Ledger is an interactive CLI double-entry accounting application inspired by ledger-cli.org.
- Linux: ledger-1.0-linux-x64.tar.gz
- MacOS: ledger-1.0-osx-x64.tar.gz
- Windows: ledger-1.0-win-x64.zip
You use your editor of choice to enter transactions in a simple text file (called journal) and then run Ledger to view different reports.
A journal consists of a series of entries.
An entry begins with the keyword @entry and is followed by an index and a number of entry items. Each entry item has three parts: An account, an asset, and an amount.
@entry 2018-06-01 12:00
Assets:Bank EUR 5000
Equity:ProfitLoss:Income:Salary EUR -5000
@entry 2018-06-02 12:00
Equity:ProfitLoss:Expense:Food EUR 19.9
Equity:ProfitLoss:Expense:Tip EUR 2.98
Assets:Bank EUR -22.88
- You can use anything such as dates or sequential numbers as index.
- Just be sure to format (and pad) them correctly as they are compared as strings.
- Use colons (
:) to create a hierarchy for your accounts. - There are only two rules on how to structure your accounts:
- All accounts have to be under one of the three main accounts:
Assets,Liabilities, orEquity. - Income and expense accounts have to be under the
Equity:ProfitLoss:IncomeandEquity:ProfitLoss:Expenseaccounts, respectively.
- All accounts have to be under one of the three main accounts:
- An asset specifies a tangible entity (usually money) that you wish to keep track of.
- It can be anything from currencies (EUR, USD, etc.) to shares (AAPL, MSFT, etc.), to commodities. Ledger doesn't really care.
- An account can hold many different assets.
- An amount can be any decimal number.
- A positive number means to debit the account, and a negative number means to credit the account.
Run the application and pass the path of your journal file as the first argument:
$ ledger 2018.journal
Once inside the program, run any of the following commands or type help to view a list of all available commands.
balances (or b for short) shows you a list of your accounts and their ending balances:
> balances
Account | Asset | Total Debit | Total Credit | Balance Debit | Balance Credit
------------------------------- | ----- | ----------- | ------------ | ------------- | --------------
Assets:Bank | EUR | 5,000 | 22.88 | 4,977.12 | 0
Equity:ProfitLoss:Expense:Food | EUR | 19.9 | 0 | 19.9 | 0
Equity:ProfitLoss:Expense:Tip | EUR | 2.98 | 0 | 2.98 | 0
Equity:ProfitLoss:Income:Salary | EUR | 0 | 5,000 | 0 | 5,000
To see how much you have gained, or lost, run the profitloss (or pl for short) command:
> profitloss
Account | Asset | Balance Debit | % | Balance Credit | %
----------------- | ----- | ------------- | - | -------------- | ---
Equity:ProfitLoss | EUR | 0 | 0 | 4,977.12 | 100
To see a list of your top incomes or expenses, run:
profitloss Equity:ProfitLoss:Expense:*
Account | Asset | Balance Debit | % | Balance Credit | %
------------------------------ | ----- | ------------- | ----- | -------------- | -
Equity:ProfitLoss:Expense:Food | EUR | 19.9 | 86.98 | 0 | 0
Equity:ProfitLoss:Expense:Tip | EUR | 2.98 | 13.02 | 0 | 0
To make sure that your balances satisfy the fundamental accounting equation (Assets = Liabilities + Equity), run the balance-check (or bc for short) command:
> balance-check
Asset | Assets | Liabilities + Equity | Liabilities | Equity | Diff
----- | -------- | -------------------- | ----------- | --------- | ----
EUR | 4,977.12 | -4,977.12 | 0 | -4,977.12 | 0
- 1.0
- Initial release.
Please report issues or better yet, fork, fix and send a pull request.
Soheil Rashidi
Copyright 2018 Soheil Rashidi.
Licensed under the The MIT License (the "License"); you may not use this work except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License in the LICENSE file, or at:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.