Does anyone have any advice on how to be successful with ledger? I've tried a few things. I entered a lot of things, but the issues I have are more structural nature and probably general lack of accounting experience:

What types do you use is there a useful list, that I can then translate to SMB or Personal tax filing? A somewhat standardized structure of assets, liabilities, accounts payable, accounts receivable etc.

How do you deal with Cash? (EDIT: most answers assume that you only spend little cash, but in some countries cash can account for a decent amount of your income)

How do you deal with interest?

How do you keep your bank statements? I've tried using https://github.com/johannesgerer/buchhaltung which supports paypal ofx and hbci

How do you convert your balance sheet into a tax filing compatible format?

How do you track things like rent? Do you keep it as a recurring entry i.e. `~ Monthly` or do you only book it when you pay with buchhaltung?

Do you keep completely separate ledger files if you're sole proprietor or can you keep them semi separate and work with includes to create separate reports for private and sole proprietor tax filing?

How do you track small expenses on the go? There's a web app called fava from beancount which looks nice, but i'm not sure you want to expose it to the outside world and i'm not sure the files are fully compatible with hledger https://beancount.github.io/fava/

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

> How do you deal with Cash?

Move money from Asset:Checking to Expenses:Cash

> How do you deal with interest?

Move money from Income:Interest to Asset:Depot

> How do you keep your bank statements?

I download CSVs once in a while an import them with hledgers import tool (see https://bloerg.net/2016/02/22/ledger-import-of-deutsche-bank...)

> How do you convert your balance sheet into a tax filing compatible format?

I don't, sorry. But it's actually pretty easy to get the relevant data if you split your taxable incoming accordingly.

> How do you track things like rent? Do you keep it as a recurring entry i.e. `~ Monthly` or do you only book it when you pay with buchhaltung?

It's part of the bank statement, so yes it moves money from Assets:Checking to Expenses:Rent whenever the transaction happens.

> How do you track small expenses on the go?

I don't. After a while I found it's not worth the effort. I rarely make financial decisions based on how much I spent on beers and sandwiches, so most of these little things are just subsumed in Expenses:Cash.

> I don't. After a while I found it's not worth the effort. I rarely make financial decisions based on how much I spent on beers and sandwiches, so most of these little things are just subsumed in Expenses:Cash.

Agree completely - when keeping track of expenses, it is only worth tracking the numbers that matter to you. If it won't effect your decisions, don't bother tracking.