abandon noun: freedom from inhibitions, restraint, concern, or worry.
Abandon is a text based, double-entry accounting system. Transactions are entered in plain text files. You can use your favorite text editor to edit these files, and can use your favorite VCS for versioning and collaboration.
From these input text files, Abandon can present textual reports or graphical reports. The graphical reports are useful when you need to interactively explore the data.
Abandon is inspired by Ledger but is simpler to use, has a more regular syntax, has a GUI and is cross-platform. Abandon tries to maintain syntax compatibility with Ledger whenever possible.
If we enter this into a text file:
2013/1/1
Expense:Food -200
Assets:Cash
... and run it through abandon, the program will subtract 200 from the account Expense:Food and (automatically) balance the transaction by adding 200 to the account Assets:Cash.
Expense:Food will become an account nested under the account Expense. If we add another transaction like this:
2013/1/2
Expense:Entertainment -400
Assets:Cash
then Entertainment will be another child account under the parent Expense account.
Hence, the balance report will look like this:
600.00 Assets:Cash
-600.00 Expense
-400.00 ├╴Entertainment
-200.00 └╴Food
─────────────────────────────────────────────
0.00 0.00 = Zero
The Expense account shows a value of -600 which is the total of its own amount and its childrens'.
The last line shows the total of the top level accounts, which in this case is 0.00.
Note: The second
0.00is for accounts that get printed on right. In this simple example there is nothing to show on the right side of the report.
- Double entry accounting
- Infinite precision arithmetic
- Input is through plain-text files. The syntax is well defined and yet human friendly, just like
ledger's. - Portable across many operating systems; based on the Java platform.
- Reporting: supports both textual and interactive, graphical reports. The GUI watches for changes in input files and automatically refreshes when it detects a change.
(or why yet another fork)
- Cross-platform. This was a major consideration to be able to collaborate with external auditors, accountants, etc. While, in theory, the existing implementations of Ledger are cross-platform, they need to be compiled and packaged separately for each platform.
- Simpler and more regular syntax. Some of the simplicity is because of missing features. But, in general, I want to cut the flab and keep things simple and regular.
For example, identifiers can have numbers in them. Although this might sound trivial, the language has to be carefully designed for this. In
ledger, this doesn't work because it messes up with the syntax for currencies. - An interactive GUI for viewing reports.
- Install Java 8 from any provider. Other versions of Java will work fine for the CLI, but the GUI requires the above specific versions.
- Download and extract the
Abandonbinaries from here - Use the
*.shfiles to run on*nixandMacor the*.batfiles to run onWindows.
The command line options are:
-c <config-file-path> Specifies the path to a config file
-i <input-file-path> Specifies the path to an input file
The config file can specify which reports to generate and how. Some of these options are available as command line parameters too.
As of now, the preferred way of running the program is by specifying a config file. Look at examples/simple/accounts.conf for an example config file, and doc/abandon.md for further instructions and information about Abandon.
Many features are still missing. Until version 0.5 the focus will be on adding basic features such as:
- Support for currencies
- Reporting options (sorting, grouping, time limits, etc)
Look at the issue list for a complete road map.
Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 (free to use, share, modify, but attribution is required)
Join us in the chat room here: 
Or simply raise an issue in GitHub.
