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% Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

Plain Text Accounting

accounting

accounting is tracking the flow of valuable commodities, such as money or time. It clarifies activity, priorities, obligations, opportunities. It can reduce stress and even be enjoyable.

double-entry bookkeeping is a process for doing this reliably. For every movement of value (a transaction), both the source and destination are recorded. Simple arithmetic invariants help prevent errors.

In traditional double-entry bookkeeping, value at any point in time is tracked in various accounts, classified as asset (owned), liability (owed) or equity (invested). Two more classifications track changes during some period: revenues (inflows) and expenses (outflows).

Transactions consist of debits (increases to asset or expense accounts, or decreases to liability or equity accounts) or credits (decreases to asset or expense accounts, or increases to liability or equity accounts).

...with text

In 2003, John Wiegley invented Ledger: a plain text data format and command-line reporting tool for efficient double-entry-style accounting. This idea went viral among software developers and technical folk, and we now have 5+ actively-developed Ledger-likes such as hledger and Beancount, with 40+ add-on tools and an active community. This site was created in 2016 to introduce our tools, documentation, and practices.

Accounting data is valuable; we want to know that it will be accessible for ever - even without software. We want to know when it changes, and revision-control it. We want to search and manipulate it efficiently. So, we store it as human-readable plain text.

We simplify debits and credits by using signed numbers - positive for inflows to an account, negative for outflows from an account.

We define arbitrary account hierarchy to suit our needs. This scales smoothly from simple to complex scenarios, and from high-level overview to fine detail.

Ledger-likes are, at least in part, command-line tools. This makes them efficient to use and very scriptable and flexible.

Ledger-likes also, at their core, tend towards functional operation: they read the input data without changing it, and output a report. This simple model makes them easy to understand and rely on.

frequently asked questions

Who is this for?
Those who are comfortable on the command line and who understand the value of storing information in plain text. If you need a complete GUI providing lots of guidance, you may prefer to use something else.

Must I edit text and type cryptic commands?
Not entirely! "Plain Text Accounting" is a broad description, referring mainly to the data format. We welcome optional GUIs, and they are coming.

Who is using this, and how?
See Who's using Ledger? for some stories.

What are the alternatives?
FOSS tools like GNUCash, Grisbi, KMyMoney. Proprietary tools like Quicken/Quickbooks, You Need A Budget. Online tools like Xero, FreeAgent. (There are many). Spreadsheets. Paper accounting. A bookkeeper.

Why is this better than QuickBooks?
Your data remains accessible. No yearly fees. Free software you can fix and port. Cross platform. Scriptable. Efficient.

How do I communicate with my accountant?
Clean up text reports by hand, print them as PDF, export CSV reports to a spreadsheet..

What if my accountant only uses QuickBooks?
You'll need a new accountant, or a duplicate set of books in QuickBooks, or to pioneer *ledger -> QuickBooks exporting.

Can I use this to do my taxes?
You can use this to track and report the data needed for tax reporting. Fill out and submit tax forms with another tool, or by hand.

How do I do budgeting?
See budgeting below. I emulate YNAB-ish envelope budgetting (see third link).

Double entry accounting? Where are the debits and credits?
Most (not all) plain text accounting implementations use signed amounts instead of debits and credits. This makes them "double entry light" perhaps, but it has been a rather successful simplification, intuitive to most newcomers.

Isn't personal accounting a waste of time?
People have very different needs and practise personal accounting for many different reasons. There is of course a point of diminishing returns; tailor your accounting practices to your needs. Needs change over time. Some of us would benefit from doing more (or better) accounting, some less (I would guess this second group is smaller). In The Millionaire Next Door (highly recommended), one research finding was that above-average wealth accumulators spend more time on financial planning, which for many of us requires accounting as a foundation. "Minimal time dedicated to financial planning is a leading indicator of a UAW [Under Accumulator of Wealth]".

Do you really enter every little transaction?
Yes! Many folks in our community do it. Mahatma Gandhi reconciled to the penny every night. J.D. Rockefeller was famous for his ledgers. It's not required. I started doing it as a temporary learning exercise, and still like it. It makes troubleshooting and reconciling easier.

How is that possible?
Practice, and a process/toolset that suits you. Some folks import most of the data from their banks, so little manual data entry is required. A few prefer to manually enter everything, for the increased awareness and insight. "Manual" data entry is usually assisted in some way: interactive console tools (hledger add and similar), web-based tools (hledger-web and similar), GUI tools (ledgerhelpers), smart editors (eg emacs & ledger-mode), recurring transaction scripts. I currently use a mixture of bank CSV import and rapid copy/paste in emacs. I spend 15 minutes a day on average, and for me that's currently a good investment.

How do I use the transaction data in my bank's web or mobile app?
If you can export it as CSV, you can import it and run queries against it. There are also some tools for converting OFX, QIF etc.

So I've got a huge list of transactions recorded, duplicating my bank statements. How does that help?
Accounting is modelling flows of money (or other value). Such a model aggregates information from many sources, in one trusted place. With it you can efficiently generate reports, forecast things (cashflow!), answer questions, try experiments. Some people need a very simple model, others benefit from a more detailed one, and we don't know up front what we might need in future. The most fundamental accounting data is a simple list of transactions (the journal). Once you have captured this, you can mine it for anything you may want later on. Plain text accounting provides nice open data format(s), tools and practices for doing this, and could be a good foundation for more powerful tools.

Isn't a command-line tool too limited for real-world accounting needs?
"I am sure for a simple expense/budget ledger it will work OK, but when it comes to recurring journals, multiple reconciliation accounts, inter company transfers, control account tracing etc., give me a nice GUI any day..."
Understandable. The current plain text accounting tools provide a very generic double entry accounting system with which you can model such things, and script them. There are a number of generic GUIs available (hledger has curses and web interfaces, and there are web/curses/GTK interfaces for Ledger and beancount). But there are not yet a lot of rich task-specific GUIs. There's no reason they can't be built, though.

Isn't a plain text format too limited for large organizations?
"it's pretty obvious that plain-text files don't scale to a multinational, with hundreds of accountants of various types all trying to work with the same files. Even with proper use of Git I bet that would get old fast. You would instead want a real database, with a schema, and some data validation and some programs/webpages to smooth out the data entry and querying and whatnot."
I'm not sure. Current plain text accounting tools can do some schema definition and data validation, and will do more in future. The plain text storage format is open, human-readable, future-proof (useful even without the software), scales smoothly from simple to complex needs, and taps a huge ecosystem of highly useful tooling, such as version control systems. And, despite the name, there's no reason these tools can't support other kinds of storage, such as a database.

Where can I see a comparison of hledger, Ledger, beancount, and the rest?
Glad you asked! See below, and also comparisons. hledger's FAQ discusses differences from Ledger, Beancount docs probably do too.

software

plain text accounting tools

<style> th, td { border:none; padding-top:0; padding-bottom:0; border-bottom:thin solid #ddd; white-space:nowrap; } </style>
Project Start Last release Code Committers Stars Mail list, size Chat, size
Ledger 2003 2019-03 C++ 160 2994 ledger, 922 #ledger, 70
hledger 2007 2019-09 haskell 110 1226 hledger, 151 #hledger, 70
Beancount 2008 2019-01 python 40 beancount, 261 #beancount, 20
 
Abandon 2013 2017-05 scala 9 132 gitter
Transity 2018 2018-09 purescript 5 382 gitter
Ledger in Go 2013 2018-06 go 5 168
cl-ledger 2007 common lisp 4 50
.Net Ledger 2017 2018-08 C# 1 29 gitter
Tackler 2017 2019-04 scala 1 18 gitter
beans 2017 2019-01 haskell 1 10
monescript 2017 2018-01 javascript 1 3
Prudent 2018 javascript (addons) 1 @PrudentLedger
goledger 2019 2019-09 go 1
 
Inactive:
uledger 2015 python
pacioli 2013 python
ledger.pl 2013 perl
Penny 2012 2014 haskell
UMM 2009 2010 haskell
sm-Ledger 2007 squeak smalltalk

The following sections collect add-ons and helper tools related to the above. "*ledger" below means Ledger & hledger-style journal format.

data import/conversion

data generation

reports

  • hledger-diff report differing transactions between two journals (haskell)
  • hledger-irr calculate an account's internal rate of return (superseded by roi) (haskell)
  • ledger-plot interactive tool for making GNUplot charts from Ledger (python)
  • ledger-plots R package & script to make charts from Ledger (R)
  • r-ledger an R package for reading and reporting on ledger/hledger/beancount files (R)
  • TaxingLots calculates capital gains for a ledger journal (python)

time logging

  • org2tc org to timeclock converter
  • on-modify.timetrack.py taskwarrior hook for timeclock output
  • t ledger timeclock shellscript
  • tim time logging and reporting tool using hledger

UI, console

  • bean-add interactive transaction entry tool (python)
  • hledger add interactive transaction entry tool (builtin command)
  • ldgr command line tool to add/sort/tag ledger files (ruby)
  • ledger xact history-aware transaction generator (builtin command)

UI, curses

UI, GUI

  • ledgerhelpers misc. GUI tools + helper library (Python, GTK)
  • Prudent integrated journal editing/importing/reporting GUI for Ledger (Javascript, mac only, closed source)

UI, web

UI, mobile

  • beancount-mobile data entry app for beancount (Android, javascript)
  • cashier mobile or desktop client for ledger and hledger-web (Android/Desktop, javascript, app)
  • cone data entry app for the h/ledger format (Android, dart)
  • MoLe mobile client for hledger-web (Android, java)

API

editor support

Grouped by editor. Note these often work quite well for other ledger-likes, not just the one they are named for.


discussion

#### stack exchange

ledger, hledger

#### hacker news

stories, comments

docs

general accounting

plain text accounting

comparisons

presentations

videos

articles & blog posts

common tasks

choosing accounts

choosing cash vs accrual

entering data

importing

reconciling

reporting

budgeting

Budget reporting with Ledger's periodic transactions:

Budget reporting with hledger-budget:

Envelope budgeting with ordinary accounts:

Envelope budgeting with Ledger's automated postings:

Envelope budgeting with automated postings, org & babel:

forecasting

invoicing

multiple currencies

trip expenses

shared expenses

taxes

time tracking

inventory tracking

non-profit accounting

exporting

customising

API access