Ledger is a command-line accounting tool that provides double-entry accounting based on a text journal. It provides no bells or whistles, and returns the user to the days before user interfaces were even a twinkling in their fathers’ CRTs.

Ledger is an accounting tool with the moxie to exist. It provides no bells or whistles, and returns the user to the days before user interfaces were even a twinkling in their father’s CRT.

What it does offer is a double-entry accounting journal with all the flexibility and muscle of its modern day cousins, without any of the fat. Think of it as the Bran Muffin of accounting tools.

To use it, you need to start keeping a journal. This is the basis of all accounting, and if you haven’t started yet, now is the time to learn. The little booklet that comes with your checkbook is a journal, so we’ll describe double-entry accounting in terms of that.

A checkbook journal records debits (subtractions, or withdrawals) and credits (additions, or deposits) with reference to a single account: the checking account. Where the money comes from, and where it goes to, are described in the payee field, where you write the person or company’s name. The ultimate aim of keeping a checkbook journal is to know how much money is available to spend. That’s really the aim of all journals.

What computers add is the ability to walk through these postings, and tell you things about your spending habits; to let you devise budgets and get control over your spending; to squirrel away money into virtual savings account without having to physically move money around; etc. As you keep your journal, you are recording information about your life and habits, and sometimes that information can start telling you things you aren’t aware of. Such is the aim of all good accounting tools.

The next step up from a checkbook journal, is a journal that keeps track of all your accounts, not just checking. In such a journal, you record not only who gets paid—in the case of a debit—but where the money came from. In a checkbook journal, it’s assumed that all the money comes from your checking account. But in a general journal, you write postings in two lines: the source account and target account. There must always be a debit from at least one account for every credit made to another account. This is what is meant by “double-entry” accounting: the journal must always balance to zero, with an equal number of debits and credits.

For example, let’s say you have a checking account and a brokerage account, and you can write checks from both of them. Rather than keep two checkbooks, you decide to use one journal for both. In this general journal you need to record a payment to Pacific Bell for your monthly phone bill, and a transfer (via check) from your brokerage account to your checking account. The Pacific Bell bill is $23.00, let’s say, and you want to pay it from your checking account. In the general journal you need to say where the money came from, in addition to where it’s going to. These transactions might look like this:

9/29 Pacific Bell $23.00 $23.00 Checking $-23.00 0 9/30 Checking $100.00 $100.00 (123) Brokerage $-100.00 0

The posting must balance to $0: $23 went to Pacific Bell, $23 came from Checking. The next entry shows check number 123 written against your brokerage account, transferring money to your checking account. There is nothing left over to be accounted for, since the money has simply moved from one account to another in both cases. This is the basis of double-entry accounting: money never pops in or out of existence; it is always a posting from one account to another.

Keeping a general journal is the same as keeping two separate journals: One for Pacific Bell and one for Checking. In that case, each time a payment is written into one, you write a corresponding withdrawal into the other. This makes it easier to write in a “running balance”, since you don’t have to look back at the last time the account was referenced—but it also means having a lot of journal books, if you deal with multiple accounts.

Here is a good place for an aside on the use of the word “account”. Most private people consider an account to be something that holds money at an institution for them. Ledger uses a more general definition of the word. An account is anywhere money can go. Other finance programs use “categories”, Ledger uses accounts. So, for example, if you buy some groceries at Trader Joe’s, then more groceries at Whole Food Market, you might assign the transactions like this

2011/03/15 Trader Joe's Expenses:Groceries $100.00 Assets:Checking 2011/03/15 Whole Food Market Expenses:Groceries $75.00 Assets:Checking

In both cases the money goes to the ‘Groceries’ account, even though the payees were different. You can set up your accounts in any way you choose.

Enter the beauty of computerized accounting. The purpose of the Ledger program is to make general journal accounting simple, by keeping track of the balances for you. Your only job is to enter the postings. If an individual posting does not balance, Ledger displays an error and indicates the incorrect posting.1

In summary, there are two aspects of Ledger use: updating the journal data file, and using the Ledger tool to view the summarized result of your transactions.

And just for the sake of example—as a starting point for those who want to dive in head-first—here are the journal transactions from above, formatted as the Ledger program wishes to see them:

2004/09/29 Pacific Bell Expenses:Pacific Bell $23.00 Assets:Checking

The account balances and registers in this file, if saved as ledger.dat, could be reported using:

$ ledger -f ledger.dat balance

         $-23.00  Assets:Checking
          $23.00  Expenses:Pacific Bell

$ ledger -f ledger.dat register checking

04-Sep-29 Pacific Bell Assets:Checking $-23.00 $-23.00

And even:

$ ledger -f ledger.dat register Bell

04-Sep-29 Pacific Bell Expenses:Pacific Bell $23.00 $23.00

An important difference between Ledger and other finance packages is that Ledger will never alter your input file. You can create and edit that file in any way you prefer, but Ledger is only for analyzing the data, not for altering it.

Ledger is written in ANSI C++, and should compile on any unix platform. The easiest way to build and install ledger is to use the prepared acprep script, that does a lot of the footwork:

# to install missing dependencies
./acprep dependencies
# building ledger
./acprep update
# to run the actual installation
make install

See the ‘help‘ subcommand to ‘acprep‘, which explains some of its many options. You can run ‘make check‘ to confirm the result, and ‘make install‘ to install. If these instructions do not work for you, you can check the ‘INSTALL.md‘ in the source directory for more up to date build instructions.

Ledger has a complete online help system based on GNU Info. This manual can be searched directly from the command-line using info ledger, which will bring up this entire manual in your TTY. Alternatively, the shorter man page can be accessed from the command-line either via man ledger or ledger --help

If you need help on how to use Ledger, or run into problems, you can join the Ledger mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/ledger-cli.

You can also find help in the #ledger channel on the IRC server irc.libera.chat.

There are plenty of people using Ledger for accounting applications. Some have documented how they use Ledger’s features to solve their accounting problems.

One such tutorial, specifically designed for non-profit charities that seek to use Ledger, can be found at https://k.sfconservancy.org/NPO-Accounting/npo-ledger-cli (with a copy on GitHub also available at https://github.com/conservancy/npo-ledger-cli/). If you’re looking for information about how to use Ledger’s tagging system to handle invoicing, track expenses by program targets, and other such concepts, you might find the tutorial useful. (Some of the auditor reporting scripts that relate to the aforementioned Ledger setup can be found contrib/non-profit-audit-reports/ in Ledger’s own source repository.)

Start a Journal File
Run a Few Reports

A journal is a record of your financial transactions and will be central to using Ledger. For now we just want to get a taste of what Ledger can do. An example journal is included with the source code distribution, called drewr3.dat (see Example Journal File). Copy it someplace convenient and open up a terminal window in that directory.

If you would rather start with your own journal right away please see Keeping a Journal.

Please note that as a command-line program, Ledger is controlled from your shell. There are several different command shells that all behave slightly differently with respect to some special characters. In particular, the “bash” shell will interpret ‘$’ signs differently than ledger and they must be escaped to reach the actual program. Another example is “zsh”, which will interpret ‘^’ differently than ledger expects. In all cases that follow you should take that into account when entering the command-line arguments as given. There are too many variations between shells to give concrete examples for each.

To show all transactions and a running total:

$ ledger -f drewr3.dat register

Ledger will generate:

10-Dec-01 Checking balance Assets:Checking $ 1,000.00 $ 1,000.00 Equit:Opening Balances $ -1,000.00 0 10-Dec-20 Organic Co-op Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 37.50 Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 75.00 Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 112.50 Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 150.00 Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 187.50 Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 225.00 Assets:Checking $ -225.00 0 10-Dec-28 Acme Mortgage Lia:Mortgage:Principal $ 200.00 $ 200.00 Expe:Interest:Mortgage $ 500.00 $ 700.00 Expenses:Escrow $ 300.00 $ 1,000.00 Assets:Checking $ -1,000.00 0 11-Jan-02 Grocery Store Expense:Food:Groceries $ 65.00 $ 65.00 Assets:Checking $ -65.00 0 11-Jan-05 Employer Assets:Checking $ 2,000.00 $ 2,000.00 Income:Salary $ -2,000.00 0 (Liabilities:Tithe) $ -240.00 $ -240.00 11-Jan-14 Bank Assets:Savings $ 300.00 $ 60.00 Assets:Checking $ -300.00 $ -240.00 11-Jan-19 Grocery Store Expense:Food:Groceries $ 44.00 $ -196.00 Assets:Checking $ -44.00 $ -240.00 11-Jan-25 Bank Assets:Checking $ 5,500.00 $ 5,260.00 Assets:Savings $ -5,500.00 $ -240.00 11-Jan-25 Tom's Used Cars Expenses:Auto $ 5,500.00 $ 5,260.00 Assets:Checking $ -5,500.00 $ -240.00 11-Jan-27 Book Store Expenses:Books $ 20.00 $ -220.00 Liabilities:MasterCard $ -20.00 $ -240.00 11-Dec-01 Sale Asse:Checking:Business $ 30.00 $ -210.00 Income:Sales $ -30.00 $ -240.00 (Liabilities:Tithe) $ -3.60 $ -243.60

To limit this to a more useful subset, simply add the accounts you are interested in seeing transactions for:

$ ledger -f drewr3.dat register Groceries

10-Dec-20 Organic Co-op Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 37.50 Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 75.00 Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 112.50 Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 150.00 Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 187.50 Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 225.00 11-Jan-02 Grocery Store Expense:Food:Groceries $ 65.00 $ 290.00 11-Jan-19 Grocery Store Expense:Food:Groceries $ 44.00 $ 334.00

Which matches the balance reported for the ‘Groceries’ account:

$ ledger -f drewr3.dat balance Groceries

        $ 334.00  Expenses:Food:Groceries

If you would like to find transaction to only a certain payee use ‘payee’ or ‘@’:

$ ledger -f drewr3.dat register payee "Organic"

Accounting is simply tracking your money. It can range from nothing, and just waiting for automatic overdraft protection to kick in, or not, to a full-blown double-entry accounting system. Ledger accomplishes the latter. With ledger you can handle your personal finances or your business’s. Double-entry accounting scales.

Accountants will talk of “credits” and “debits”, but the meaning is often different from the layman’s understanding. To avoid confusion, Ledger uses only subtractions and additions, although the underlying intent is the same as standard accounting principles.

Recall that every posting will involve two or more accounts. Money is transferred from one or more accounts to one or more other accounts. To record the posting, an amount is subtracted from the source accounts, and added to the target accounts.

In order to write a Ledger transaction correctly, you must determine where the money comes from and where it goes to. For example, when you are paid a salary, you must add money to your bank account and also subtract it from an income account:

9/29 My Employer Assets:Checking $500.00 Income:Salary $-500.00

Why is the Income a negative figure? When you look at the balance totals for your ledger, you may be surprised to see that Expenses are a positive figure, and Income is a negative figure. It may take some getting used to, but to properly use a general ledger you must think in terms of how money moves. Rather than Ledger “fixing” the minus signs, let’s understand why they are there.

When you earn money, the money has to come from somewhere. Let’s call that somewhere “society”. In order for society to give you an income, you must take money away (withdraw) from society in order to put it into (make a payment to) your bank. When you then spend that money, it leaves your bank account (a withdrawal) and goes back to society (a payment). This is why Income will appear negative—it reflects the money you have drawn from society—and why Expenses will be positive—it is the amount you’ve given back. These additions and subtractions will always cancel each other out in the end, because you don’t have the ability to create new money: it must always come from somewhere, and in the end must always leave. This is the beginning of economy, after which the explanation gets terribly difficult.

Based on that explanation, here’s another way to look at your balance report: every negative figure means that that account or person or place has less money now than when you started your ledger; and every positive figure means that that account or person or place has more money now than when you started your ledger. Make sense?

Assets are money that you have, and Liabilities are money that you owe. “Liabilities” is just a more inclusive name for Debts.

An Asset is typically increased by transferring money from an Income account, such as when you get paid. Here is a typical transaction:

2004/09/29 My Employer Assets:Checking $500.00 Income:Salary

Money, here, comes from an Income account belonging to ‘My Employer’, and is transferred to your checking account. The money is now yours, which makes it an Asset.

Liabilities track money owed to others. This can happen when you borrow money to buy something, or if you owe someone money. Here is an example of increasing a MasterCard liability by spending money with it:

2004/09/30 Restaurant Expenses:Dining $25.00 Liabilities:MasterCard

The Dining account balance now shows $25 spent on Dining, and a corresponding $25 owed on the MasterCard—and therefore shown as $-25.00. The MasterCard liability shows up as negative because it offsets the value of your assets.

The combined total of your Assets and Liabilities is your net worth. So to see your current net worth, use this command:

$ ledger balance ^assets ^liabilities

         $500.00  Assets:Checking
         $-25.00  Liabilities:MasterCard

         $475.00

In a similar vein, your Income accounts show up negative, because they transfer money from an account in order to increase your assets. Your Expenses show up positive because that is where the money went to. The combined total of Income and Expenses is your cash flow. A positive cash flow means you are spending more than you make, since income is always a negative figure. To see your current cash flow, use this command:

$ ledger balance ^income ^expenses

          $25.00  Expenses:Dining
        $-500.00  Income:Salary

        $-475.00

Another common question to ask of your expenses is: How much do I spend each month on X? Ledger provides a simple way of displaying monthly totals for any account. Here is an example that summarizes your monthly automobile expenses:

$ ledger -M register -f drewr3.dat expenses:auto

11-Jan-01 - 11-Jan-31 Expenses:Auto $ 5,500.00 $ 5,500.00

This assumes, of course, that you use account names like ‘Expenses:Auto:Gas’ and ‘Expenses:Auto:Repair’.

Tracking reimbursable expenses

Sometimes you will want to spend money on behalf of someone else, which will eventually get repaid. Since the money is still yours, it is really an asset. And since the expenditure was for someone else, you don’t want it contaminating your Expenses reports. You will need to keep an account for tracking reimbursements.

This is fairly easy to do in ledger. When spending the money, spend it to your Assets:Reimbursements, using a different account for each person or business that you spend money for. For example:

2004/09/29 Circuit City Assets:Reimbursements:Company XYZ $100.00 Liabilities:MasterCard

This shows $100.00 spent on a MasterCard at Circuit City, with the expense was made on behalf of Company XYZ. Later, when Company XYZ pays the amount back, the money will transfer from that reimbursement account back to a regular asset account:

2004/09/29 Company XYZ Assets:Checking $100.00 Assets:Reimbursements:Company XYZ

This deposits the money owed from Company XYZ into a checking account, presumably because they paid the amount back with a check.

But what to do if you run your own business, and you want to keep track of expenses made on your own behalf, while still tracking everything in a single ledger file? This is more complex, because you need to track two separate things: 1) The fact that the money should be reimbursed to you, and 2) What the expense account was, so that you can later determine where your company is spending its money.

This kind of posting is best handled with mirrored postings in two different files, one for your personal accounts, and one for your company accounts. But keeping them in one file involves the same kinds of postings, so those are what is shown here. First, the personal transaction, which shows the need for reimbursement:

2004/09/29 Circuit City Assets:Reimbursements:Company XYZ $100.00 Liabilities:MasterCard

This is the same as above, except that you own Company XYZ, and are keeping track of its expenses in the same ledger file. This transaction should be immediately followed by an equivalent transaction, which shows the kind of expense, and also notes the fact that $100.00 is now payable to you:

2004/09/29 Circuit City Company XYZ:Expenses:Computer:Software $100.00 Company XYZ:Accounts Payable:Your Name

This second transaction shows that Company XYZ has just spent $100.00 on software, and that this $100.00 came from Your Name, which must be paid back.

These two transactions can also be merged, to make things a little clearer. Note that all amounts must be specified now:

2004/09/29 Circuit City Assets:Reimbursements:Company XYZ $100.00 Liabilities:MasterCard $-100.00 Company XYZ:Expenses:Computer:Software $100.00 Company XYZ:Accounts Payable:Your Name $-100.00

To “pay back” the reimbursement, just reverse the order of everything, except this time drawing the money from a company asset, paying it to accounts payable, and then drawing it again from the reimbursement account, and paying it to your personal asset account. It’s easier shown than said:

2004/10/15 Company XYZ Assets:Checking $100.00 Assets:Reimbursements:Company XYZ $-100.00 Company XYZ:Accounts Payable:Your Name $100.00 Company XYZ:Assets:Checking $-100.00

And now the reimbursements account is paid off, accounts payable is paid off, and $100.00 has been effectively transferred from the company’s checking account to your personal checking account. The money simply “waited”—in both ‘Assets:Reimbursements:Company XYZ’, and ‘Company XYZ:Accounts Payable:Your Name’—until such time as it could be paid off.

The value of tracking expenses from both sides like that is that you do not contaminate your personal expense report with expenses made on behalf of others, while at the same time making it possible to generate accurate reports of your company’s expenditures. It is more verbose than just paying for things with your personal assets, but it gives you a very accurate information trail.

The advantage to keep these doubled transactions together is that they always stay in sync. The advantage to keeping them apart is that it clarifies the transfer’s point of view. To keep the postings in separate files, just separate the two transactions that were joined above. For example, for both the expense and the pay-back shown above, the following four transactions would be created. Two in your personal ledger file:

2004/09/29 Circuit City Assets:Reimbursements:Company XYZ $100.00 Liabilities:MasterCard $-100.00

2004/10/15 Company XYZ Assets:Checking $100.00 Assets:Reimbursements:Company XYZ $-100.00

And two in your company ledger file:

apply account Company XYZ

2004/09/29 Circuit City Expenses:Computer:Software $100.00 Accounts Payable:Your Name $-100.00

2004/10/15 Company XYZ Accounts Payable:Your Name $100.00 Assets:Checking $-100.00

end apply account

(Note: The apply account above means that all accounts mentioned in the file are children of that account. In this case it means that all activity in the file relates to Company XYZ).

After creating these transactions, you will always know that $100.00 was spent using your MasterCard on behalf of Company XYZ, and that Company XYZ spent the money on computer software and paid it back about two weeks later.

$ ledger balance --no-total

         $100.00  Assets:Checking
               0  Company XYZ
        $-100.00    Assets:Checking
         $100.00    Expenses:Computer:Software
        $-100.00  Liabilities:MasterCard

Ledger makes no assumptions about the commodities you use; it only requires that you specify a commodity. The commodity may be any non-numeric string that does not contain a period, comma, forward slash or at-sign. It may appear before or after the amount, although it is assumed that symbols appearing before the amount refer to currencies, while non-joined symbols appearing after the amount refer to commodities. Here are some valid currency and commodity specifiers:

$20.00 ; currency: twenty US dollars 40 AAPL ; commodity: 40 shares of Apple stock 60 DM ; currency: 60 Deutsche Mark £50 ; currency: 50 British pounds 50 EUR ; currency: 50 Euros (or use appropriate symbol)

Ledger will examine the first use of any commodity to determine how that commodity should be printed on reports. It pays attention to whether the name of commodity was separated from the amount, whether it came before or after, the precision used in specifying the amount, whether thousand marks were used, etc. This is done so that printing the commodity looks the same as the way you use it.

An account may contain multiple commodities, in which case it will have separate totals for each. For example, if your brokerage account contains both cash, gold, and several stock quantities, the balance might look like:

$200.00 100.00 AU AAPL 40 BORL 100 FEQTX 50 Assets:Brokerage

This balance report shows how much of each commodity is in your brokerage account.

Sometimes, you will want to know the current street value of your balance, and not the commodity totals. For this to happen, you must specify what the current price is for each commodity. The price can be any commodity, in which case the balance will be computed in terms of that commodity. The usual way to specify prices is with a price history file, which might look like this:

P 2004/06/21 02:18:01 FEQTX $22.49 P 2004/06/21 02:18:01 BORL $6.20 P 2004/06/21 02:18:02 AAPL $32.91 P 2004/06/21 02:18:02 AU $400.00

Specify the price history to use with the --price-db FILE option, with the --market (-V) option to report in terms of current market value:

$ ledger --price-db prices.db -V balance brokerage

The balance for your brokerage account will be reported in US dollars, since the prices database uses that currency.

$40880.00 Assets:Brokerage

You can convert from any commodity to any other commodity. Let’s say you had $5000 in your checking account, and for whatever reason you wanted to know how many ounces of gold that would buy, in terms of the current price of gold:

$ ledger -X AU balance checking

The result of this command might be:

Commodity price histories
Commodity equivalences

Sometimes a commodity has several forms which are all equivalent. An example of this is time. Whether tracked in terms of minutes, hours or days, it should be possible to convert between the various forms. Doing this requires the use of commodity equivalences.

For example, you might have the following two postings, one which transfers an hour of time into a ‘Billable’ account, and another which decreases the same account by ten minutes. The resulting report will indicate that fifty minutes remain:

2005/10/01 Work done for company Billable:Client 1h Project:XYZ

2005/10/02 Return ten minutes to the project Project:XYZ 10m Billable:Client

Reporting the balance for this ledger file produces:

$ ledger --no-total balance Billable Project

           50.0m  Billable:Client
          -50.0m  Project:XYZ

This example works because ledger already knows how to handle seconds, minutes and hours, as part of its time tracking support. Defining other equivalences is simple. The following is an example that creates data equivalences, helpful for tracking bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, and more:

C 1.00 Kb = 1024 b C 1.00 Mb = 1024 Kb C 1.00 Gb = 1024 Mb C 1.00 Tb = 1024 Gb

Each of these definitions correlates a commodity (such as ‘Kb’) and a default precision, with a certain quantity of another commodity. In the above example, kilobytes are reported with two decimal places of precision and each kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes.

Equivalence chains can be as long as desired. Whenever a commodity would report as a decimal amount (less than ‘1.00’), the next smallest commodity is used. If a commodity could be reported in terms of a higher commodity without resulting to a partial fraction, then the larger commodity is used.

Since Ledger’s accounts and commodity system is so flexible, you can have accounts that don’t really exist, and use commodities that no one else recognizes. For example, let’s say you are buying and selling various items in EverQuest, and want to keep track of them using a ledger. Just add items of whatever quantity you wish into your EverQuest account:

9/29 Get some stuff at the Inn Places:Black's Tavern -3 Apples Places:Black's Tavern -5 Steaks EverQuest:Inventory

Now your EverQuest:Inventory has 3 apples and 5 steaks in it. The amounts are negative, because you are taking from Black’s Tavern in order to add to your Inventory account. Note that you don’t have to use ‘Places:Black's Tavern’ as the source account. You could use ‘EverQuest:System’ to represent the fact that you acquired them online. The only purpose for choosing one kind of source account over another is to generate more informative reports later on. The more you know, the better the analysis you can perform.

If you later sell some of these items to another player, the transaction would look like:

10/2 Sturm Brightblade EverQuest:Inventory -2 Steaks EverQuest:Inventory 15 Gold

Now you’ve turned 2 steaks into 15 gold, courtesy of your customer, Sturm Brightblade.

$ ledger balance EverQuest

        3 Apples
         15 Gold
        3 Steaks  EverQuest:Inventory

The most confusing transaction in any ledger will be your equity account—because starting balances can’t come out of nowhere.

When you first start your ledger, you will likely already have money in some of your accounts. Let’s say there’s $100 in your checking account; then add a transaction to your ledger to reflect this amount. Where will the money come from? The answer: your equity.

10/2 Opening Balance Assets:Checking $100.00 Equity:Opening Balances

But what is equity? You may have heard of equity when people talked about house mortgages, as “the part of the house that you own”. Basically, equity is like the value of something. If you own a car worth $5000, then you have $5000 in equity in that car. In order to turn that car (a commodity) into a cash flow, or a credit to your bank account, you will have to debit the equity by selling it.

When you start a ledger, you probably already have a net worth. Your net worth is your current equity. By transferring the money in the ledger from your equity to your bank accounts, you are crediting the ledger account based on your prior equity. That is why, when you look at the balance report, you will see a large negative number for Equity that never changes: Because that is what you were worth (what you debited from yourself in order to start the ledger) before the money started moving around. If the total positive value of your assets is greater than the absolute value of your starting equity, it means you are making money.

Clear as mud? Keep thinking about it. Until you figure it out, put not Equity at the end of your balance command, to remove the confusing figure from the total.

Something that stops many people from keeping a ledger at all is the insanity of tracking small cash expenses. They rarely generate a receipt, and there are often a lot of small postings, rather than a few large ones, as with checks.

One solution is: don’t bother. Move your spending to a debit card, but in general ignore cash. Once you withdraw it from the ATM, mark it as already spent to an ‘Expenses:Cash’ category:

2004/03/15 ATM Expenses:Cash $100.00 Assets:Checking

If at some point you make a large cash expense that you want to track, just move the amount of the expense from ‘Expenses:Cash’ into the target account:

2004/03/20 Somebody Expenses:Food $65.00 Expenses:Cash

This way, you can still track large cash expenses, while ignoring all of the smaller ones.

There are situations when the accounts you’re tracking are different between your clients and the financial institutions where money is kept. An example of this is working as the treasurer for a religious institution. From the secular point of view, you might be working with three different accounts:

Checking
Savings
Credit Card

From a religious point of view, the community expects to divide its resources into multiple “funds”, from which it makes purchases or reserves resources for later:

School fund
Building fund
Community fund

The problem with this kind of setup is that, when you spend money, it comes from two or more places at once: the account and the fund. And yet, the correlation of amounts between funds and accounts is rarely one-to-one. What if the school fund has ‘$500.00’, but ‘$400.00’ of that comes from Checking, and ‘$100.00’ from Savings?

Traditional finance packages require that the money reside in only one place. But there are really two “views” of the data: from the account point of view and from the fund point of view—yet both sets should reflect the same overall expenses and cash flow. It’s simply where the money resides that differs.

This situation can be handled in one of two ways. The first is using virtual postings to represent the fact that money is moving to and from two kind of accounts at the same time:

2004/03/20 Contributions Assets:Checking $500.00 Income:Donations

2004/03/25 Distribution of donations [Funds:School] $300.00 [Funds:Building] $200.00 [Assets:Checking] $-500.00

The use of square brackets in the second transaction ensures that the virtual postings balance to zero. Now money can be spent directly from a fund at the same time as money is drawn from a physical account:

2004/03/25 Payment for books (paid from Checking) Expenses:Books $100.00 Assets:Checking $-100.00 (Funds:School) $-100.00

The use of round brackets creates a virtual posting without ensuring a balance to zero. When reports are generated, by default they’ll appear in terms of the funds. In this case, you will likely want to mask out your ‘Assets’ account, because otherwise the balance won’t make much sense:

$ ledger --no-total bal not ^Assets

         $100.00  Expenses:Books
         $400.00  Funds
         $200.00    Building
         $200.00    School
        $-500.00  Income:Donations

If the --real option is used, the report will be in terms of the real accounts:

$ ledger --real --no-total bal

         $400.00  Assets:Checking
         $100.00  Expenses:Books
        $-500.00  Income:Donations

If more asset accounts are needed as the source of a posting, just list them as you would normally, for example:

2004/03/25 Payment for books (paid from Checking) Expenses:Books $100.00 Assets:Checking $-50.00 Liabilities:Credit Card $-50.00 (Funds:School) $-100.00

The second way of tracking funds is to use transaction codes. In this respect the codes become like virtual accounts that embrace the entire set of postings. Basically, we are associating a transaction with a fund by setting its code. Here are two transactions that deposit money into, and spend money from, the ‘Funds:School’ fund:

2004/03/25 (Funds:School) Donations Assets:Checking $100.00 Income:Donations

2004/03/25 (Funds:Building) Donations Assets:Checking $20.00 Income:Donations

2004/04/25 (Funds:School) Payment for books Expenses:Books $50.00 Assets:Checking

Note how the accounts now relate only to the real accounts, and any balance or register reports will reflect this. That the transactions relate to a particular fund is kept only in the code.

How does this become a fund report? By using the --payee=code option, you can generate a register report where the payee for each posting shows the code. Alone, this is not terribly interesting; but when combined with the --by-payee (-P) option, you will now see account subtotals for any postings related to a specific fund. So, to see the current monetary balances of all funds, the command would be:

$ ledger --payee=code -P reg ^Assets

04-Mar-25 Funds:Building Assets:Checking $20.00 $20.00 04-Mar-25 Funds:School Assets:Checking $50.00 $70.00

Or to see a particular fund’s expenses, the ‘School’ fund in this case:

$ ledger --payee=code -P reg ^Expenses and code School

04-Apr-25 Funds:School Expenses:Books $50.00 $50.00

Both approaches yield different kinds of flexibility, depending on how you prefer to think of your funds: as virtual accounts, or as tags associated with particular transactions. Your own tastes will decide which is best for your situation.

The most important part of accounting is keeping a good journal. If you have a good journal, tools can be written to work whatever mathematical tricks you need to better understand your spending patterns. Without a good journal, no tool, however smart, can help you.

The Ledger program aims at making journal transactions as simple as possible. Since it is a command-line tool, it does not provide a user interface for keeping a journal. If you require a user interface to maintain journal transactions GnuCash is a good alternative.

If you are not using GnuCash, but a text editor to maintain your journal, read on. Ledger has been designed to make data transactions as simple as possible, by keeping the journal format easy, and also by automagically determining as much information as possible based on the nature of your transactions.

For example, you do not need to tell Ledger about the accounts you use. Any time Ledger sees a posting involving an account it knows nothing about, it will create it2. If you use a commodity that is new to Ledger, it will create that commodity, and determine its display characteristics (placement of the symbol before or after the amount, display precision, etc.) based on how you used the commodity in the posting.

Here is the Pacific Bell example from above, given as a Ledger posting, with the addition of a check number:

9/29 (1023) Pacific Bell Expenses:Utilities:Phone $23.00 Assets:Checking $-23.00

As you can see, it is very similar to what would be written on paper, minus the computed balance totals, and adding in account names that work better with Ledger’s scheme of things. In fact, since Ledger is smart about many things, you don’t need to specify the balanced amount, if it is the same as the first line:

9/29 (1023) Pacific Bell Expenses:Utilities:Phone $23.00 Assets:Checking

For this transaction, Ledger will figure out that $-23.00 must come from ‘Assets:Checking’ in order to balance the transaction.

Also note the structure of the account entries. There is an implied hierarchy established by separating with colons (see Structuring your Accounts).

The format is very flexible and it isn’t necessary that you indent and space out things exactly as shown. The only requirements are that the start of the transaction (the date typically) is at the beginning of the first line of the transaction, and the accounts are indented by at least one space. If you omit the leading spaces in the account lines Ledger will generate an error. There must be at least two spaces, or a tab, between the amount and the account. If you do not have adequate separation between the amount and the account Ledger will give an error and stop calculating.

Unless you have recently arrived from another planet, you already have a financial state. You need to capture that financial state so that Ledger has a starting point.

At some convenient point in time you knew the balances and outstanding obligation of every financial account you have. Those amounts form the basis of the opening entry for ledger. For example if you chose the beginning of 2011 as the date to start tracking finances with ledger, your opening balance entry could look like this:

2011/01/01 * Opening Balance Assets:Joint Checking $800.14 Assets:Other Checking $63.44 Assets:Savings $2805.54 Assets:Investments:401K:Deferred 100.0000 VIFSX @ $80.5227 Assets:Investments:401K:Matching 50.0000 VIFSX @ $83.7015 Assets:Investments:IRA 250.0000 VTHRX @ $20.5324 Liabilities:Mortgage $-175634.88 Liabilities:Car Loan $-3494.26 Liabilities:Visa -$1762.44 Equity:Opening Balances

There is nothing special about the name “Opening Balances” as the payee of the account name, anything convenient that you understand will work.

There really are no requirements for how you do this, but to preserve your sanity we suggest some very basic structure to your accounting system.

At the highest level you have five sorts of accounts:

Expenses: where money goes,
Assets: where money sits,
Income: where money comes from,
Liabilities: money you owe,
Equity: the real value of your property.

Starting the structure off this way will make it simpler for you to get answers to the questions you really need to ask about your finances.

Beneath these top level accounts you can have any level of detail you desire. For example, if you want to keep specific track of how much you spend on burgers and fries, you could have the following:

Expenses:Food:Hamburgers and Fries

Ledger is agnostic when it comes to how you value your accounts. Dollars, Euros, Pounds, Francs, Shares etc. are all just “commodities”. Holdings in stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other financial instruments can be labeled using whatever is convenient for you (stock ticker symbols are suggested for publicly traded assets).3

For the rest of this manual, we will only use the word “commodities” when referring to the units on a transaction value.

This is fundamentally different than many common accounting packages, which assume the same currency throughout all of your accounts. This means if you typically operate in Euros, but travel to the US and have some expenses, you would have to do the currency conversion before you made the entry into your financial system. With ledger this is not required. In the same journal you can have entries in any or all commodities you actually hold. You can use the reporting capabilities to convert all commodities to a single commodity for reporting purposes without ever changing the underlying entry.

For example, the following entries reflect transactions made for a business trip to Europe from the US:

2011/09/23 Cash in Munich Assets:Cash €50.00 Assets:Checking $-66.00

2011/09/24 Dinner in Munich Expenses:Business:Travel €35.00 Assets:Cash

This says that $66.00 came out of checking and turned into 50 Euros. The implied exchange rate was $1.32. Then 35.00 Euros were spent on Dinner in Munich.

Running a ledger balance report shows:

$ ledger -f example.dat bal

         $-66.00
          €15.00  Assets
          €15.00    Cash
         $-66.00    Checking
          €35.00  Expenses:Business:Travel

         $-66.00
          €50.00

The top two lines show my current assets as $-66.00 in checking (in this very short example I didn’t establish opening an opening balance for the checking account) and €15.00. After spending on dinner I have €15.00 in my wallet. The bottom line balances to zero, but is shown in two lines since we haven’t told ledger to convert commodities.

Buying stock is a typical example that many will use that involves multiple commodities in the same transaction. The type of the share (AAPL for Apple Inc.) and the share purchase price in the currency unit you made the purchase in ($ for AAPL). Yes, the typical convention is as follows:

2004/05/01 Stock purchase Assets:Broker 50 AAPL @ $30.00 Expenses:Broker:Commissions $19.95 Assets:Broker $-1,519.95

This assumes you have a brokerage account that is capable of managing both liquid and commodity assets. Now, on the day of the sale:

2005/08/01 Stock sale Assets:Broker -50 AAPL {$30.00} @ $50.00 Expenses:Broker:Commissions $19.95 Income:Capital Gains $-1,000.00 Assets:Broker $2,480.05

You can, of course, elide the amount of the last posting. It is there for clarity’s sake.

The ‘{$30.00}’ is a lot price. You can also use a lot date, ‘[2004/05/01]’, or both, in case you have several lots of the same price/date and your taxation model is based on longest-held-first.

Commodities that you keep in order to sell at a later time have a variable value that fluctuates with the market prices. Commodities that you consume should not fluctuate in value, but stay at the lot price they were purchased at. As an extension of “lot pricing”, you can fix the per-unit price of a commodity.

For example, say you buy 10 gallons of gas at $1.20. In future “value” reports, you don’t want these gallons reported in terms of today’s price, but rather the price when you bought it. At the same time, you also want other kinds of commodities—like stocks— reported in terms of today’s price.

This is supported as follows:

2009/01/01 Shell Expenses:Gasoline 11 GAL {=$2.299} Assets:Checking

This transaction actually introduces a new commodity, ‘GAL {=$2.29}’, whose market value disregards any future changes in the price of gasoline.

If you do not want price fixing, you can specify this same transaction in one of two ways, both equivalent (note the lack of the equal sign compared to the transaction above):

2009/01/01 Shell Expenses:Gasoline 11 GAL {$2.299} Assets:Checking

2009/01/01 Shell Expenses:Gasoline 11 GAL @ $2.299 Assets:Checking

There is no difference in meaning between these two forms. Why do both exist, you ask? To support things like this:

2009/01/01 Shell Expenses:Gasoline 11 GAL {=$2.299} @ $2.30 Assets:Checking

This transaction says that you bought 11 gallons priced at $2.299 per gallon at a cost to you of $2.30 per gallon. Ledger auto-generates a balance posting in this case to Equity:Capital Losses to reflect the 1.1 cent difference, which is then balanced by Assets:Checking because its amount is null.

Ledger allows you to have very detailed control over how your commodities are valued. You can fine tune the results given using the --market or --exchange COMMODITY options. There are now several points of interception; you can specify the valuation method:

on a commodity itself,
on a posting, via metadata (effect is largely the same as #1),
on an xact, which then applies to all postings in that xact,
on any posting via an automated transaction,
on a per-account basis,
on a per-commodity basis,
by changing the journal default of market.

Fixated pricing (such as ‘{=$20}’) still plays a role in this scheme. As far as valuation goes, it’s shorthand for writing ‘((s,d,t -> market($20,d,t)))’.

A valuation function receives three arguments:

source

A string identifying the commodity whose price is being asked for (example: ‘EUR’).

date

The reference date the price should be relative.

target

A string identifying the “target” commodity, or the commodity the returned price should be in. This argument is null if --market was used instead of --exchange COMMODITY.

The valuation function should return an amount. If you’ve written your function in Python, you can return something like ‘Amount("$100")’. If the function returns an explicit value, that value is always used, regardless of the commodity, the date, or the desired target commodity. For example,

define myfunc_seven(s, d, t) = 7 EUR

In order to specify a fixed price, but still valuate that price into the target commodity, use something like this:

define myfunc_five(s, d, t) = market(5 EUR, d, t)

The value directive sets the valuation used for all commodities used in the rest of the data stream. This is the fallback, if nothing more specific is found.

You can set a specific valuation function on a per-commodity basis. Instead of defining a function, you can also pass a lambda.

commodity $ value s, d, t -> 6 EUR

Each account can also provide a default valuation function for any commodities transferred to that account.

account Expenses:Food5 value myfunc_five

The metadata field ‘Value’, if found, overrides the valuation function on a transaction-wide or per-posting basis.

= @XACT and Food ; Value:: 8 EUR (Equity) $1

= @POST and Dining (Expenses:Food9) $1 ; Value:: 9 EUR

Lastly, you can specify the valuation function/value for any specific amount using the ‘(( ))’ commodity annotation.

2012-03-02 KFC Expenses:Food2 $1 ((2 EUR)) Assets:Cash2

2012-03-03 KFC Expenses:Food3 $1 ; Value:: 3 EUR Assets:Cash3

2012-03-04 KFC ; Value:: 4 EUR Expenses:Food4 $1 Assets:Cash4

2012-03-05 KFC Expenses:Food5 $1 Assets:Cash5

2012-03-06 KFC Expenses:Food6 $1 Assets:Cash6

2012-03-07 KFC Expenses:Food7 1 CAD Assets:Cash7

2012-03-08 XACT Expenses:Food8 $1 Assets:Cash8

2012-03-09 POST Expenses:Dining9 $1 Assets:Cash9

12-Mar-02 KFC Expenses:Food2 2 EUR 2 EUR 12-Mar-03 KFC Expenses:Food3 3 EUR 5 EUR 12-Mar-04 KFC Expenses:Food4 4 EUR 9 EUR 12-Mar-05 KFC Expenses:Food5 $1 $1 9 EUR 12-Mar-06 KFC Expenses:Food6 $1 $2 9 EUR 12-Mar-07 KFC Expenses:Food7 1 CAD $2 1 CAD 9 EUR 12-Mar-08 XACT Expenses:Food8 $1 $3 1 CAD 9 EUR

Sometimes Ledger’s flexibility can lead to difficulties. Using a freeform text editor to enter transactions makes it easy to keep the data, but also easy to enter accounts or payees inconsistently or with spelling errors.

In order to combat inconsistency you can define allowable accounts and payees. For simplicity, create a separate text file and define accounts and payees like

account Expenses account Expenses:Utilities

Using the --strict option will cause Ledger to complain if any accounts are not previously defined:

$ ledger bal --strict Warning: "FinanceData/Master.dat", line 6: Unknown account 'Liabilities:Tithe Owed' Warning: "FinanceData/Master.dat", line 8: Unknown account 'Liabilities:Tithe Owed' Warning: "FinanceData/Master.dat", line 15: Unknown account 'Allocation:Equities:Domestic'

If you have a large Ledger register already created use the accounts command to get started:

$ ledger accounts >> Accounts.dat

You will have to edit this file to add the account directive in front of every line.

The ledger file format is quite simple, but also very flexible. It supports many options, though typically the user can ignore most of them. They are summarized below.

Transactions and Comments
Command Directives

There are numerous tools to help convert various formats to a Ledger file. Most banks will generate a comma separated values file that can easily be parsed into Ledger format using one of those tools. Some of the most popular tools are:

Directly pulling information from banks is outside the scope of Ledger’s function.

After a while, your journal can get to be pretty large. While this will not slow down Ledger—it’s designed to process journals very quickly—things can start to feel “messy”; and it’s a universal complaint that when finances feel messy, people avoid them.

Thus, archiving the data from previous years into their own files can offer a sense of completion, and freedom from the past. But how to best accomplish this with the ledger program? There are two commands that make it very simple: print, and equity.

Let’s take an example file, with data ranging from year 2000 until 2004. We want to archive years 2000 and 2001 to their own file, leaving 2002–2004 in the current file. So, use print to output all the earlier transactions to a file called ledger-old.dat:

$ ledger -f ledger.dat -b 2000 -e 2002 print > ledger-old.dat

Note that -e limits output to transactions before the date specified.

To delete older data from the current ledger file, use print again, this time specifying year 2002 as the starting date:

$ ledger -f ledger.dat -b 2002 print > x $ mv x ledger.dat

However, now the current file contains only postings from 2002 onward, which will not yield accurate present-day balances, because the net income from previous years is no longer being tallied. To compensate for this, we must append an equity report for the old ledger at the beginning of the new one:

$ ledger -f ledger-old.dat equity > equity.dat $ cat equity.dat ledger.dat > x $ mv x ledger.dat $ rm equity.dat

Now the balances reported from ledger.dat are identical to what they were before the data was split.

How often should you split your ledger? You never need to, if you don’t want to. Even eighty years of data will not slow down ledger much, and that’s just using present day hardware! Or, you can keep the previous and current year in one file, and each year before that in its own file. It’s really up to you, and how you want to organize your finances. For those who also keep an accurate paper trail, it might be useful to archive the older years to their own files, then burn those files to a CD to keep with the paper records—along with any electronic statements received during the year. In the arena of organization, just keep in mind this maxim: Do whatever keeps you doing it.

The most basic form of transaction is:

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash $-20.00

This transaction has a date, a payee or description, a target account (the first posting), and a source account (the second posting). Each posting specifies what action is taken related to that account.

A transaction can have any number of postings:

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash $-10.00 Liabilities:Credit $-10.00

The first thing you can do to make things easier is elide amounts. That is, if exactly one posting has no amount specified, Ledger will infer the inverse of the other postings’ amounts:

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash $-10.00 Liabilities:Credit ; same as specifying $-10

If the other postings use multiple commodities, Ledger will copy the empty posting N times and fill in the negated values of the various commodities:

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Expenses:Tips $2.00 Assets:Cash EUR -10.00 Assets:Cash GBP -10.00 Liabilities:Credit

This transaction is identical to writing:

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Expenses:Tips $2.00 Assets:Cash EUR -10.00 Assets:Cash GBP -10.00 Liabilities:Credit $-22.00 Liabilities:Credit EUR 10.00 Liabilities:Credit GBP 10.00

A transaction can have a textual “code”. This has no meaning and is only displayed by the print command. Checking accounts often use codes like DEP, XFER, etc., as well as check numbers. This is to give you a place to put those codes:

2012-03-10 (#100) KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Checking

A transaction can have a “state”: cleared, pending, or uncleared. The default is uncleared. To mark a transaction cleared, put an asterisk ‘*’ after the date, before the code or payee:

2012-03-10 * KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash

To mark it pending, use a ‘!’:

2012-03-10 ! KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash

What these mean is entirely up to you. The --cleared option limits reports to only cleared items, while --uncleared shows both uncleared and pending items, and --pending shows only pending items.

I use cleared to mean that I’ve reconciled the transaction with my bank statement, and pending to mean that I’m in the middle of a reconciliation.

When you clear a transaction, that’s really just shorthand for clearing all of its postings. That is:

2012-03-10 * KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash

Is the same as writing:

2012-03-10 KFC * Expenses:Food $20.00 * Assets:Cash

You can mark individual postings as cleared or pending, in case one “side” of the transaction has cleared, but the other hasn’t yet:

2012-03-10 KFC Liabilities:Credit $100.00 * Assets:Checking

After the payee, and after at least one tab or two spaces (or a space and a tab), which Ledger calls a “hard separator”, you may introduce a note about the transaction using the ‘;’ character:

2012-03-10 * KFC ; yum, chicken... Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash

Notes can also appear on the next line, so long as that line begins with whitespace:

2012-03-10 * KFC ; yum, chicken... ; and more notes... Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash

2012-03-10 * KFC ; just these notes... Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash

A transaction’s note is shared by all its postings. This becomes significant when querying for metadata (see below). To specify that a note belongs only to one posting, place it after a hard separator after the amount, or on its own line preceded by whitespace:

2012-03-10 * KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 ; posting #1 note Assets:Cash ; posting #2 note, extra indentation is optional

Ordinarily, the amounts of all postings in a transaction must balance to zero. This is non-negotiable. It’s what double-entry accounting is all about! But there are some tricks up Ledger’s sleeve...

You can use virtual accounts to transfer amounts to an account on the sly, bypassing the balancing requirement. The trick is that these postings are not considered “real”, and can be removed from all reports using --real.

To specify a virtual account, surround the account name with parentheses:

2012-03-10 * KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash (Budget:Food) $-20.00

If you want, you can state that virtual postings should balance against one or more other virtual postings by using brackets (which look “harder”) rather than parentheses:

2012-03-10 * KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash [Budget:Food] $-20.00 [Equity:Budgets] $20.00

An amount is a numerical figure with a commodity, but it can also be any value expression. To indicate this, surround the amount expression with parentheses:

2012-03-10 * KFC Expenses:Food ($10.00 + $20.00) ; Ledger adds it up for you Assets:Cash

If at the end of a posting’s amount (and after the cost too, if there is one) there is an equals sign, then Ledger will verify that the total value for that account as of that posting matches the amount specified. See --permissive option to relax the balance assertions checks.

There are two forms of this features: balance assertions, and balance assignments. Note that both of these are processed while parsing the given ledger files. Hence the order in which these are evaluated is the order in which they appear in the ledger file. The date or effective date of the transactions and postings that contain the balance assertions or balance assignments is therefore irrelevant for the the evaluation of the balance assertions and balance assignments. This may be confusing to people for whom a date order is more intuitive.

When you transfer a commodity from one account to another, sometimes it gets transformed during the transaction. This happens when you spend money on gas, for example, which transforms dollars into gallons of gasoline, or dollars into stocks in a company.

In those cases, Ledger will remember the “cost” of that transaction for you, and can use it during reporting in various ways. Here’s an example of a stock purchase:

2012-03-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL Assets:Brokerage:Cash $-500.00

This is different from transferring 10 AAPL shares from one account to another, in this case you are exchanging one commodity for another. The resulting posting’s cost is $50.00 per share.

You can make any posting’s cost explicit using the ‘@’ symbol after the amount or amount expression:

2012-03-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL @ $50.00 Assets:Brokerage:Cash $-500.00

When you do this, since Ledger can now figure out the balancing amount from the first posting’s cost, you can elide the other amount:

2012-03-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL @ $50.00 Assets:Brokerage:Cash

Primary and secondary commodities

Just as you can have amount expressions, you can have posting expressions:

2012-03-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL @ ($500.00 / 10) Assets:Brokerage:Cash

You can even have both:

2012-03-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage (5 AAPL * 2) @ ($500.00 / 10) Assets:Brokerage:Cash

The cost figure following the ‘@’ character specifies the per-unit price for the commodity being transferred. If you’d like to specify the total cost instead, use ‘@@’:

2012-03-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL @@ $500.00 Assets:Brokerage:Cash

Ledger reads this as if you had written:

2012-03-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL @ ($500.00 / 10) Assets:Brokerage:Cash

Normally whenever a commodity exchange like this happens, the price of the exchange (such as $50 per share of AAPL, above) is recorded in Ledger’s internal price history database. To prevent this from happening in the case of an exceptional transaction, surround the ‘@’ or ‘@@’ with parentheses:

2012-03-10 My Brother Assets:Brokerage 1000 AAPL (@) $1 Income:Gifts Received

When a transaction occurs that exchanges one commodity for another, Ledger records that commodity price not only within its internal price database, but also attached to the commodity itself. Usually this fact remains invisible to the user, unless you turn on --lot-prices to show these hidden price figures.

For example, consider the stock sale given above:

2012-03-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL @ $50.00 Assets:Brokerage:Cash

The commodity transferred into ‘Assets:Brokerage’ is not actually 10 AAPL, but rather 10 AAPL {$50.00}. The figure in braces after the amount is called the “lot price”. It’s Ledger’s way of remembering that this commodity was transferred through an exchange, and that $50.00 was the price of that exchange.

This becomes significant if you later sell that commodity again. For example, you might write this:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage:Cash Assets:Brokerage -10 AAPL @ $75.00

And that would be perfectly fine, but how do you track the capital gains on the sale? It could be done with a virtual posting:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage:Cash Assets:Brokerage -10 AAPL @ $75.00 (Income:Capital Gains) $-250.00

But this gets messy since capital gains income is very real, and not quite appropriate for a virtual posting.

Instead, if you reference that same hidden price annotation, Ledger will figure out that the price of the shares you’re selling, and the cost you’re selling them at, don’t balance:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage:Cash $750.00 Assets:Brokerage -10 AAPL {$50.00} @ $75.00

This transaction will fail because the $250.00 price difference between the price you bought those shares at, and the cost you’re selling them for, does not match. The lot price also identifies which shares you purchased on that prior date.

As a shorthand, you can specify the total price instead of the per-share price in doubled braces. This goes well with total costs, but is not required to be used with them:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage:Cash $750.00 Assets:Brokerage -10 AAPL {{$500.00}} @@ $750.00 Income:Capital Gains $-250.00

It should be noted that this is a convenience only for cases where you buy and sell whole lots. The {{$500.00}} is not an attribute of the commodity, whereas {$50.00} is. In fact, when you write {{$500.00}}, Ledger just divides that value by 10 and sees {$50.00}. So if you use the print command to look at this transaction, you’ll see the single braces form in the output. The double braces price form is a shorthand only.

Plus, it comes with dangers. This works fine:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL @ $50.00 Assets:Brokerage:Cash $-500.00

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage:Cash $375.00 Assets:Brokerage -5 AAPL {$50.00} @@ $375.00 Income:Capital Gains $-125.00

But this does not do what you might expect:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL @ $50.00 Assets:Brokerage:Cash $-500.00

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage:Cash $375.00 Assets:Brokerage -5 AAPL {{$500.00}} @@ $375.00 Income:Capital Gains $-125.00

And in cases where the amounts do not divide into whole figures and must be rounded, the capital gains figure could be off by a cent. Use with caution.

Because lot pricing provides enough information to infer the cost, the following two transactions are equivalent:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL @ $50.00 Assets:Brokerage:Cash $-500.00

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL {$50.00} Assets:Brokerage:Cash $-500.00

However, note that what you see in some reports may differ, for example in the print report. Functionally, however, there is no difference, and neither the register nor the balance report are sensitive to this difference.

If you bought a stock last year, and ask for its value today, Ledger will consult its price database to see what the most recent price for that stock is. You can short-circuit this lookup by “fixing” the price at the time of a transaction. This is done using ‘{=AMOUNT}’:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL {=$50.00} Assets:Brokerage:Cash $-500.00

These 10 AAPL will now always be reported as being worth $50, no matter what else happens to the stock in the meantime.

Fixated prices are a special case of using lot valuation expressions (see below) to fix the value of a commodity lot.

Since price annotations and costs are largely interchangeable and a matter of preference, there is an equivalent syntax for specified fixated prices by way of the cost:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage 10 AAPL @ =$50.00 Assets:Brokerage:Cash $-500.00

This is the same as the previous transaction, with the same caveats found in Prices versus costs.

You can also associate arbitrary notes for your own record keeping in parentheses, and reveal them with --lot-notes. One caveat is that the note cannot begin with an ‘@’ character, as that would indicate a virtual cost:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage:Cash $375.00 Assets:Brokerage -5 AAPL {$50.00} [2012-04-10] (Oh my!) @@ $375.00 Income:Capital Gains $-125.00

You can specify any combination of lot prices, dates or notes, in any order. They are all optional.

To show all lot information in a report, use --lots.

Normally when you ask Ledger to display the values of commodities held, it uses a value expression called “market” to determine the most recent value from its price database—even downloading prices from the Internet, if --download (-Q) was specified and a suitable getquote script is found on your system.

However, you can override this valuation logic by providing a commodity valuation expression in doubled parentheses. This expression must result in one of two values: either an amount to always be used as the per-share price for that commodity; or a function taking three arguments, which is called to determine that price.

If you use the functional form, you can either specify a function name, or a lambda expression. Here’s a function that yields the price as $10 in whatever commodity is being requested:

define ten_dollars(s, date, t) = market($10, date, t)

I can now use that in a lot value expression as follows:

2012-04-10 My Broker Assets:Brokerage:Cash $375.00 Assets:Brokerage -5 AAPL {$50.00} ((ten_dollars)) @@ $375.00 Income:Capital Gains $-125.00

Alternatively, I could do the same thing without pre-defining a function by using a lambda expression taking three arguments:

2012-04-10 My Broker A:B:Cash $375.00 A:B -5 AAPL {$50.00} ((s, d, t -> market($10, date, t))) @@ $375.00 Income:Capital Gains $-125.00

The arguments passed to these functions have the following meaning:

source The source commodity string, or an amount object. If it is a string, the return value must be an amount representing the price of the commodity identified by that string (example: ‘$’). If it is an amount, return the value of that amount as a new amount (usually calculated as commodity price times source amount).
date The date to use for determining the value. If null, it means no date was specified, which can mean whatever you want it to mean.
target If not null, a string representing the desired target commodity that the commodity price, or repriced amount, should be valued in. Note that this string can be a comma-separated list, and that some or all of the commodities in that list may be suffixed with an exclamation mark, to indicate what is being desired.

In most cases, it is simplest to either use explicit amounts in your valuation expressions, or just pass the arguments down to ‘market’ after modifying them to suit your needs.

An automated transaction is a special kind of transaction which adds its postings to other transactions any time one of that other transactions’ postings matches its predicate. The predicate uses the same query syntax as the Ledger command-line.

Consider this posting:

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash

If I write this automated transaction before it in the file:

= expr true Foo $50.00 Bar $-50.00

Then the first transaction will be modified during parsing as if I’d written this:

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Foo $50.00 Bar $-50.00 Assets:Cash $-20.00 Foo $50.00 Bar $-50.00

Despite this fancy logic, automated transactions themselves follow most of the same rules as regular transactions: their postings must balance (unless you use a virtual posting), you can have metadata, etc.

One thing you cannot do, however, is elide amounts in an automated transaction.

If you use an amount expression for an automated transaction’s posting, that expression has access to all the details of the matched posting. For example, you can refer to that posting’s amount using the “amount” value expression variable:

= expr true (Foo) (amount * 2) ; same as just "2" in this case

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash

This becomes:

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 (Foo) $40.00 Assets:Cash $-20.00 (Foo) $-40.00

Sometimes you want to refer to the account that was matched in some way within the automated transaction itself. This is done by using the string ‘$account’, anywhere within the account part of the automated posting:

= food (Budget:$account) 10

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 Assets:Cash

Becomes:

2012-03-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20.00 (Budget:Expenses:Food) $200.00 Assets:Cash $-20.00

It is possible to refer to information within the posting using a VEXPR. Note that the syntax for using a VEXPR is "%(VEXPR)".

= ^Income Liabilities:Tax:%(tag(/Tax/)) (20/120) $account (-20/120)

2024-07-04 * Sale ; Tax: General Assets 10 USD Income:Customer A

Becomes:

2024/07/04 * Sale ; Tax: General Assets 10 USD Income:Customer A -10 USD Liabilities:Tax:General -2 USD Income:Customer A 2 USD

Keep in mind that if you are using --strict or --pedantic you will have to explicitly define an account to avoid errors. When using ‘$account’, such definition can be done thus:

In the real world, transactions do not take place instantaneously. Purchases can take several days to post to a bank account. And you may pay ahead for something for which you want to distribute costs. With Ledger you can control every aspect of the timing of a transaction.

Say you’re in business. If you bill a customer, you can enter something like

2008/01/01=2008/01/14 Client invoice ; estimated date you'll be paid Assets:Accounts Receivable $100.00 Income: Client name

Then, when you receive the payment, you change it to

2008/01/01=2008/01/15 Client invoice ; actual date money received Assets:Accounts Receivable $100.00 Income: Client name

and add something like

2008/01/15 Client payment Assets:Checking $100.00 Assets:Accounts Receivable

Now

$ ledger --begin 2008/01/01 --end 2008/01/14 bal Income

gives you your accrued income in the first two weeks of the year, and

$ ledger --effective --begin 2008/01/01 --end 2008/01/14 bal Income

gives you your cash basis income in the same two weeks.

Another use is distributing costs out in time. As an example, suppose you just prepaid into a local vegetable co-op that sustains you through the winter. It costs $225 to join the program, so you write a check. You don’t want your October grocery budget to be blown because you bought food ahead, however. What you really want is for the money to be evenly distributed over the next six months so that your monthly budgets gradually take a hit for the vegetables you’ll pick up from the co-op, even though you’ve already paid for them.

2008/10/16 * (2090) Bountiful Blessings Farm Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2008/10/01] Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2008/11/01] Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2008/12/01] Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2009/01/01] Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2009/02/01] Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2009/03/01] Assets:Checking

This entry accomplishes this. Every month you’ll see an automatic $37.50 deficit like you should, while your checking account really knows that it debited $225 this month.

And using the --effective (or --aux-date) option, the initial date will be overridden by the effective dates.

$ ledger --effective register Groceries

08-Oct-01 Bountiful Blessings.. Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 37.50 08-Nov-01 Bountiful Blessings.. Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 75.00 08-Dec-01 Bountiful Blessings.. Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 112.50 09-Jan-01 Bountiful Blessings.. Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 150.00 09-Feb-01 Bountiful Blessings.. Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 187.50 09-Mar-01 Bountiful Blessings.. Expense:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 $ 225.00

Note that the --aux-date option is an alias for --effective; for a brief explanation of auxiliary date see Auxiliary dates.

Introduction
Balance Reports
Typical queries
Advanced Reports

The power of Ledger comes from the incredible flexibility in its reporting commands, combined with formatting commands. Some options control what is included in the calculations, and formatting controls how it is displayed. The combinations are infinite. This chapter will show you the basics of combining various options and commands. In the next chapters you will find details about the specific commands and options.

Controlling the Accounts and Payees
Controlling Formatting

The balance report is the most commonly used report. The simplest invocation is:

$ ledger balance -f drewr3.dat

which will print the balances of every account in your journal.

     $ -3,804.00  Assets
      $ 1,396.00    Checking
         $ 30.00      Business
     $ -5,200.00    Savings
     $ -1,000.00  Equity:Opening Balances
      $ 6,654.00  Expenses
      $ 5,500.00    Auto
         $ 20.00    Books
        $ 300.00    Escrow
        $ 334.00    Food:Groceries
        $ 500.00    Interest:Mortgage
     $ -2,030.00  Income
     $ -2,000.00    Salary
        $ -30.00    Sales
        $ -63.60  Liabilities
        $ -20.00    MasterCard
        $ 200.00    Mortgage:Principal
       $ -243.60    Tithe

       $ -243.60

Most times, this is more than you want. Limiting the results to specific accounts is as easy as entering the names of the accounts after the command:

$ ledger balance -f drewr3.dat Auto MasterCard

      $ 5,500.00  Expenses:Auto
        $ -20.00  Liabilities:MasterCard

      $ 5,480.00

Note the implicit logical or between ‘Auto’ and ‘Mastercard’.

If you want the entire contents of a branch of your account tree, use the highest common name in the branch:

$ ledger balance -f drewr3.dat Income

     $ -2,030.00  Income
     $ -2,000.00    Salary
        $ -30.00    Sales

     $ -2,030.00

You can use general regular expressions (PCRE) in nearly any place Ledger needs a string:

$ ledger balance -f drewr3.dat ^Bo

This first example looks for any account starting with ‘Bo’, of which there are none.

$ ledger balance -f drewr3.dat Bo

This second example looks for any account containing ‘Bo’, which is ‘Expenses:Books’.

If you want to know exactly how much you have spent in a particular account on a particular payee, the following are equivalent:

$ ledger balance Expenses:Auto:Fuel and @Chevron

$ ledger balance --limit 'account=~/Expenses:Auto:Fuel/ and payee=~/Chevron/'

will show you the amount expended on gasoline at Chevron. The second example is the first example of the very powerful expression language available to shape reports. The first example may be easier to remember, but learning to use the second will open up far more possibilities.

If you want to exclude specific accounts from the report, you can exclude multiple accounts with parentheses:

$ ledger bal Expenses and not (Expenses:Drinks or Expenses:Candy or Expenses:Gifts)

A query such as the following shows all expenses since last October, sorted by total:

$ ledger -b "last oct" -S T bal ^expenses

From left to right the options mean: Show transactions since last October; sort by the absolute value of the total; and report the balance for all accounts that begin with ‘expenses’.

Reporting monthly expenses

The following query makes it easy to see monthly expenses, with each month’s expenses sorted by the amount:

$ ledger -M --period-sort "(amount)" reg ^expenses

Now, you might wonder where the money came from to pay for these things. To see that report, add --related (-r), which shows the “related account” postings:

$ ledger -M --period-sort "(amount)" -r reg ^expenses

But maybe this prints too much information. You might just want to see how much you’re spending with your MasterCard. That kind of query requires the use of a display predicate, since the postings calculated must match ‘^expenses’, while the postings displayed must match ‘mastercard’. The command would be:

$ ledger -M -r --display 'account=~/mastercard/' reg ^expenses

This query says: Report monthly subtotals; report the “related account” postings; display only related postings whose account matches ‘mastercard’, and base the calculation on postings matching ‘^expenses’.

This works just as well for reporting the overall total, too:

$ ledger -s -r --display "account=~/mastercard/" reg ^expenses

The --subtotal (-s) option subtotals all postings, just as --monthly (-M) subtotaled by the month. The running total in both cases is off, however, since a display expression is being used.

Asset Allocation
Visualizing with Gnuplot

A very popular method of managing portfolios is to control the percent allocation of assets by certain categories. The mix of categories and the weights applied to them vary by investing philosophy, but most follow a similar pattern. Tracking asset allocation in ledger is not difficult but does require some additional effort to describe how the various assets you own contribute to the asset classes you want to track.

In our simple example we assume you want to apportion your assets into the general categories of domestic and international equities (stocks) and a combined category of bonds and cash. For illustrative purposes, we will use several publicly available mutual funds from Vanguard. The three funds we will track are the Vanguard 500 IDX FD Signal (VIFSX), the Vanguard Target Retirement 2030 (VTHRX), and the Vanguard Short Term Federal Fund (VSGBX). Each of these funds allocates assets to different categories of the investment universe and in different proportions. When you buy a share of VTHRX, that share is partially invested in equities, and partially invested in bonds and cash. Below is the asset allocation for each of the instruments listed above:

Domestic

Global

Symbol

Equity

bonds/cash

VIFSX

100%

VTHRX

24.0%

56.3%

19.7%

VSGBX

100%

These numbers are available from the prospectus of any publicly available mutual fund. Of course a single stock issue is 100% equity and a single bond issue is 100% bonds.

We track purchases of specific investments using the symbol of that investment as its commodity. How do we tell Ledger that a share of VTHRX is 24% Domestic equity? Enter automatic transactions and virtual accounts.

At the top of our ledger we enter automatic transactions that describe these proportions to Ledger. In the same entries we set up virtual accounts that let us separate these abstract calculations from our actual balances.

For the three instruments listed above, those automatic transactions would look like:

= expr ( commodity == 'VIFSX' ) (Allocation:Equities:Domestic) 1.000

= expr ( commodity == 'VTHRX' ) (Allocation:Equities:Global) 0.240 (Allocation:Equities:Domestic) 0.563 (Allocation:Bonds/Cash) 0.197

= expr ( commodity == 'VBMFX') (Allocation:Bonds/Cash) 1.000

2015-01-01 Buy VIFSX Assets:Broker 100 VIFSX Assets:Cash $-10000

2015-01-01 Buy VTHRX Assets:Broker 10 VTHRX Assets:Cash $-10000

2015-01-01 Buy VBMFX Assets:Broker 1 VBMFX Assets:Cash $-10000

How do these work? First the ‘=’ sign at the beginning of the line tells ledger this is an automatic transaction to be applied when the condition following the ‘=’ is true. After the ‘=’ sign is a value expression (see Value Expressions) that returns true any time a posting contains the commodity of interest.

The following line gives the proportions (not percentages) of each unit of commodity that belongs to each asset class. Whenever Ledger sees a buy or sell of a particular commodity it will credit or debit these virtual accounts with that proportion of the number of shares moved.

Now that Ledger understands how to distribute the commodities amongst the various asset classes how do we get a report that tells us our current allocation? Using the balance command and some tricky formatting!

ledger bal Allocation --current --format "\ %-17((depth_spacer)+(partial_account))\ %10(percent(market(display_total), market(parent.total)))\ %16(market(display_total))\n%/"

Which yields:

    Allocation                  100.00%                  $30000
      Bonds/Cash                 39.90%                  $11970
      Equities                   60.10%                  $18030
        Domestic                 86.69%                  $15630
        Global                   13.31%                   $2400

Let’s look at the Ledger invocation a bit closer. The command above is split into lines for clarity. The first line is very vanilla Ledger asking for the current balances of the account in the “Allocation” tree, using a special formatter.

The magic is in the formatter. The second line simply tells Ledger to print the partial account name indented by its depth in the tree. The third line is where we calculate and display the percentages. The display_total command gives the values of the total calculated for the account in this line. The parent.total command gives the total for the next level up in the tree. percent formats their ratio as a percentage. The fourth line tells ledger to display the current market value of the line. The last two characters ‘%/’ tell Ledger what to do for the last line, in this case, nothing.

If you have the “Gnuplot” program installed, you can graph any of the above register reports. The script to do this is included in the ledger distribution, and is named contrib/report. Install report anywhere along your PATH, and then use report instead of ledger when doing a register report. The only thing to keep in mind is that you must specify --amount-data (-j) or --total-data (-J) to indicate whether “Gnuplot” should plot the amount, or the running total. For example, this command plots total monthly expenses made on your MasterCard.

$ report -j -M -r --display "account =~ /mastercard/" reg ^expenses

The report script is a very simple Bourne shell script, that passes a set of scripted commands to “Gnuplot”. Feel free to modify the script to your liking, since you may prefer histograms to line plots, for example.

Here are some useful plots:

report -j -M reg ^expenses # monthly expenses report -J reg checking # checking account balance report -J reg ^income ^expenses # cash flow report

net worth report, ignoring non-$ postings

report -J -l "Ua>={\$0.01}" reg ^assets ^liab

net worth report starting last February. the use of a display

predicate (-d) is needed, otherwise the balance will start at

zero, and thus the y-axis will not reflect the true balance

report -J -l "Ua>={\$0.01}" -d "d>=[last feb]" reg ^assets ^liab

The last report uses both a calculation predicate --limit EXPR (-l) and a display predicate --display EXPR (-d). The calculation predicate limits the report to postings whose amount is greater than or equal to $0.01 (which can only happen if the posting amount is in dollars). The display predicate limits the transactions displayed to just those since last February, even though those transactions from before will be computed as part of the balance.

The register command displays all the postings occurring in a single account, line by line. The account regex must be specified as the only argument to this command. If any regexes occur after the required account name, the register will contain only those postings that match, which makes it very useful for hunting down a particular posting.

The output from register is very close to what a typical checkbook, or single-account ledger, would look like. It also shows a running balance. The final running balance of any register should always be the same as the current balance of that account.

If you have “Gnuplot” installed, you may plot the amount or running total of any register by using the script report, which is included in the Ledger distribution. The only requirement is that you add either --amount-data (-j) or --total-data (-J) to your register command, in order to plot either the amount or total column, respectively.

The csv command
The convert command

The convert command parses a comma separated value (csv) file and prints Ledger transactions. Many banks offer csv file downloads. Unfortunately, the file formats, aside from the commas, are all different. The ledger convert command tries to help as much as it can.

Your bank’s csv files will have fields in different orders from other banks, so there must be a way to tell Ledger what to expect. Insert a line at the beginning of the csv file that describes the fields to Ledger.

For example, this is a portion of a csv file downloaded from a credit union in the United States:

Account Name: VALUFIRST CHECKING Account Number: 71 Date Range: 11/13/2011 - 12/13/2011

Transaction Number,Date,Description,Memo,Amount Debit,Amount Credit,Balance,Check Number,Fees 767406,12/13/2011,"Deposit","CASH DEPOSIT",,45.00,00001646.89,, 767718,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD",8.80,,00001640.04,, 767406,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD",1.03,,00001648.84,, 683342,12/13/2011,"Visa Checking","NetFlix Date 12/12/11 000326585896 5968",21.85,,00001649.87,, 639668,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ID: 1741472662 CO: XXAA.COM PAYMNT",236.65,,00001671.72,, 1113648,12/12/2011,"Withdrawal","Tuscan IT #00037657",29.73,,00001908.37,,

Unfortunately, as it stands Ledger cannot read it, but you can. Ledger expects the first line to contain a description of the fields on each line of the file. The fields ledger can recognize contain these case-insensitive strings date, posted, code, payee or desc or description, amount or credit, debit, cost, total, and note.

Delete the account description lines at the top, and replace the first line in the data above with:

,date,payee,note,debit,credit,,code,

Then execute ledger like this:

$ ledger convert download.csv --input-date-format "%m/%d/%Y"

Where the --input-date-format DATE_FORMAT option tells ledger how to interpret the dates.

Importing csv files is a lot of work, but is very amenable to scripting.

If your csv has only one amount column with opposite signs for credits and debits, this is also supported. For example, the first fiew lines of the above account could also be in the following format:

,date,payee,note,credit,,code, 767406,12/13/2011,"Deposit","CASH DEPOSIT",45.00,00001646.89,, 767718,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD",-8.80,00001640.04,,

If there are columns in the bank data you would like to keep in your ledger data, besides the primary fields described above, you can name them in the field descriptor list and Ledger will include them in the transaction as meta data if it doesn’t recognize the field name. For example, if you want to capture the bank transaction number and it occurs in the first column of the data use:

transid,date,payee,note,debit,credit,,code,

Ledger will include ‘; transid: 767718’ in the first transaction from the file above.

The convert command accepts four options. They are --invert which inverts the amount, --auto-match which automatically matches an account from the Ledger journal for every CSV line, --account STR which you can use to specify the account to balance against, and --rich-data which stores additional tag/value pairs.

Using the two first lines of the above csv file,

,date,payee,note,debit,credit,balance,code, 767406,12/13/2011,"Deposit","CASH DEPOSIT",,45.00,00001646.89,, 767718,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD",8.80,,00001640.04,,

and launching the below command,

$ ledger convert download.csv --input-date-format "%m/%d/%Y" \ --invert --account Assets:MyBank --rich-data \ --file sample.dat --now=2012/01/13

you will get the result:

2011/12/13 * Deposit ;CASH DEPOSIT ; balance: 00001646.89 ; CSV: 767406,12/13/2011,"Deposit","CASH DEPOSIT",,45.00,00001646.89,, ; Imported: 2012/01/13 ; UUID: ce0b7d42b02ce5eaf0d828c3b1028041fd09494c Expenses:Unknown -45 Assets:MyBank

2011/12/13 * Withdrawal ;ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD ; balance: 00001640.04 ; CSV: 767718,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD",8.80,,00001640.04,, ; Imported: 2012/01/13 ; UUID: 0aaf85911adc447ea2d5377ff6a60d6b2940047f Expenses:Unknown 8.8 Assets:MyBank

The three added metadata are: ‘CSV’ as the original line from csv file, ‘Imported’ as the date when the csv file was imported into Ledger, and ‘UUID’ as a checksum of original csv line.

If an entry with the same ‘UUID’ tag is already included in the normal ledger file (specified via --file FILE (-f) or via the environment variable LEDGER_FILE) this entry will not be printed again.

In the output above, the account is ‘Expenses:Unknown’ for CSV lines. You can use the --auto-match option to automatically match an account from your Ledger journal.

You can also use convert with payee and account directives. First, you can use the payee and alias directive to rewrite the payee field based on some rules. Then you can use the account and its payee directive to specify the account. I use it like this, for example:

payee Aldi alias ^ALDI SUED SAGT DANKE account Aufwand:Einkauf:Lebensmittel payee ^(Aldi|Alnatura|Kaufland|REWE)$

Note that it may be necessary for the output of ‘ledger convert’ to be passed through ledger print a second time if you want to match on the new payee field. During the ledger convert run, only the original payee name as specified in the csv data seems to be used.

Org mode has a sub-system known as Babel which allows for literate programming. This allows you to mix text and code within the same document and automatically execute code which may generate results which will then appear in the text.

One of the languages supported by Babel is Ledger, so that you can have ledger commands embedded in a text file and have the output of ledger commands also appear in the text file. The output can be updated whenever any new ledger entries are added.

For instance, the following Org mode text document snippet illustrates a very naive but still useful application of the Babel system:

* A simple test of ledger in an org file The following are some entries and I have requested that ledger be run to generate a balance on the accounts. I could have asked for a register or, in fact, anything at all the ledger can do through command-line options.

#+begin_src ledger :cmdline bal :results value 2010/01/01 * Starting balance assets:bank:savings £1300.00 income:starting balances 2010/07/22 * Got paid assets:bank:chequing £1000.00 income:salary 2010/07/23 Rent expenses:rent £500.00 assets:bank:chequing #+end_src

#+results: : £1800.00 assets:bank : £500.00 chequing : £1300.00 savings : £500.00 expenses:rent : £-2300.00 income : £-1000.00 salary : £-1300.00 starting balances

Typing C-c C-c anywhere in the “ledger source code block” will invoke ledger on the contents of that block and generate a “results” block. The results block can appear anywhere in the file but, by default, will appear immediately below the source code block.

You can combine multiple source code blocks before executing ledger and do all kinds of other wonderful things with Babel (and Org mode).

By default, Ledger uses a human-readable data format, and displays its reports in a manner meant to be read on screen. For the purpose of writing tools which use Ledger, however, it is possible to read and display data using XML. This section documents that format.

The general format used for Ledger data is:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <ledger> <xact>...</xact> <xact>...</xact> <xact>...</xact>... </ledger>

The data stream is enclosed in a ledger tag, which contains a series of one or more transactions. Each xact describes one transaction and contains a series of one or more postings:

<xact> <en:date>2004/03/01</en:date> <en:cleared/> <en:code>100</en:code> <en:payee>John Wiegley</en:payee> <en:postings> <posting>...</posting> <posting>...</posting> <posting>...</posting>... </en:postings> </xact>

The date format for en:date is always YYYY/MM/DD. The en:cleared tag is optional, and indicates whether the posting has been cleared or not. There is also an en:pending tag, for marking pending postings. The en:code and en:payee tags both contain whatever text the user wishes.

After the initial transaction data, there must follow a set of postings marked with en:postings. Typically these postings will all balance each other, but if not they will be automatically balanced into an account named ‘Unknown’.

Within the en:postings tag is a series of one or more posting’s, which have the following form:

<posting> <tr:account>Expenses:Computer:Hardware</tr:account> <tr:amount> <value type="amount"> <amount> <commodity flags="PT">$</commodity> <quantity>90.00</quantity> </amount> </value> </tr:amount> </posting>

This is a basic posting. It may also begin with tr:virtual and/or tr:generated tags, to indicate virtual and auto-generated postings. Then follows the tr:account tag, which contains the full name of the account the posting is related to. Colons separate parent from child in an account name.

Lastly follows the amount of the posting, indicated by tr:amount. Within this tag is a value tag, of which there are four different kinds, each with its own format:

Boolean,
integer,
amount,
balance.

The format of a Boolean value is true or false surrounded by a boolean tag, for example:

The format of an integer value is the numerical value surrounded by an integer tag, for example:

The format of an amount contains two members, the commodity and the quantity. The commodity can have a set of flags that indicate how to display it. The meaning of the flags (all of which are optional) are:

P

The commodity is prefixed to the value.

S

The commodity is separated from the value by a space.

T

Thousands markers are used to display the amount.

E

The format of the amount is European, with period used as a thousands marker, and comma used as the decimal point.

The actual quantity for an amount is an integer of arbitrary size. Ledger uses the GNU multiple precision arithmetic library to handle such values. The XML format assumes the reader to be equally capable. Here is an example amount:

Lastly, a balance value contains a series of amounts, each with a different commodity. Unlike the name, such a value does need to balance. It is called a balance because it sums several amounts. For example:

That is the extent of the XML data format used by Ledger. It will output such data if the xml command is used, and can read the same data.

This chapter describes Ledger’s features and options. You may wish to survey this to get an overview before diving into the Ledger Tutorial and more detailed examples that follow.

Ledger has a very simple command-line interface, named—enticingly enough—ledger. It supports a few reporting commands, and a large number of options for refining the output from those commands. The basic syntax of any ledger command is:

$ ledger [OPTIONS...] COMMAND [ARGS...]

After the command word there may appear any number of arguments. For most commands, these arguments are regular expressions that cause the output to relate only to postings matching those regular expressions. For the xact command, the arguments have a special meaning, described below.

The regular expressions arguments always match the account name that a posting refers to. To match on the payee of the transaction instead, precede the regular expression with ‘payee’ or ‘@’. For example, the following balance command reports account totals for rent, food and movies, but only those whose payee matches Freddie:

$ ledger bal rent food movies payee freddie

$ ledger bal rent food movies @freddie

There are many, many command options available with the ledger program, and it takes a while to master them. However, none of them are required to use the basic reporting commands.

These options affect how commodity values are displayed:

--price-db FILE ¶

Set the file that is used for recording downloaded commodity prices. It is always read on startup, to determine historical prices. Other settings can be placed in this file manually, to prevent downloading quotes for a specific commodity, for example. This is done by adding a line like the following:

; Don't download quotes for the dollar, or timelog values N $ N h

Note: Ledger NEVER writes output to files. You are responsible for updating the price-db file. The best way is to have your price download script maintain this file.

The format of the file can be changed by telling ledger to use the --pricedb-format FORMAT_STRING you define.

--price-exp INT ¶

--leeway INT ¶

-Z INT ¶

Set the expected freshness of price quotes, in INT minutes. That is, if the last known quote for any commodity is older than this value, and if --download is being used, then the Internet will be consulted again for a newer price. Otherwise, the old price is still considered to be fresh enough.

--download ¶

-Q ¶

Cause quotes to be automagically downloaded, as needed, by running a script named getquote and expecting that script to return a value understood by ledger. A sample implementation of a getquote script, implemented in Perl, is provided in the distribution. Downloaded quote price are then appended to the price database, usually specified using the environment variable LEDGER_PRICE_DB.

There are several different ways that ledger can report the totals it displays. The most flexible way to adjust them is by using value expressions, and the --amount EXPR (-t) and --total VEXPR (-T) options. However, there are also several “default” reports, which will satisfy most users’ basic reporting needs:

--quantity ¶

-O ¶

Report commodity totals (this is the default).

--basis ¶

-B ¶

Report the cost basis for all postings.

--market ¶

-V ¶

Use the last known value for commodities to calculate final values.

--gain ¶

-G ¶

Report the net gain/loss for all commodities in the report that have a price history.

Often you will be more interested in the value of your entire holdings, in your preferred currency. It might be nice to know you hold 10,000 shares of PENNY, but you are more interested in whether or not that is worth $1000.00 or $10,000.00. However, the current day value of a commodity can mean different things to different people, depending on the accounts involved, the commodities, the nature of the transactions, etc.

When you specify --market (-V), or --exchange COMMODITY (-X), you are requesting that some or all of the commodities be valuated as of today (or whatever --now DATE is set to). But what does such a valuation mean? This meaning is governed by the presence of a VALUE meta-data property, whose content is an expression used to compute that value.

If no VALUE property is specified, each posting is assumed to have a default, as if you’d specified a global, automated transaction as follows:

= expr true ; VALUE:: market(amount, date, exchange)

This definition emulates the present day behavior of --market (-V) and --exchange COMMODITY (-X) (in the case of ‘-X’, the requested commodity is passed via the string ‘exchange’ above).

One thing many people have wanted to do is to fixate the valuation of old European currencies in terms of the Euro after a certain date:

= expr commodity == "DM" ; VALUE:: date < [Jun 2008] ? market(amount, date, exchange) : 1.44 EUR

This says: If --now DATE is some old date, use market prices as they were at that time; but if --now DATE is past June 2008, use a fixed price for converting Deutsche Mark to Euro.

Or how about never re-valuating commodities used in Expenses, since they cannot have a different future value:

= /^Expenses:/ ; VALUE:: market(amount, post.date, exchange)

This says the future valuation is the same as the valuation at the time of posting. post.date equals the posting’s date, while just ’date’ is the value of --now DATE (defaults to today).

Or how about valuating miles based on a reimbursement rate during a specific time period:

= expr commodity == "miles" and date >= [2007] and date < [2008] ; VALUE:: market($1.05, date, exchange)

In this case, miles driven in 2007 will always be valuated at $1.05 each. If you use ‘-X EUR’ to expressly request all amounts in Euro, Ledger shall convert $1.05 to Euro by whatever means are appropriate for dollars.

Note that you can have a valuation expression specific to a particular posting or transaction, by overriding these general defaults using specific meta-data:

2010-12-26 Example Expenses:Food $20 ; Just to be silly, always valuate *these* $20 as 30 DM, no matter what ; the user asks for with -V or -X ; VALUE:: 30 DM Assets:Cash

This example demonstrates that your value expression should be as symbolic as possible, using terms like ’amount’ and ’date’, rather than specific amounts and dates. Also, you should pass the amount along to the function ’market’ so it can be further revalued if the user has asked for a specific currency.

Or, if it better suits your accounting, you can be less symbolic, which allows you to report most everything in EUR if you use ‘-X EUR’, except for certain accounts or postings which should always be valuated in another currency. For example:

= /^Assets:Brokerage:CAD$/ ; Always report the value of commodities in this account in ; terms of present day dollars, despite what was asked for ; on the command-line VALUE:: market(amount, date, ‘$’)

Ledger presently has no way of handling such things as FIFO and LIFO.

If you specify an unadorned commodity name, like AAPL, it will balance against itself. If --lots are not being displayed, then it will appear to balance against any lot of AAPL.

If you specify an adorned commodity, like AAPL {$10.00}, it will also balance against itself, and against any AAPL if --lots is not specified. But if you do specify --lot-prices, for example, then it will balance against that specific price for AAPL.

Normally when you use --exchange COMMODITY (-X) to request that amounts be reported in a specific commodity, Ledger uses these values:

Register Report For the register report, use the value of that commodity on the date of the posting being reported, with a ‘<Revalued>’ posting added at the end if today’s value is different from the value of the last posting.
Balance Report For the balance report, use the value of that commodity as of today.

You can now specify --historical (-H) to ask that all valuations for any amount be done relative to the date that amount was encountered.

You can also now use --exchange COMMODITY (-X) (and --historical (-H)) in conjunction with --basis (-B) and --price (-I), to see valuation reports of just your basis costs or lot prices.

Finally, sometimes, you may seek to only report one (or some subset) of the commodities in terms of another commodity. In this situation, you can use the syntax --exchange COMMODITY1:COMMODITY2 to request that ledger always display COMMODITY1 in terms of COMMODITY2, but you want no other commodities to be automatically displayed in terms of COMMODITY2 without additional --exchange options. For example, if you wanted to report EUR and BTC in terms of USD, but report all other commodities without conversion to USD, you could use: --exchange EUR:USD --exchange BTC:USD.

A period expression indicates a span of time, or a reporting interval, or both. Ledger’s end dates are always exclusive, imagine the date is followed by 00:00:00 time. They are instants in time not entire days. The full syntax is:

The optional INTERVAL part may be any one of:

every day every week every month every quarter every year every N days # N is any integer every N weeks every N months every N quarters every N years daily weekly biweekly monthly bimonthly quarterly yearly

After the interval, a begin time, end time, both or neither may be specified. As for the begin time, it can be either of:

The end time can be either of:

Where SPEC can be any of:

2004 2004/10 2004/10/1 10/1 october oct this week # or day, month, quarter, year next week last week

The beginning and ending can be given at the same time, if it spans a single period. In that case, just use SPEC by itself. In that case, the period ‘oct’, for example, will cover all the days in October. The possible forms are:

Intervals begin at the start of the week, first day of the month, quarter or year. This can be overridden by specifying --align-intervals which will instead use the begin time if specified.

Here are a few examples of period expressions:

monthly monthly in 2004 weekly from oct weekly from last month from sep to oct from 10/1 to 10/5 monthly until 2005 monthly from 2005/04/06 from apr until nov last oct weekly last august

Keeping a budget allows you to pay closer attention to your income and expenses, by reporting how far your actual financial activity is from your expectations.

To start keeping a budget, put some periodic transactions (see Periodic Transactions) at the top of your ledger file. A periodic transaction is almost identical to a regular transaction, except that it begins with a tilde and has a period expression in place of a payee. For example:

~ Monthly Expenses:Rent $500.00 Expenses:Food $450.00 Expenses:Auto:Gas $120.00 Expenses:Insurance $150.00 Expenses:Phone $125.00 Expenses:Utilities $100.00 Expenses:Movies $50.00 Expenses $200.00 ; all other expenses Assets

~ Yearly Expenses:Auto:Repair $500.00 Assets

These two periodic transactions give the usual monthly expenses, as well as one typical yearly expense. For help on finding out what your average monthly expenses are for any category, use a command like:

$ ledger -p "this year" --monthly --average register ^expenses

The reported totals are the current year’s average for each account.

Once these periodic transactions are defined, creating a budget report is as easy as adding --budget to the command-line. For example, a typical monthly expense report would be:

$ ledger --monthly register ^expenses

To see the same report balanced against your budget, use:

$ ledger --budget --monthly register ^expenses

A budget report includes only those accounts that appear in the budget. To see all expenses balanced against the budget, use --add-budget. You can even see only the unbudgeted expenses using --unbudgeted:

$ ledger --unbudgeted --monthly register ^expenses

You can also use these flags with the balance command.

Sometimes it’s useful to know what your finances will look like in the future, such as determining when an account will reach zero. Ledger makes this easy to do, using the same periodic transactions as are used for budgeting. An example forecast report can be generated with:

$ ledger --file drewr3.dat --forecast "T>{\$-500.00}" register ^assets ^liabilities

This report continues outputting postings until the running total is greater than $-500.00. A final posting is always shown, to inform you what the total afterwards would be.

Forecasting can also be used with the balance report, but by date only, and not against the running total:

$ ledger --forecast "d<[2010]" bal ^assets ^liabilities

Ledger directly supports “timelog” entries, which have this form:

i 2013/03/28 22:13:00 ACCOUNT[ PAYEE] o 2013/03/29 03:39:00

This records a check-in to the given ACCOUNT, and a check-out. You can be checked-in to multiple accounts at a time, if you wish, and they can span multiple days (use --day-break to break them up in the report). The number of seconds between check-in and check-out is accumulated as time to that ACCOUNT. If the checkout uses a capital ‘O’, the transaction is marked “cleared”. You can use an optional PAYEE for whatever meaning you like.

Now, there are a few ways to generate this information. You can use the timeclock.el package, which is part of Emacs. Or you can write a simple script in whichever language you prefer to emit similar information. Or you can use Org mode’s time-clocking abilities and the org2tc script developed by John Wiegley.

These timelog entries can appear in a separate file, or directly in your main ledger file. The initial ‘i’ and ‘o’ characters count as Ledger “directives”, and are accepted anywhere that ordinary transactions are valid.

Ledger uses value expressions to make calculations for many different purposes:

The values displayed in reports.
For predicates (where truth is anything non-zero), to determine which postings are calculated (option --limit EXPR (-l)) or displayed (option --display EXPR (-d)).
For sorting criteria, to yield the sort key.
In the matching criteria used by automated postings.

Value expressions support most simple math and logic operators, in addition to a set of functions and variables.

Display predicates are also very handy with register reports, to constrain which transactions are printed. For example, the following command shows only transactions from the beginning of the current month, while still calculating the running balance based on all transactions:

$ ledger -d "d>[this month]" register checking

The advantage of this command’s complexity is that it prints the running total in terms of all transactions in the register. The following, simpler command is similar, but totals only the displayed postings:

$ ledger -b "this month" register checking

Variables
Functions
Operators
Complex expressions

Below are the one letter variables available in any value expression. For the register and print commands, these variables relate to individual postings, and sometimes the account affected by a posting. For the balance command, these variables relate to accounts, often with a subtle difference in meaning. The use of each variable for both is specified.

t

This maps to whatever the user specified with --amount EXPR (-t). In a register report, --amount EXPR (-t) changes the value column; in a balance report, it has no meaning by default. If --amount EXPR (-t) was not specified, the current report style’s value expression is used.

T

This maps to whatever the user specified with --total VEXPR (-T). In a register report, --total VEXPR (-T) changes the totals column; in a balance report, this is the value given for each account. If --total VEXPR (-T) was not specified, the current report style’s value expression is used.

m

This is always the present moment/date.

Posting/account details
Calculated totals

d

date

A posting’s date, as the number of seconds past the epoch. This is always “today” for an account.

aux_date

A posting’s aux date

a

amount

The posting’s amount; the balance of an account, without considering children.

b

The cost of a posting; the cost of an account, without its children.

v

The market value of a posting or an account, without its children.

g

The net gain (market value minus cost basis), for a posting or an account, without its children. It is the same as ‘v-b’.

depth

The depth (“level”) of an account. If an account has one parent, its depth is one.

n

The index of a posting, or the count of postings affecting an account.

X

cleared

‘1’ if a posting’s transaction has been cleared, ‘0’ otherwise.

uncleared

‘1’ if a posting’s transaction state is uncleared, ‘0’ otherwise.

pending

‘1’ if a posting’s transaction state is pending, ‘0’ otherwise.

R

‘1’ if a posting is not virtual, ‘0’ otherwise.

Z

‘1’ if a posting is not automated, ‘0’ otherwise.

The available one letter functions are:

-

Negates the argument.

U

The absolute (unsigned) value of the argument.

S

Strips the commodity from the argument.

P

The present market value of the argument. The syntax ‘P(x,d)’ is supported, which yields the market value at time ‘d’. If no date is given, then the current moment is used.

Format strings may be used to change the output format of reports. They are specified by passing a formatting string to the --format FORMAT_STRING (-F) option. Within that string, constructs are allowed which make it possible to display the various parts of an account or posting in custom ways.

There are several additional flags that allow you to define formats for specific reports. These are useful to define in your configuration file and will allow you to run ledger reports from the command-line without having to enter a new format for each command.

--balance-format FORMAT_STRING
--budget-format FORMAT_STRING
--cleared-format FORMAT_STRING
--csv-format FORMAT_STRING
--plot-amount-format FORMAT_STRING
--plot-total-format FORMAT_STRING
--pricedb-format FORMAT_STRING
--prices-format FORMAT_STRING
--register-format FORMAT_STRING

Within a format string, a substitution is specified using a percent ‘%’ character. The basic format of all substitutions is:

%[-][MIN WIDTH][.MAX WIDTH](VALEXPR)

If the optional minus sign ‘-’ follows the percent character ‘%’, whatever is substituted will be left justified. The default is right justified. If a minimum width is given next, the substituted text will be at least that wide, perhaps wider. If a period and a maximum width is given, the substituted text will never be wider than this, and will be truncated to fit. Here are some examples:

%-20P

A transaction’s payee, left justified and padded to 20 characters wide.

%20P

The same, right justified, at least 20 chars wide.

%.20P

The same, no more than 20 chars wide.

The expression following the format constraints can be a single letter, or an expression enclosed in parentheses or brackets.

For demonstration purposes the journal data from expr.dat is used. The allowable expressions are:

%

Inserts a percent sign.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%%\n" reg assets

t

Inserts the results of the value expression specified by --amount EXPR (-t). If --amount EXPR (-t) was not specified, the current report style’s value expression is used.

T

Inserts the results of the value expression specified by --total VEXPR (-T). If --total VEXPR (-T) was not specified, the current report style’s value expression is used.

(EXPR)

Inserts the amount resulting from the value expression given in parentheses. To insert five times the total value of an account, for example, one could say ‘%12(5*O)’. Note: It’s important to put the five first in that expression, so that the commodity doesn’t get stripped from the total.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%12(5*O)\n" reg assets

[DATEFMT]

Inserts the result of formatting a posting’s date with a date format string, exactly like those supported by strftime (3). For example: ‘%[%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S]’.

S

Insert the path name of the file from which the transaction’s data was read. Only sensible in a register report.

$ ledger -f ~/journal.dat --format "%S\n" reg assets

/home/jwiegley/journal.dat

B

Inserts the beginning character position of that transaction within the file.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%B\n" reg assets

b

Inserts the beginning line of that transaction within the file.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%b\n" reg assets

E

Inserts the ending character position of that transaction within the file.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%E\n" reg assets

e

Inserts the ending line of that transaction within the file.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%e\n" reg assets

D

Returns the date according to the default format.

d

Returns the date according to the default format. If the transaction has an effective date, it prints ACTUAL_DATE=EFFECTIVE_DATE.

X

If a posting has been cleared, this returns a 1, otherwise returns 0.

Y

This is the same as ‘%X’, except that it only displays a state character if all of the member postings have the same state.

C

Inserts the transaction code. This is the value specified between parentheses on the first line of the transaction.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%C\n" reg assets

P

Inserts the payee related to a posting.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%P\n" reg assets

A

Inserts the full name of an account.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%A\n" reg

Assets:Cash Expenses:Office Supplies

N

Inserts the note associated with a posting, if one exists.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%N\n" reg assets

/

The ‘%/’ construct is special. It separates a format string between what is printed for the first posting of a transaction, and what is printed for all subsequent postings. If not used, the same format string is used for all postings.

$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%P\n%/%A\n" reg

PiggyBank Expenses:Office Supplies

As an example of how flexible the --format FORMAT_STRING strings can be, the default balance format looks like this (the various functions are described later):

"%(justify(scrub(display_total), 20, -1, true, color))" " %(!options.flat ? depth_spacer : \"\")" "%-(ansify_if(partial_account(options.flat), blue if color))\n%/" "%$1\n%/" "--------------------\n"

Python can be used to extend your Ledger experience. But first, a word must be said about Ledger’s data model, so that other things make sense later.

Basic data traversal
Raw versus Cooked
Queries
Embedded Python
Amounts

Every interaction with Ledger happens in the context of a Session. Even if you don’t create a session manually, one is created for you by the top-level interface functions. The Session is where objects live like the Commodities that Amounts refer to.

To make a Session useful, you must read a Journal into it, using the function ‘read_journal‘. This reads Ledger data from the given file, populates a Journal object within the current Session, and returns a reference to that Journal object.

Within the Journal live all the Transactions, Postings, and other objects related to your data. There are also AutomatedTransactions and PeriodicTransactions, etc.

Here is how you would traverse all the postings in your data file:

import ledger

for xact in ledger.read_journal("sample.dat").xacts(): for post in xact.posts(): print "Transferring %s to/from %s" % (post.amount, post.account)

Ledger data exists in one of two forms: raw and cooked. Raw objects are what you get from a traversal like the above, and represent exactly what was seen in the data file. Consider this journal:

= true (Assets:Cash) $100

2012-03-01 KFC Expenses:Food $100 Assets:Credit

In this case, the raw regular transaction in this file is:

2012-03-01 KFC Expenses:Food $100 Assets:Credit

While the cooked form is:

2012-03-01 KFC Expenses:Food $100 Assets:Credit $-100 (Assets:Cash) $100

So the easy way to think about raw vs. cooked is that raw is the unprocessed data, and cooked has had all considerations applied.

When you traverse a Journal by iterating over its transactions, you are generally looking at raw data. In order to look at cooked data, you must generate a report of some kind by querying the journal:

for post in ledger.read_journal("sample.dat").query("food"): print "Transferring %s to/from %s" % (post.amount, post.account)

The reason why queries iterate over postings instead of transactions is that queries often return only a “slice” of the transactions they apply to. You can always get at a matching posting’s transaction by looking at its xact member:

last_xact = None for post in ledger.read_journal("sample.dat").query(""): if post.xact != last_xact: for post in post.xact.posts(): print "Transferring %s to/from %s" % (post.amount, post.account) last_xact = post.xact

This query ends up reporting every cooked posting in the Journal, but does it transaction-wise. It relies on the fact that an unsorted report returns postings in the exact order they were parsed from the journal file.

The Journal.query() method accepts every argument you can specify on the command-line, including --options.

Since a query “cooks” the journal it applies to, only one query may be active for that journal at a given time. Once the query object is gone (after the for loop), then the data reverts back to its raw state.

You can embed Python into your data files using the ’python’ directive:

python import os def check_path(path_value): print "%s => %s" % (str(path_value), os.path.isfile(str(path_value))) return os.path.isfile(str(path_value))

tag PATH assert check_path(value)

2012-02-29 KFC ; PATH: somebogusfile.dat Expenses:Food $20 Assets:Cash

Any Python functions you define this way become immediately available as valexpr functions.

When numbers come from Ledger, like post.amount, the type of the value is Amount. It can be used just like an ordinary number, except that addition and subtraction are restricted to amounts with the same commodity. If you need to create sums of multiple commodities, use a Balance. For example:

total = Balance() for post in ledger.read_journal("sample.dat").query(""): total += post.amount print total

Ledger is developed as a tiered set of functionality, where lower tiers know nothing about the higher tiers. In fact, multiple libraries are built during the development the process, and link unit tests to these libraries, so that it is a link error for a lower tier to violate this modularity.

Those tiers are:

Utility code

There’s lots of general utility in Ledger for doing time parsing, using Boost.Regex, error handling, etc. It’s all done in a way that can be reused in other projects as needed.

Commoditized Amounts (amount_t, commodity_t and friends)

A numerical abstraction combining multi-precision rational numbers (via GMP) with commodities. These structures can be manipulated like regular numbers in either C++ or Python (as Amount objects).

Commodity Pool

Commodities are all owned by a commodity pool, so that future parsing of amounts can link to the same commodity and established a consistent price history and record of formatting details.

Balances

Adds the concept of multiple amounts with varying commodities. Supports simple arithmetic, and multiplication and division with non-commoditized values.

Price history

Amounts have prices, and these are kept in a data graph which the amount code itself is only dimly aware of (there’s three points of access so an amount can query its revalued price on a given date).

Values

Often the higher layers in Ledger don’t care if something is an amount or a balance, they just want to add stuff to it or print it. For this, I created a type-erasure class, value\_t/Value, into which many things can be stuffed and then operated on. They can contain amounts, balances, dates, strings, etc. If you try to apply an operation between two values that makes no sense (like dividing an amount by a balance), an error occurs at runtime, rather than at compile-time (as would happen if you actually tried to divide an `amount_t` by a `balance_t`).

This is the core data type for the value expression language.

Value expressions

The next layer up adds functions and operators around the Value concept. This lets you apply transformations and tests to Values at runtime without having to bake it into C++. The set of functions available is defined by each object type in Ledger (posts, accounts, transactions, etc.), though the core engine knows nothing about these. At its base, it only knows how to apply operators to values, and how to pass them to and receive them from functions.

Query expressions

Expressions can be onerous to type at the command-line, so there’s a shorthand for reporting called “query expressions”. These add no functionality of their own, but are purely translated from the input string down to the corresponding value expression, for example the input string ‘cash’ is translated to ‘(account =~ /cash/)’. This is a convenience layer.

Format strings

Format strings let you interpolate value expressions into strings, with the requirement that any interpolated value have a string representation. Really all this does is calculate the value expression in the current report context, call the resulting value’s `to_string()` method, and stuffs the result into the output string. It also provides printf-like behavior, such as min/max width, right/left justification, etc.

Journal items

Next is a base type shared by anything that can appear in a journal: an item\_t. It contains details common to all such parsed entities, like what file and line it was found on, etc.

Journal posts

The most numerous object found in a Journal, postings are a type of item that contain an account, an amount, a cost, and metadata. There are some other complications, like the account can be marked virtual, the amount could be an expression, etc.

Journal transactions

Postings are owned by transactions, always. This subclass of `item_t` knows about the date, the payee, etc. If a date or metadata tag is requested from a posting and it doesn’t have that information, the transaction is queried to see if it can provide it.

Journal accounts

Postings are also shared by accounts, though the actual memory is managed by the transaction. Each account knows all the postings within it, but contains relatively little information of its own.

The Journal object

Finally, all transactions with their postings, and all accounts, are owned by a `journal_t` object. This is the go-to object for querying and reporting on your data.

Textual journal parser

There is a textual parser, wholly contained in textual.cc, which knows how to parse text into journal objects, which then get “finalized” and added to the journal. Finalization is the step that enforces the double-entry guarantee.

Iterators

Every journal object is “iterable”, and these iterators are defined in iterators.h and iterators.cc. This iteration logic is kept out of the basic journal objects themselves for the sake of modularity.

Comparators

Another abstraction isolated to its own layer, this class encapsulating the comparison of journal objects, based on whatever value expression the user passed to \--sort VEXPR.

Temporaries

Many reports bring pseudo-journal objects into existence, like postings which report totals in a ‘Total’ account. These objects are created and managed by a `temporaries_t` object, which gets used in many places by the reporting filters.

Option handling

There is an option handling subsystem used by many of the layers further down. It makes it relatively easy for me to add new options, and to have those option settings immediately accessible to value expressions.

Session objects

Every journal object is owned by a session, with the session providing support for that object. In GUI terms, this is the Controller object for the journal Data object, where every document window would be a separate session. They are all owned by the global scope.

Report objects

Every time you create any report output, a report object is created to determine what you want to see. In the Ledger REPL, a new report object is created every time a command is executed. In CLI mode, only one report object ever comes into being, as Ledger immediately exits after displaying the results.

Reporting filters

The way Ledger generates data is this: it asks the session for the current journal, and then creates an iterator applied to that journal. The kind of iterator depends on the type of report.

This iterator is then walked, and every object yielded from the iterator is passed to an “item handler”, whose type is directly related to the type of the iterator.

There are many, many item handlers, which can be chained together. Each one receives an item (post, account, xact, etc.), performs some action on it, and then passes it down to the next handler in the chain. There are filters which compute the running totals; that queue and sort all the input items before playing them back out in a new order; that filter out items which fail to match a predicate, etc. Almost every reporting feature in Ledger is related to one or more filters. Looking at filters.h, there are over 25 of them defined currently.

The filter chain

How filters get wired up, and in what order, is a complex process based on all the various options specified by the user. This is the job of the chain logic, found entirely in chain.cc. It took a really long time to get this logic exactly right, which is why I haven’t exposed this layer to the Python bridge yet.

Output modules

Although filters are great and all, in the end you want to see stuff. This is the job of special “leaf” filters called output modules. They are implemented just like a regular filter, but they don’t have a “next” filter to pass the data on down to. Instead, they are the end of the line and must do something with the item that results in the user seeing something on their screen or in a file.

Select queries

Select queries know a lot about everything, even though they implement their logic by implementing the user’s query in terms of all the other features thus presented. Select queries have no functionality of their own, they are simple a shorthand to provide access to much of Ledger’s functionality via a cleaner, more consistent syntax.

The Global Scope

There is a master object which owns every other objects, and this is Ledger’s global scope. It creates the other objects, provides REPL behavior for the command-line utility, etc. In GUI terms, this is the Application object.

The Main Driver

This creates the global scope object, performs error reporting, and handles command-line options which must precede even the creation of the global scope, such as \--debug CODE.

And that’s Ledger in a nutshell. All the rest are details, such as which value expressions each journal item exposes, how many filters currently exist, which options the report and session scopes define, etc.

This chapter offers a complete description of the journal data format, suitable for implementers in other languages to follow. For users, the chapter on keeping a journal is less extensive, but more typical of common usage (see Keeping a Journal).

Data is collected in the form of transactions which occur in one or more journal files. Each transaction, in turn, is made up of one or more postings, which describe how amounts flow from one account to another. Here is an example of the simplest of journal files:

2010/05/31 Just an example Expenses:Some:Account $100.00 Income:Another:Account

In this example, there is a transaction date, a payee, or description of the transaction, and two postings. The postings show movement of one hundred dollars from an account within the Income hierarchy, to the specified expense account. The name and meaning of these accounts is arbitrary, with no preferences implied, although you will find it useful to follow standard accounting practices (see Principles of Accounting with Ledger).

Since an amount is missing from the second posting, it is assumed to be the inverse of the first. This guarantees the cardinal rule of double-entry accounting: the sum of every transaction must balance to zero, or it is in error. Whenever Ledger encounters a null posting in a transaction, it uses it to balance the remainder.

It is also typical, though not enforced, to think of the first posting as the destination, and the final as the source. Thus, the amount of the first posting is typically positive. Consider:

2010/05/31 An income transaction Assets:Checking $1,000.00 Income:Salary

2010/05/31 An expense transaction Expenses:Dining $100.00 Assets:Checking

Comments and meta-data
Specifying Amounts
Posting costs
Primary commodities

The heart of a journal is the amounts it records, and this fact is reflected in the diversity of amount expressions allowed. All of them are covered here, though it must be said that sometimes, there are multiple ways to achieve a desired result.

Note: It is important to note that there must be at least two spaces between the end of the account and the beginning of the amount (including a commodity designator).

Integer Amounts
Commoditized Amounts

In the simplest form, bare decimal numbers are accepted:

2010/05/31 An income transaction Assets:Checking 1000.00 Income:Salary

Such amounts may only use an optional period for a decimal point. These are referred to as integer amounts or uncommoditized amounts. In most ways they are similar to commoditized amounts, but for one significant difference: They always display in reports with full precision. More on this in a moment. For now, a word must be said about how Ledger stores numbers.

Every number parsed by Ledger is stored internally as an infinite-precision rational value. Floating-point math is never used, as it cannot be trusted to maintain precision of values. So, in the case of ‘1000.00’ above, the internal value is ‘100000/100’.

While rational numbers are great at not losing precision, the question arises: How should they be displayed? A number like ‘100000/100’ is no problem, since it represents a clean decimal fraction. But what about when the number ‘1/1’ is divided by three? How should one print ‘1/3’, an infinitely repeating decimal?

Ledger gets around this problem by rendering rationals into decimal at the last possible moment, and only for display. As such, some rounding must, at times, occur. If this rounding would affect the calculation of a running total, special accommodation postings are generated to make you aware it has happened. In practice, it happens rarely, but even then it does not reflect adjustment of the internal amount, only the displayed amount.

What has still not been answered is how Ledger rounds values. Should ‘1/3’ be printed as ‘0.33’ or ‘0.33333’? For commoditized amounts, the number of decimal places is decided by observing how each commodity is used; but in the case of integer amounts, an arbitrary factor must be chosen. Initially, this factor is six. Thus, ‘1/3’ is printed back as ‘0.333333’. Further, this rounding factor becomes associated with each particular value, and is carried through mathematical operations. For example, if that particular number were multiplied by itself, the decimal precision of the result would be twelve. Addition and subtraction do not affect precision.

Since each integer amount retains its own display precision, this is called full precision, as opposed to commoditized amounts, which always look to their commodity to know what precision they should round to, and so use commodity precision.

A commoditized amount is an integer amount which has an associated commodity. This commodity can appear before or after the amount, and may or may not be separated from it by a space. Most characters are allowed in a commodity name, except for the following:

Any kind of white-space
Numerical digits
Punctuation: .,;:?!
Mathematical and logical operators: -+*/^&|=
Bracketing characters: <>[](){}
The at symbol: @

And yet, any of these may appear in a commodity name if it is surrounded by double quotes, for example:

If a quoted commodity is found, it is displayed in quotes as well, to avoid any confusion as to which part is the amount, and which part is the commodity.

Another feature of commoditized amounts is that they are reported back in the same form as parsed. If you specify dollar amounts using ‘$100’, they will print the same; likewise with ‘100 $’ or ‘$100.000’. You may even use decimal commas, such as ‘$100,00’, or thousand-marks, as in ‘$10,000.00’.

These display characteristics become associated with the commodity, with the result being that all amounts of the same commodity are reported consistently. Where this is most noticeable is the display precision, which is determined by the most precise value seen for a given commodity—in most cases.

Ledger makes a distinction between observed amounts and unobserved amounts. An observed amount is critiqued by Ledger to determine how amounts using that commodity should be displayed; unobserved amounts are significant in their value only—no matter how they are specified, it does not change how other amounts in that commodity will be displayed.

An example of this is found in cost expressions, covered next.

You have seen how to specify either a commoditized or an integer amount for a posting. But what if the amount you paid for something was in one commodity, and the amount received was another? There are two main ways to express this:

2010/05/31 Farmer's Market Assets:My Larder 100 apples Assets:Checking -$20.00

In this example, you have paid twenty dollars for one hundred apples. The cost to you is twenty cents per apple, and Ledger calculates this implied cost for you. You can also make the cost explicit using a cost amount:

2010/05/31 Farmer's Market Assets:My Larder 100 apples @ $0.200000 Assets:Checking

Here the per-unit cost is given explicitly in the form of a cost amount; and since cost amounts are unobserved, the use of six decimal places has no effect on how dollar amounts are displayed in the final report. You can also specify the total cost:

2010/05/31 Farmer's Market Assets:My Larder 100 apples @@ $20 Assets:Checking

These three forms have identical meaning. In most cases the first is preferred, but the second two are necessary when more than two postings are involved:

2010/05/31 Farmer's Market Assets:My Larder 100 apples @ $0.200000 Assets:My Larder 100 pineapples @ $0.33 Assets:My Larder 100 "crab apples" @ $0.04 Assets:Checking

Here the implied cost is ‘$57.00’, which is entered into the null posting automatically so that the transaction balances.

In every transaction involving more than one commodity, there is always one which is the primary commodity. This commodity should be thought of as the exchange commodity, or the commodity used to buy and sell units of the other commodity. In the fruit examples above, dollars are the primary commodity. This is decided by Ledger based on the placement of the commodity in the transaction:

2010/05/31 Sample Transaction Expenses 100 secondary Assets -50 primary

2010/05/31 Sample Transaction Expenses 100 secondary @ 0.5 primary Assets

2010/05/31 Sample Transaction Expenses 100 secondary @@ 50 primary Assets

The only case where knowledge of primary versus secondary comes into play is in reports that use the --market (-V) or --basis (-B) options. With these, only primary commodities are shown.

If a transaction uses only one commodity, this commodity is also considered a primary. In fact, when Ledger goes about ensuring that all transactions balance to zero, it only ever asks this of primary commodities.

The following have been removed from Ledger 3.0:

OFX support.
GnuCash file import.
The option --performance (-g).
The balance report now defaults to showing all relevant accounts. This is the opposite of 2.x. That is, bal in 3.0 does what ‘-s bal’ did in 2.x. To see 2.6 behavior, use --collapse (-n) option in 3.0, like ‘bal -n’. The --subtotal (-s) option no longer has any effect on balance reports.

The following are deprecated in Ledger 3.0:

Single character value expressions are deprecated and should be changed to the new value expressions available in 3.0
The following environment variables have been renamed in Ledger 3.0:

`LEDGER`

is now `LEDGER_FILE`,

`LEDGER_INIT`

is now `LEDGER_INIT_FILE`,

`PRICE_HIST`

is now `LEDGER_PRICE_DB`,

`PRICE_EXP`

is now `LEDGER_PRICE_EXP`.

Overview

net worth report, ignoring non-$ postings

net worth report starting last February. the use of a display

predicate (-d) is needed, otherwise the balance will start at

zero, and thus the y-axis will not reflect the true balance