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
--------------------
0
Or
$ 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.)
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 find the balances of all of your accounts, run this command:
$ ledger -f drewr3.dat balance
Ledger will generate:
$ -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
Showing you the balance of all accounts. Options and search terms can pare this down to show only the accounts you want.
A more useful report is to show only your Assets and Liabilities:
$ ledger -f drewr3.dat balance Assets Liabilities
$ -3,804.00 Assets
$ 1,396.00 Checking
$ 30.00 Business
$ -5,200.00 Savings
$ -63.60 Liabilities
$ -20.00 MasterCard
$ 200.00 Mortgage:Principal
$ -243.60 Tithe
--------------------
$ -3,867.60
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"
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
A very useful report is to show what your obligations are versus what
expenditures have actually been recorded. It can take several days for
a check to clear, but you should treat it as money spent. The
cleared report shows just that (note that the
cleared report will not format correctly for accounts that
contain multiple commodities):
$ ledger -f drewr3.dat cleared
$ -3,804.00 $ 775.00 Assets
$ 1,396.00 $ 775.00 10-Dec-20 Checking
$ 30.00 0 Business
$ -5,200.00 0 Savings
$ -1,000.00 $ -1,000.00 10-Dec-01 Equity:Opening Balances
$ 6,654.00 $ 225.00 Expenses
$ 5,500.00 0 Auto
$ 20.00 0 Books
$ 300.00 0 Escrow
$ 334.00 $ 225.00 10-Dec-20 Food:Groceries
$ 500.00 0 Interest:Mortgage
$ -2,030.00 0 Income
$ -2,000.00 0 Salary
$ -30.00 0 Sales
$ -63.60 0 Liabilities
$ -20.00 0 MasterCard
$ 200.00 0 Mortgage:Principal
$ -243.60 0 Tithe
---------------- ---------------- ---------
$ -243.60 0
The first column shows the outstanding balance, the second column shows the “cleared” balance.
Using ledger under the windows command shell has one significant limitation. CMD.EXE is limited to standard ASCII characters and as such cannot display any currency symbols other than dollar signs ‘$’.
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’.
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:
12.50 AU Assets:Checking
Whenever a commodity is purchased using a different commodity (such as a share of common stock using dollars), it establishes a price for that commodity on that day. It is also possible, by recording price details in a ledger file, to specify other prices for commodities at any given time. Such price transactions might look like those below:
P 2004/06/21 02:17:58 TWCUX $27.76 P 2004/06/21 02:17:59 AGTHX $25.41 P 2004/06/21 02:18:00 OPTFX $39.31 P 2004/06/21 02:18:01 FEQTX $22.49 P 2004/06/21 02:18:02 AAPL $32.91
By default, ledger will not consider commodity prices when generating its various reports. It will always report balances in terms of the commodity total, rather than the current value of those commodities. To enable pricing reports, use one of the commodity reporting options.
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:
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:
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:
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
Comments are generally started using a ‘;’. However, in order to increase compatibility with other text manipulation programs and methods, four additional comment characters are valid if used at the beginning of a line: ‘#’, ‘|’, and ‘*’ and ‘%’.
Block comments can be made by use comment ... end
comment.
; This is a single line comment,
# and this,
% and this,
| and this,
* and this.
comment
This is a block comment with
multiple lines
end comment
There are several forms of comments within a transaction, for example:
; this is a global comment that is not applied to a specific transaction
; it can start with any of the five characters but is not included in the
; output from 'print' or 'output'
2011/12/11 Something Sweet
; German Chocolate Cake
; :Broke Diet:
Expenses:Food $10.00 ; Friends: The gang
Assets:Credit Union:Checking
The first comment is global and Ledger will not attach it to any specific transactions. The comments within the transaction must all start with ‘;’ and are preserved as part of the transaction. The ‘:’ indicates meta-data and tags (see Metadata).
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.
Commodity names can have any character, including white-space. However, if you include white-space or numeric characters, the commodity name must be enclosed in double quotes ‘"’:
1999/06/09 ! Achat
Actif:SG PEE STK 49.957 "Arcancia Équilibre 454"
Actif:SG PEE STK $-234.90
2000/12/08 ! Achat
Actif:SG PEE STK 215.796 "Arcancia Équilibre 455"
Actif:SG PEE STK $-10742.54
Please note that, for querying quoted commodities, the quotes need to be escaped, as follows:
$ ledger -f d reg -l 'commodity == "\"Arcancia Équilibre 454\""'
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:
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:
sourceA string identifying the commodity whose price is being asked for (example: ‘EUR’).
dateThe reference date the price should be relative.
targetA 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.
value myfunc_seven
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
$ ledger reg -V food
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.
The initial character of each line determines what the line means, and how it should be interpreted. Allowable initial characters are:
NUMBERA line beginning with a number denotes a transaction. It may be followed by any number of lines, each beginning with white-space, to denote the transaction’s account postings. The format of the first line is:
DATE[=EDATE] [*|!] [(CODE)] DESC
If ‘*’ appears after the date (with optional effective date), it
indicates the transaction is “cleared”, which can mean whatever the
user wants it to mean. If ‘!’ appears after the date, it
indicates the transaction is “pending”; i.e., tentatively cleared
from the user’s point of view, but not yet actually cleared. If
a CODE appears in parentheses, it may be used to indicate
a check number, or the type of the posting. Following these is the
payee, or a description of the posting.
The format of each following posting is:
ACCOUNT AMOUNT [; NOTE]
The ACCOUNT may be surrounded by parentheses if it is a virtual
posting, or square brackets if it is a virtual posting that
must balance. The AMOUNT can be followed by a per-unit
posting cost, by specifying @ AMOUNT, or a complete
posting cost with @@ AMOUNT. Lastly, the NOTE may
specify an actual and/or effective date for the posting by using
the syntax [ACTUAL_DATE] or [=EFFECTIVE_DATE] or
[ACTUAL_DATE=EFFECTIVE_DATE] (see Virtual postings).
P ¶Specifies a historical price for a commodity. These are usually found in a pricing history file (see the --download (-Q) option). The syntax is:
P DATE SYMBOL PRICE
= ¶An automated transaction. A value expression must appear after the equal sign.
After this initial line there should be a set of one or more postings, just as if it were a normal transaction. If the amounts of the postings have no commodity, they will be applied as multipliers to whichever real posting is matched by the value expression (see Automated Transactions).
~ ¶A periodic transaction. A period expression must appear after the tilde.
After this initial line there should be a set of one or more postings, just as if it were a normal transaction.
; # % | * ¶A line beginning with a semicolon, pound, percent, bar or asterisk indicates a comment, and is ignored. Comments will not be returned in a “print” response.
indented ; ¶If the semicolon is indented and occurs inside a transaction, it is parsed as a persistent note for its preceding category. These notes or tags can be used to augment the reporting and filtering capabilities of Ledger.
beginning of lineCommand directives must occur at the beginning of a line. Use of ‘!’ and ‘@’ is deprecated.
account ¶Pre-declare valid account names. This only has an effect if
--strict or --pedantic is used (see below). The
account directive supports several optional sub-directives, if
they immediately follow the account directive and if they begin with
whitespace:
account Expenses:Food
note This account is all about the chicken!
alias food
payee ^(KFC|Popeyes)$
check commodity == "$"
assert commodity == "$"
eval print("Hello!")
default
The note sub-directive associates a textual note with the
account. This can be accessed later using the note value
expression function in any account context.
The alias sub-directive, which can occur multiple times, allows
the alias to be used in place of the full account name anywhere that
account names are allowed.
The payee sub-directive, which can occur multiple times,
provides regexes that identify the account if that payee is
encountered and an account within its transaction ends in the name
"Unknown". Example:
2012-02-27 KFC
Expenses:Unknown $10.00 ; Read now as "Expenses:Food"
Assets:Cash
The check and assert directives warn or raise an error
(respectively) if the given value expression evaluates to false within
the context of any posting.
The eval directive evaluates the value expression in the
context of the account at the time of definition. At the moment this
has little value.
The default directive specifies that this account should be
used as the “balancing account” for any future transactions that
contain only a single posting.
apply account ¶Sets the root for all accounts following this directive. Ledger supports a hierarchical tree of accounts. It may be convenient to keep two “root accounts”. For example you may be tracking your personal finances and your business finances. In order to keep them separate you could preface all personal accounts with ‘personal:’ and all business accounts with ‘business:’. You can easily split out large groups of transactions without manually editing them using the account directive. For example:
apply account Personal
2011/11/15 Supermarket
Expenses:Groceries $ 50.00
Assets:Checking
Would result in all postings going into ‘Personal:Expenses:Groceries’ and ‘Personal:Assets:Checking’ until an ‘end apply account’ directive was found.
apply fixed ¶A fixed block is used to set fixated prices (see Fixated prices and costs) for a series of transactions. It’s purely a typing saver, for use when entering many transactions with fixated prices.
Thus, the following:
apply fixed CAD $0.90
2012-04-10 Lunch in Canada
Assets:Wallet -15.50 CAD
Expenses:Food 15.50 CAD
2012-04-11 Second day Dinner in Canada
Assets:Wallet -25.75 CAD
Expenses:Food 25.75 CAD
end apply fixed
is equivalent to this:
2012-04-10 Lunch in Canada
Assets:Wallet -15.50 CAD {=$0.90}
Expenses:Food 15.50 CAD {=$0.90}
2012-04-11 Second day Dinner in Canada
Assets:Wallet -25.75 CAD {=$0.90}
Expenses:Food 25.75 CAD {=$0.90}
alias ¶Define an alias for an account name. If you have a deeply nested tree of accounts, it may be convenient to define an alias, for example:
alias Dining=Expenses:Entertainment:Dining
alias Checking=Assets:Credit Union:Joint Checking Account
2011/11/28 YummyPalace
Dining $10.00
Checking
The aliases are only in effect for transactions read in after the alias
is defined and are affected by account directives that precede
them.
$ ledger bal --no-total ^Exp
$10.00 Expenses:Entertainment:Dining
With the option --recursive-aliases, aliases can refer to other aliases, the following example produces exactly the same transactions and account names as the preceding one:
alias Entertainment=Expenses:Entertainment alias Dining=Entertainment:Dining alias Checking=Assets:Credit Union:Joint Checking Account 2011/11/30 ChopChop Dining $10.00 Checking
$ ledger balance --no-total --recursive-aliases ^Exp
$10.00 Expenses:Entertainment:Dining
The option --no-aliases completely disables alias expansion. All accounts are read verbatim as they are in the ledger file.
assert ¶An assertion can throw an error if a condition is not met during Ledger’s run.
assert <VALUE EXPRESSION BOOLEAN RESULT>
bucketDefines the default account to use for balancing transactions.
Normally, each transaction has at least two postings, which must
balance to zero. Ledger allows you to leave one posting with no
amount and automatically balance the transaction in the
posting. The bucket allows you to fill in all postings and
automatically generate an additional posting to the bucket account
balancing the transaction. If any transaction is unbalanced, it
will automatically be balanced against the bucket account.
The following example sets ‘Assets:Checking’ as the bucket:
bucket Assets:Checking
2011/01/25 Tom's Used Cars
Expenses:Auto $ 5,500.00
2011/01/27 Book Store
Expenses:Books $20.00
2011/12/01 Sale
Assets:Checking:Business $ 30.00
captureDirects Ledger to replace any account matching a regex with the given account. For example:
capture Expenses:Deductible:Medical Medical
Would cause any posting with ‘Medical’ in its name to be replaced with ‘Expenses:Deductible:Medical’.
Ledger will display the mapped payees in print and
register reports.
check ¶A check issues a warning if a condition is not met during Ledger’s run.
check <VALUE EXPRESSION BOOLEAN RESULT>
comment ¶Start a block comment, closed by end comment.
commodity ¶Pre-declare commodity names. This only has an effect if --strict or --pedantic is used (see below).
commodity $ commodity CAD
The commodity directive supports several optional
sub-directives, if they immediately follow the commodity directive
and—if they are on successive lines—begin with whitespace:
commodity $ note American Dollars format $1,000.00 nomarket alias USD default
The note sub-directive associates a textual note with the
commodity. At present this has no value other than documentation.
The format sub-directive gives you a way to tell Ledger how to
format this commodity. In the future, using this directive will disable
Ledger’s observation of other ways that commodity is used, and will
provide the “canonical” representation.
The nomarket sub-directive states that the commodity’s price
should never be auto-downloaded.
The alias sub-directive states that any commodity matching this
symbol is to use the commodity declared in this block.
The default sub-directive marks this as the “default” commodity.
define ¶Allows you to define value expressions for future use. For example:
define var_name=$100
2011/12/01 Test
Expenses (var_name*4)
Assets
The posting will have a cost of $400.
end ¶Closes block commands like apply or comment.
expr ¶Same as eval.
include ¶Include the stated file as if it were part of the current file. The file name can contain a wildcard (‘*’) to refer to multiple files (e.g. ‘bank/*.ledger’).
payee ¶The payee directive supports two optional sub-directives, if they
immediately follow the payee directive and—if it is on a successive
line—begins with whitespace:
payee KFC
alias KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN
uuid 2a2e21d434356f886c84371eebac6e44f1337fda
The alias sub-directive provides a regex which, if it matches
a parsed payee, the declared payee name is substituted:
2012-02-27 KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN ; will be read as being 'KFC'
The uuid sub-directive specifies that a transaction with exactly
the uuid given should have the declared payee name substituted:
2014-05-13 UNHELPFUL PAYEE ; will be read as being 'KFC'
; UUID: 2a2e21d434356f886c84371eebac6e44f1337fda
Ledger will display the mapped payees in print and
register reports.
apply tag ¶Allows you to designate a block of transactions and assign the same tag to all. Tags can have values and may be nested.
apply tag hastag
apply tag nestedtag: true
2011/01/25 Tom's Used Cars
Expenses:Auto $ 5,500.00
; :nobudget:
Assets:Checking
2011/01/27 Book Store
Expenses:Books $20.00
Liabilities:MasterCard
end apply tag
2011/12/01 Sale
Assets:Checking:Business $ 30.00
Income:Sales
end apply tag
is the equivalent of:
2011/01/25 Tom's Used Cars
; :hastag:
; nestedtag: true
Expenses:Auto $ 5,500.00
; :nobudget:
Assets:Checking
2011/01/27 Book Store
; :hastag:
; nestedtag: true
Expenses:Books $20.00
Liabilities:MasterCard
2011/12/01 Sale
; :hastag:
Assets:Checking:Business $ 30.00
Income:Sales
tag ¶Pre-declares tag names. This only has an effect if --strict or --pedantic is used (see below).
tag Receipt tag CSV
The tag directive supports two optional sub-directives, if they
immediately follow the tag directive and—if on a successive
line—begin with whitespace:
tag Receipt check value =~ /pattern/ assert value != "foobar"
The check and assert sub-directives warn or error
(respectively) if the given value expression evaluates to false within
the context of any use of the related tag. In such a context,
“value” is bound to the value of the tag (which may be something else
but a string if typed metadata is used!). Such checks or assertions are
not called if no value is given.
test ¶This is a synonym for comment and must be closed by an
end tag.
year ¶Denotes the year used for all subsequent transactions that give a date
without a year. The year should appear immediately after the
directive, for example: year 2004. This is useful at the
beginning of a file, to specify the year for that file. If all
transactions specify a year, however, this command has no effect.
The following single letter commands may be at the beginning of a line alone, for backwards compatibility with older Ledger versions.
A ¶See bucket.
Y ¶See year.
N SYMBOL ¶Indicates that pricing information is to be ignored for a given symbol, nor will quotes ever be downloaded for that symbol. Useful with a home currency, such as the dollar ‘$’. It is recommended that these pricing options be set in the price database file, which defaults to ~/.pricedb. The syntax for this command is:
N SYMBOL
D AMOUNT ¶Specifies the default commodity to use, by specifying an amount in the
expected format. The xact command will use this commodity as
the default when none other can be determined. This command may be used
multiple times, to set the default flags for different commodities;
whichever is seen last is used as the default commodity. For example,
to set US dollars as the default commodity, while also setting the
thousands flag and decimal flag for that commodity, use:
D $1,000.00
C AMOUNT1 = AMOUNT2 ¶Specifies a commodity conversion, where the first amount is given to be equivalent to the second amount. The first amount should use the decimal precision desired during reporting:
C 1.00 Kb = 1024 bytes
I, i, O, o, b, h ¶These four relate to timeclock support, which permits Ledger to read timelog files. See timeclock’s documentation for more info on the syntax of its timelog files.
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:
ledger convert download.csv
hledger -f checking.csv print
icsv2ledger
csvToLedger
CSV2Ledger
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
You can associate a second date with a transaction by following the primary date with an equals sign:
2012-03-10=2012-03-08 KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash $-20.00
What this auxiliary date means is entirely up to you. The only use Ledger has for it is that if you specify --aux-date (or --effective), then all reports and calculations (including pricing) will use the auxiliary date as if it were the primary date.
Note that the --aux-date option is an alias for --effective; for more details on effective dates see Effective Dates.
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
One of Ledger’s more powerful features is the ability to associate typed metadata with postings and transactions (by which I mean all of a transaction’s postings). This metadata can be queried, displayed, and used in calculations.
The are two forms of metadata: plain tags, and tag/value pairs.
To tag an item, put any word not containing whitespace between two colons inside a comment:
2012-03-10 * KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash
; :TAG:
You can gang up multiple tags by sharing colons:
2012-03-10 * KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash
; :TAG1:TAG2:TAG3:
To associate a value with a tag, use the syntax “Key: Value”, where the value can be any string of characters. Whitespace is needed after the colon, and cannot appear in the Key:
2012-03-10 * KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash
; MyTag: This is just a bogus value for MyTag
If a metadata tag ends in ::, its value will be parsed as a value expression and stored internally as a value rather than as a string. For example, although I can specify a date textually like so:
2012-03-10 * KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash
; AuxDate: 2012/02/30
This date is just a string, and won’t be parsed as a date unless its value is used in a date-context (at which time the string is parsed into a date automatically every time it is needed as a date). If on the other hand I write this:
2012-03-10 * KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash
; AuxDate:: [2012/02/30]
Then it is parsed as a date only once, and during parsing of the journal file, which would let me know right away that it is an invalid date.
“Payee” is a special metadata field. If set on a posting, it will be
used as the payee name for that posting. This affects the
register report, the payees report, and the
--by-payee option.
This is useful when for example you deposit 4 checks at a time to the bank. On the bank statement, there is just one amount ‘$400’, but you can specify from whom each check came, as shown by example below:
2010-06-17 Sample
Assets:Bank $400.00
Income:Check1 $-100.00 ; Payee: Person One
Income:Check2 $-100.00 ; Payee: Person Two
Income:Check3 $-100.00 ; Payee: Person Three
Income:Check4 $-100.00 ; Payee: Person Four
When reporting with
$ ledger reg
it appears as:
10-Jun-17 Sample Assets:Bank $400.00 $400.00
Person One Income:Check1 $-100.00 $300.00
Person Two Income:Check2 $-100.00 $200.00
Person Three Income:Check3 $-100.00 $100.00
Person Four Income:Check4 $-100.00 0
This shows that they are all in the same transaction (which is why the date is not repeated), but they have different payees now.
If using the --strict or --pedantic options, you must declare this tag to avoid warnings and errors.
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.
A balance assertion has this general form:
2012-03-10 KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash $-20.00 = $500.00
This simply asserts that after subtracting $20.00 from Assets:Cash, that the resulting total matches $500.00. If not, it is an error.
The assertion has an effect only on the specified commodity. If an account has multiple commodities, then only the one asserted is verified:
2012-03-10 KFC New York
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash $-20.00 = $500.00
2012-03-11 KFC Montreal
Expenses:Food 15.00 CAD
Assets:Cash -15.00 CAD = $500.00
In this case, the amount in USD of cash (which has not changed) is validated. Nothing is asserted about the current amount of Canadian dollars in ‘Asset:Cash’.
The only value that can be asserted without a commodity is ‘0’. This results in a cross-commodities assertion, which makes it possible to assert that an account is totally empty.
2012-03-09 Fill Wallet
Revenue $20.00
Revenue 15.00 CAD
Assets:Cash
2012-03-10 KFC New York
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash $-20.00
2012-03-11 KFC Montreal
Expenses:Food 15.00 CAD
Assets:Cash -15.00 CAD = 0
The last transaction will assert that we are out of cash of any sort.
A balance assignment has this form:
2012-03-10 KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash = $500.00
This sets the amount of the second posting to whatever it would need to be for the total in ‘Assets:Cash’ to be $500.00 after the posting. If the resulting amount is not $-20.00 in this case, it is an error.
Say your book-keeping has gotten a bit out of date, and your Ledger balance no longer matches your bank balance. You can create an adjustment transaction using balance assignments:
2012-03-10 Adjustment
Assets:Cash = $500.00
Equity:Adjustments
Since the second posting is also null, its value will become the inverse of whatever amount is generated for the first posting.
This is the only time in ledger when more than one posting’s amount may be empty—and then only because it’s not truly empty, it is indirectly provided by the balance assignment’s value.
As a consequence of all the above, consider the following transaction:
2012-03-10 My Broker
[Assets:Brokerage] = 10 AAPL
What this says is: set the amount of the posting to whatever value is needed so that ‘Assets:Brokerage’ contains 10 AAPL. Then, because this posting must balance, ensure that its value is zero. This can only be true if Assets:Brokerage does indeed contain 10 AAPL at that point in the input file.
A balanced virtual transaction is used simply to indicate to Ledger that this is not a “real” transaction. It won’t appear in any reports anyway (unless you use a register report with --empty).
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
It is a general convention within Ledger that the “top” postings in a transaction contain the target accounts, while the final posting contains the source account. Whenever a commodity is exchanged like this, the commodity moved to the target account is considered “secondary”, while the commodity used for purchasing and tracked in the cost is “primary”.
Said another way, whenever Ledger sees a posting cost of the form "AMOUNT @ AMOUNT", the commodity used in the second amount is marked “primary”.
The only meaning a primary commodity has is that the --market (-V) flag will never convert a primary commodity into any other commodity. --exchange COMMODITY (-X) still will, however.
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
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
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.
In addition to lot prices, you can specify lot dates and reveal them with --lot-dates. Other than that, however, they have no special meaning to Ledger. They are specified after the amount in square brackets (the same way that dates are parsed in value expressions):
2012-04-10 My Broker
Assets:Brokerage:Cash $375.00
Assets:Brokerage -5 AAPL {$50.00} [2012-04-10] @@ $375.00
Income:Capital Gains $-125.00
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:
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.
As a special case, if an automated transaction’s posting’s amount (phew) has no commodity, it is taken as a multiplier upon the matching posting’s cost. For example:
= expr true
Foo 50.00
Bar -50.00
2012-03-10 KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash
Then the latter transaction turns into this during parsing:
2012-03-10 KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Foo $1000.00
Bar $-1000.00
Assets:Cash $-20.00
Foo $1000.00
Bar $-1000.00
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 $-20.00
Keep in mind that if you are using --strict or --pedantic you will have to explicitly define an account ‘$account’ to avoid errors.
account $account
If the automated transaction has a transaction note, that note is copied (along with any metadata) to every posting that matches the predicate:
= food
; Foo: Bar
(Budget:$account) 10
2012-03-10 KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash
Becomes:
2012-03-10 KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
; Foo: Bar
(Budget:Expenses:Food) $200.00
Assets:Cash $-20.00
If the automated transaction’s posting has a note, that note is carried to the generated posting within the matched transaction:
= food
(Budget:$account) 10
; Foo: Bar
2012-03-10 KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
Assets:Cash
Becomes:
2012-03-10 KFC
Expenses:Food $20.00
(Budget:Expenses:Food) $200.00
; Foo: Bar
Assets:Cash $-20.00
This is slightly different from the rules for regular transaction notes, in that an automated transaction’s note does not apply to every posting within the automated transaction itself, but rather to every posting it matches.
Although you cannot mark an automated transaction as a whole as cleared or pending, you can mark its postings with a ‘*’ or ‘!’ before the account name, and that state flag gets carried to the generated posting.
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.
A periodic transaction starts with a tilde ‘~’ followed by a period expression (see Period Expressions). Periodic transactions are used for budgeting and forecasting only, they have no effect without the --budget option specified. For examples and details, see Budgeting and Forecasting.
As a Bahá’í, I need to compute Huqúqu’lláh whenever I acquire assets. It is similar to tithing for Jews and Christians, or to Zakát for Muslims. The exact details of computing Huqúqu’lláh are somewhat complex, but if you have further interest, please consult the Web.
Ledger makes this otherwise difficult law very easy. Just set up an automated posting at the top of your ledger file:
; This automated transaction will compute Huqúqu'lláh based on this ; journal's postings. Any accounts that match will affect the ; Liabilities:Huqúqu'lláh account by 19% of the value of that posting. = /^(?:Income:|Expenses:(?:Business|Rent$|Furnishings|Taxes|Insurance))/ (Liabilities:Huqúqu'lláh) 0.19
This automated posting works by looking at each posting in the ledger file. If any match the given value expression, 19% of the posting’s value is applied to the ‘Liabilities:Huqúqu'lláh’ account. So, if $1000 is earned from ‘Income:Salary’, $190 is added to ‘Liabilities:Huqúqu'lláh’; if $1000 is spent on Rent, $190 is subtracted.
2003/01/01 (99) Salary Income:Salary -$1000 Assets:Checking 2003/01/01 (100) Rent Expenses:Rent $500 Assets:Checking
The ultimate balance of Huqúqu’lláh reflects how much is owed in order to fulfill one’s obligation to Huqúqu’lláh. When ready to pay, just write a check to cover the amount shown in ‘Liabilities:Huqúqu'lláh’. That transaction would look like:
2003/01/01 (101) Bahá'í Huqúqu'lláh Trust
Liabilities:Huqúqu'lláh $1,000.00
Assets:Checking
That’s it. To see how much Huqúq is currently owed based on your ledger transactions, use:
$ ledger balance Liabilities:Huqúq
$-95 Liabilities:Huqúqu'lláh
This works fine, but omits one aspect of the law: that Huqúq is only due once the liability exceeds the value of 19 mithqáls of gold (which is roughly 2.22 ounces). So what we want is for the liability to appear in the balance report only when it exceeds the present day value of 2.22 ounces of gold. This can be accomplished using the command:
$ ledger -Q -t "/Liab.*Huquq/?(a/P{2.22 AU}<={-1.0}&a):a" bal liab
With this command, the current price for gold is downloaded, and the Huqúqu’lláh is reported only if its value exceeds that of 2.22 ounces of gold. If you wish the liability to be reflected in the parent subtotal either way, use this instead:
$ ledger -Q -T "/Liab.*Huquq/?(O/P{2.22 AU}<={-1.0}&O):O" bal liab
In some cases, you may wish to refer to the account of whichever posting matched your automated transaction’s value expression. To do this, use the special account name ‘$account’:
= /^Some:Long:Account:Name/
[$account] -0.10
[Savings] 0.10
This example causes 10% of the matching account’s total to be deferred to the ‘Savings’ account—as a balanced virtual posting, which may be excluded from reports by using --real.
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.
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
$ 20.00 Expenses:Books
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 Auto:Fuel and Chevron
$ ledger balance --limit 'account=~/Fuel/' and 'payee=~/Chev/'
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)
These examples all use the default formatting for the balance report. Customizing the formatting allows you to see only what you want, or interface Ledger with other programs. For examples and details, see Format Strings and Asset Allocation.
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’.
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.
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 | 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.
balance command ¶The balance command reports the current balance of all
accounts. It accepts a list of optional regexes, which confine the
balance report to the matching accounts. If an account contains
multiple types of commodities, each commodity’s total is reported
separately.
equity command ¶The equity command prints out account balances as if they
were transactions. This makes it easy to establish the starting
balances for an account, such as when Archiving Previous Years.
register command ¶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.
print command ¶The print command prints out ledger transactions in a textual
format that can be parsed by Ledger. They will be properly formatted,
and output in the most economic form possible. The print
command also takes a list of optional regexes, which will cause only
those postings which match in some way to be printed.
The print command can be a handy way to clean up a ledger
file whose formatting has gotten out of hand.
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