up some accounts like a credit card, bank account, as well as expenses, I started to get the gist of it and the appeal. I also wanted to check it into git, a version control system typically used for programming but can be used for anything file-based. I figured the journals produced by hledger were the perfect candidate for it.

I then came up with another thing to tack on. I recently caught wind of keys.pub, software that helps manage cryptographic keys as well as other nifty features, and thought about encrypting my journal files before checking them into git. This way, I can use any remote repository and not worry about anyone stealing the content of the accounting journals even if they manage to access my private git repo.

I’ll be starting a series that covers these three programs, how to use them, and how to set up a system of “Encrypted Plaintext Accounting” which will hopefully clear up what I mean by that phrase.

Stay tuned!