I don't see how this is actually a use-case. How many people that need accounting software do it from the terminal? And on what earth is that a worthwhile business decision to spend time and money on this?

being able to maintain local backup/copies of your entire general ledger, even if u are using a cloud tool is generally the #1 blocker for any accounting team.

Instead of building a whole new format (with implications on testing, etc) - it would be incremental effort to build support for ledger-cli format . And completely mitigate 90% of the objections by accounting teams.

not asking for them to build cli functionality.

this is the file format - https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Example-Journal-File

I understand. But this is not a proper journal file imho. We're actually building something in this space as well and there are way better but probably local standards like the Datev format (essentially CSV). Accountants need double book formatted journal entries. This is just a collection of amounts it seems.

But I really appreciate all the different solutions in this space! I build our own when we started.

In fact, someone also wrote a book on this - https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/

I will defer if you are indeed building your own competing tool in this space which is better, but holding to the original point of my request - maybe it will be incremental to support your format if ledger-cli format is supported today. versus not supporting any disk format (or inventing a new one).

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/ledger-cli/search?q=double%20ent...