Huzzah! I've been slowly moving my #plaintextaccounting workflow from the appears-to-be-sloppifying ledger(1) to hledger(1) which @simonmic seems to lovingly maintain by hand. One of the reports I've run on occasion is a monthly (-M) or weekly (-W) breakdown of average-spending in particular categories¹. But there were some quirky edges in ledger(1) that meant that running the report for a parent category didn't roll up all the child-categories under it (so using the "-3"-style depth-limiting ended up only printing things at that level, excluding deeper child postings). So my saved command was a convoluted pipeline like $ ledger print $PARENT_CATEGORY | sed 'substitution that strips off the child-categories with duplicated strings from $PARENT_CATEGORY' | ledger -f - reg -AM It was a pain to play around with exploration because I had to update the parent and child-parent-stripping parts of the thing rather than just update it once. I went to run the same report in hledger and tested the naïve command that I'd originally wanted, and it worked like a charm: $ hledger -f wrapper.txt register Expenses:Household:Food -AM -3 Want to check average grocery-spend for each week? $ hledger -f wrapper.txt register Expenses:Household:Food:Grocery -AW -4 compared with takeout? $ hledger -f wrapper.txt register Expenses:Household:Food:Takeout -AW -4 And it delightfully answers the "How much does our household spend on food per month/weekly?" with much less effort than before. 🤗 ⸻ ¹ In case you're curious, it works out to ~$145/wk for groceries and $54/wk for takeout, or just a little over $200/wk average to feed our family of four (or about $2.40/person/meal).