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My take is that they are no more off topic than questions about Quicken... But also no more on topic than questions about Quicken.

Most such questions should be directed to the teams or communities which support the products. If there isn't any support other than SE, maybe you don't want to use that product... Though an occasional question is probably harmless.

However questions which are not about personal finance are off topic no matter what tools they are using.

I think the lemonade stand example for ledger-cli is treading on the line, not least because it is a hypothetical rather than real situation.

If the community disagrees, I will shut up. Otherwise, we may want to make our position clearer on this, and make clear that precedent does not trump policy.

(Meanwhile, I'm making that an Ignored tags and hiding ignored, so I simply don't see those questions.)

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Thanks for the question @keshlam. Speaking for the folks interested in accounting and finance but using plain text tools (AKA, the Plain Text Accounting community): we'd like clarity on this too.

Here are some related tags on the money stackexchange site:

And some related past discussion can be seen here:

  • Lemonade stand in ledger cli

  • How to account for human error?

  • https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/new-money-stackexchange-tags/351

  • https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/pta-on-money-stackexchange-com/248

    Some notes on money.stackexchange.com for plain text accounting folks.

    • On the recent PTA forum post referencing a question asked on the Personal Finance & Money stackexchange Q&A site, I wrote:

      It's often hard to get much traction for PTA questions over there

      By that I mean there aren't many PTA-related questions there, and if you do ask there you will feel a certain headwind, ie they are likely to get downvotes for being "off-topic", and you may have to do extra work justifying your question.

    • Here's my recent comment suggesting PTA is in fact on topic there, according to past discussions. It links to, eg:

      "Use of software for managing one's finances." is literally listed on this site's help page as an on-topic question example. (2021, 12 upvotes)

    • There is a ledger-cli tag there, with 15 questions using it.

    • There are no hledger or beancount-tagged questions yet.

    • I'm not sure what is Stack Exchange's current policy on monetising the community-built knowledge bases on their platform, eg to AI companies.

    • Stack Exchange sites are good for building knowledge. Discourse sites like this forum are also pretty good for this, in fact the two have a lot of similar functionality.

    • Posting on money.stackexchange.com will get your question in front of way more eyeballs right now.. maybe. The question may get downvoted and the answers may be less PTA-aware.

    • Do you feel PTA should preserve/build its foothold on money.stackexchange.com, as a Q & A resource additional to the PTA forum, PTA reddit, and website ?

Some more historical context from Chris Rea

TLDR:

The PTA community has its own dedicated fora, but some money stackexchange users who also use plain text tools want to ask their questions here, probably because there's a much larger user base and breadth of financial knowledge here. So we'd like to be able to ask and answer those here if possible, without having to debate topicality every time.

PS:

PTA users are often grappling with double entry bookkeeping and financial management for the first time, and seeking more depth of experience on those topics than they can quickly find within the PTA community. Often they are learning in the context of their PTA tool's file format and features, and so questions will reflect those.

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    The tags themselves don't need approval, they just pop into existence when used. The tag wiki is to describe the tag, and I've approved the pending tag wiki edit. That isn't a statement either way about whether the tag is on-topic though.
    – Ganesh Sittampalam Mod
    Commented Oct 8 at 22:30
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    If the question was about the bookkeeping, and it really was personal bookkeeping, you shouldn't have to mention the tool; we should be able to focus on the necessary data operations, and let folks map those two whatever commands their tool provides on their own. If you are asking specifically how to do it in an individual tool, I really think of that the domain of the tool rather than of the finances and this is the wrong place to find the best tool expertise, though it may have better financial expertise.. But I may be wrong.
    – keshlam
    Commented Oct 9 at 0:28
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Generally, I'd suggest agreeing taking tech support off topic. That's true for Quicken, cli-ledger, GnuCash, and whatever else. I don't know if it's helpful to help people finding the right button in TurboTax, or fix their cli script, or explain why GnuCash does things the way it does in this forum since these answers are either highly specific to very few users (cli tools are a good example), or can become stale and irrelevant when some frequently updated software morphs (tax prep software for example gets new releases every year with frequent UI and logic changes).

I understand that some communities/companies are trying to use this platform to "spread the word", but that's not really the purpose of the Q&A site.

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