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.
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.
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.
Credit cards sometimes provide a cashback percentage of purchases. This can be setup with the following:
; This automated transaction will add to "Assets:Credit Card Cashback"
; the amount of the transaction multiplied by the "cashback" tag.
= "Liabilities:Credit Card" and %cashback
Assets:Credit Card Cashback (-amount * tag("cashback") * 0.01)
Income:Credit Card Rewards (amount * tag("cashback") * 0.01)
To add a transaction that gives 2% cashback:
2023/06/06 McDonalds ; cashback:: 2% Expenses:Food:Restaurants $23.98 Liabilities:Credit Card
Now when a report is generated, e.g.
$ ledger -f cashback.dat reg
The cashback postings appear with the transaction.
23-Jun-06 McDonalds Expen:Food:Restaurants $23.98 $23.98
Liabilitie:Credit Card $-23.98 0
..Credit Card Cashback $0.48 $0.48
In:Credit Card Rewards $-0.48 0
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 Expenses:Auto:Fuel and @Chevron
$ ledger balance --limit 'account=~/Expenses:Auto:Fuel/ and payee=~/Chevron/'
will show you the amount expended on gasoline at Chevron. The second example is the first example of the very powerful expression language available to shape reports. The first example may be easier to remember, but learning to use the second will open up far more possibilities.
If you want to exclude specific accounts from the report, you can exclude multiple accounts with parentheses:
$ ledger bal Expenses and not (Expenses:Drinks or Expenses:Candy or Expenses:Gifts)
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 commandThe 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 commandThe 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 commandThe 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 commandThe 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.
lisp commandorg Modepricemap commandxml commandprices and pricedb commandscsv commandThe csv command prints the desired ledger
transactions in a csv format suitable for importing into other programs.
You can specify the transactions to print using all the normal
limiting and searching functions.
convert commandThe convert command parses a comma separated value (csv) file
and prints Ledger transactions. Many banks offer csv file downloads.
Unfortunately, the file formats, aside from the commas, are all
different. The ledger convert command tries to help as much
as it can.
Your bank’s csv files will have fields in different orders from other banks, so there must be a way to tell Ledger what to expect. Insert a line at the beginning of the csv file that describes the fields to Ledger.
For example, this is a portion of a csv file downloaded from a credit union in the United States:
Account Name: VALUFIRST CHECKING Account Number: 71 Date Range: 11/13/2011 - 12/13/2011 Transaction Number,Date,Description,Memo,Amount Debit,Amount Credit,Balance,Check Number,Fees 767406,12/13/2011,"Deposit","CASH DEPOSIT",,45.00,00001646.89,, 767718,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD",8.80,,00001640.04,, 767406,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD",1.03,,00001648.84,, 683342,12/13/2011,"Visa Checking","NetFlix Date 12/12/11 000326585896 5968",21.85,,00001649.87,, 639668,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ID: 1741472662 CO: XXAA.COM PAYMNT",236.65,,00001671.72,, 1113648,12/12/2011,"Withdrawal","Tuscan IT #00037657",29.73,,00001908.37,,
Unfortunately, as it stands Ledger cannot read it, but you can. Ledger
expects the first line to contain a description of the fields on each
line of the file. The fields ledger can recognize contain these
case-insensitive strings date, posted, code,
payee or desc or description, amount or
credit, debit, cost, total, and note.
Delete the account description lines at the top, and replace the first line in the data above with:
,date,payee,note,debit,credit,,code,
Then execute ledger like this:
$ ledger convert download.csv --input-date-format "%m/%d/%Y"
Where the --input-date-format DATE_FORMAT option tells ledger how to interpret the dates.
Importing csv files is a lot of work, but is very amenable to scripting.
If your csv has only one amount column with opposite signs for credits and debits, this is also supported. For example, the first fiew lines of the above account could also be in the following format:
,date,payee,note,credit,,code, 767406,12/13/2011,"Deposit","CASH DEPOSIT",45.00,00001646.89,, 767718,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD",-8.80,00001640.04,,
If there are columns in the bank data you would like to keep in your ledger data, besides the primary fields described above, you can name them in the field descriptor list and Ledger will include them in the transaction as meta data if it doesn’t recognize the field name. For example, if you want to capture the bank transaction number and it occurs in the first column of the data use:
transid,date,payee,note,debit,credit,,code,
Ledger will include ‘; transid: 767718’ in the first transaction from the file above.
The convert command accepts four options. They are
--invert which inverts the amount, --auto-match
which automatically matches an account from the Ledger journal for every
CSV line, --account STR which you can use to specify the
account to balance against, and --rich-data which stores
additional tag/value pairs.
Using the two first lines of the above csv file,
,date,payee,note,debit,credit,balance,code, 767406,12/13/2011,"Deposit","CASH DEPOSIT",,45.00,00001646.89,, 767718,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD",8.80,,00001640.04,,
and launching the below command,
$ ledger convert download.csv --input-date-format "%m/%d/%Y" \ --invert --account Assets:MyBank --rich-data \ --file sample.dat --now=2012/01/13
you will get the result:
2011/12/13 * Deposit ;CASH DEPOSIT
; balance: 00001646.89
; CSV: 767406,12/13/2011,"Deposit","CASH DEPOSIT",,45.00,00001646.89,,
; Imported: 2012/01/13
; UUID: ce0b7d42b02ce5eaf0d828c3b1028041fd09494c
Expenses:Unknown -45
Assets:MyBank
2011/12/13 * Withdrawal ;ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD
; balance: 00001640.04
; CSV: 767718,12/13/2011,"Withdrawal","ACE HARDWARE 16335 S HOUGHTON RD",8.80,,00001640.04,,
; Imported: 2012/01/13
; UUID: 0aaf85911adc447ea2d5377ff6a60d6b2940047f
Expenses:Unknown 8.8
Assets:MyBank
The three added metadata are: ‘CSV’ as the original line from csv file, ‘Imported’ as the date when the csv file was imported into Ledger, and ‘UUID’ as a checksum of original csv line.
If an entry with the same ‘UUID’ tag is already included in the
normal ledger file (specified via --file FILE (-f) or via
the environment variable LEDGER_FILE) this entry will not be
printed again.
In the output above, the account is ‘Expenses:Unknown’ for CSV lines. You can use the --auto-match option to automatically match an account from your Ledger journal.
You can also use convert with payee and account
directives. First, you can use the payee and alias
directive to rewrite the payee field based on some rules. Then
you can use the account and its payee directive to specify the
account. I use it like this, for example:
payee Aldi
alias ^ALDI SUED SAGT DANKE
account Aufwand:Einkauf:Lebensmittel
payee ^(Aldi|Alnatura|Kaufland|REWE)$
Note that it may be necessary for the output of ‘ledger convert’
to be passed through ledger print a second time if you want to
match on the new payee field. During the ledger convert run,
only the original payee name as specified in the csv data seems to be
used.
lisp commandThe lisp command prints results in a form that can be read
directly by Emacs Lisp. The format of the sexp is:
((BEG-POS CLEARED DATE CODE PAYEE (ACCOUNT AMOUNT)...) ; list of postings ...) ; list of transactions
emacs can also be used as a synonym for lisp.
org ModeOrg mode has a sub-system known as Babel which allows for literate programming. This allows you to mix text and code within the same document and automatically execute code which may generate results which will then appear in the text.
One of the languages supported by Babel is Ledger, so that you can have ledger commands embedded in a text file and have the output of ledger commands also appear in the text file. The output can be updated whenever any new ledger entries are added.
For instance, the following Org mode text document snippet illustrates a very naive but still useful application of the Babel system:
* A simple test of ledger in an org file The following are some entries and I have requested that ledger be run to generate a balance on the accounts. I could have asked for a register or, in fact, anything at all the ledger can do through command-line options. #+begin_src ledger :cmdline bal :results value 2010/01/01 * Starting balance assets:bank:savings £1300.00 income:starting balances 2010/07/22 * Got paid assets:bank:chequing £1000.00 income:salary 2010/07/23 Rent expenses:rent £500.00 assets:bank:chequing #+end_src #+results: : £1800.00 assets:bank : £500.00 chequing : £1300.00 savings : £500.00 expenses:rent : £-2300.00 income : £-1000.00 salary : £-1300.00 starting balances
Typing C-c C-c anywhere in the “ledger source code block” will invoke ledger on the contents of that block and generate a “results” block. The results block can appear anywhere in the file but, by default, will appear immediately below the source code block.
You can combine multiple source code blocks before executing ledger and do all kinds of other wonderful things with Babel (and Org mode).
Using Babel, it is possible to record financial transactions conveniently in an org file and subsequently generate the financial reports required.
As of Org mode 7.01, Ledger support is provided. Check the Babel documentation on Worg for instructions on how to achieve this but I currently do this directly as follows:
(org-babel-do-load-languages 'org-babel-load-languages '((ledger . t) ;this is the important one for this tutorial ))
Once Ledger support in Babel has been enabled, we can proceed to include Ledger entries within an org file. There are three ways (at least) in which these can be included:
noweb literary programming approach, supported by Babel, to
combine these into one block elsewhere in the file for processing by
Ledger,
tangle to
generate a Ledger file which you can subsequently process using Ledger
directly.
The first two are described in more detail in this short tutorial.
nowebThe easiest, albeit possibly least useful, way in which to use Ledger within an org file is to use a single source block to record all Ledger entries. The following is an example source block:
#+name: allinone #+begin_src ledger 2010/01/01 * Starting balance assets:bank:savings £1300.00 income:starting balances 2010/07/22 * Got paid assets:bank:chequing £1000.00 income:salary 2010/07/23 Rent expenses:rent £500.00 assets:bank:chequing 2010/07/24 Food expenses:food £150.00 assets:bank:chequing 2010/07/31 * Interest on bank savings assets:bank:savings £3.53 income:interest 2010/07/31 * Transfer savings assets:bank:savings £250.00 assets:bank:chequing 2010/08/01 got paid again assets:bank:chequing £1000.00 income:salary #+end_src
In this example, we have combined both expenses and income into one set
of Ledger entries. We can now generate register and balance reports (as
well as many other types of reports) using Babel to invoke Ledger with
specific arguments. The arguments are passed to Ledger using the
:cmdline header argument. In the code block above, there is no
such argument so the system takes the default. For Ledger code blocks,
the default :cmdline argument is bal and the result of
evaluating this code block (C-c C-c) would be:
#+results: allinone() : £2653.53 assets:bank : £1100.00 chequing : £1553.53 savings : £650.00 expenses : £150.00 food : £500.00 rent : £-3303.53 income : £-3.53 interest : £-2000.00 salary : £-1300.00 starting balances
If, instead, you wished to generate a register of all the transactions,
you would change the #+begin_src line for the code block to
include the required command-line option:
#+begin_src ledger :cmdline reg
Evaluating the code block again would generate a different report.
Having to change the actual directive on the code block and re-evaluate
makes it difficult to have more than one view of your transactions and
financial state. Eventually, Babel will support passing arguments to
#+call evaluations of code blocks but this support is missing
currently. Instead, we can use the concepts of literary programming, as
implemented by the noweb features of Babel, to help us.
nowebThe noweb feature of Babel allows us to expand references to
other code blocks within a code block. For Ledger, this can be used to
group transactions according to type, say, and then bring various sets
of transactions together to generate reports.
Using the same transactions used above, we could consider splitting these into expenses and income, as follows:
The first set of entries relates to income, either monthly pay or
interest, all typically going into one of my bank accounts. Here, I have
placed several entries, but we could have had each entry in a separate
src block. Note that all code blocks you wish to refer to later
must have the :noweb yes header argument specified.
#+name: income #+begin_src ledger :noweb yes 2010/01/01 * Starting balance assets:bank:savings £1300.00 income:starting balances 2010/07/22 * Got paid assets:bank:chequing £1000.00 income:salary 2010/07/31 * Interest on bank savings assets:bank:savings £3.53 income:interest 2010/07/31 * Transfer savings assets:bank:savings £250.00 assets:bank:chequing 2010/08/01 got paid again assets:bank:chequing £1000.00 income:salary #+end_src
The following entries relate to personal expenses, such as rent and
food. Again, these have all been placed in a single src block but
could have been done individually.
#+name: expenses #+begin_src ledger :noweb yes 2010/07/23 Rent expenses:rent £500.00 assets:bank:chequing 2010/07/24 Food expenses:food £150.00 assets:bank:chequing #+end_src
Given the ledger entries defined above in the income and expenses code
blocks, we can now refer to these using the noweb expansion directives,
<<name>>. We can now define different code blocks to generate
specific reports for those transactions. Below are two examples, one to
generate a balance report and one to generate a register report of all
transactions.
The overall balance of your account and expenditure with a breakdown
according to category is specified by passing the :cmdline bal
argument to Ledger. This code block can now be evaluated (C-c C-c)
and the results generated by incorporating the transactions referred to
by the <<income>> and <<expenses>> lines.
#+name: balance #+begin_src ledger :cmdline bal :noweb yes <<income>> <<expenses>> #+end_src #+results: balance : £2653.53 assets:bank : £1100.00 chequing : £1553.53 savings : £650.00 expenses : £150.00 food : £500.00 rent : £-3303.53 income : £-3.53 interest : £-2000.00 salary : £-1300.00 starting balances
If you want a less detailed breakdown of where your money is, you can specify the --collapse (-n) flag (i.e. ‘:cmdline -n bal’) to tell Ledger to exclude sub-accounts in the report.
#+begin_src ledger :cmdline -n bal :noweb yes <<income>> <<expenses>> #+end_src #+results: : £2653.53 assets : £650.00 expenses : £-3303.53 income
You can also generate a monthly register (the reg command) by
executing the following src block. This presents a summary of
transactions for each monthly period (the --monthly (-M)
argument) with a running total in the final column (which should be 0 at
the end if all the entries are correct).
#+name: monthlyregister #+begin_src ledger :cmdline -M reg :noweb yes <<income>> <<expenses>> #+end_src #+results: monthlyregister :2010/01/01 - 2010/01/31 assets:bank:savings £1300.00 £1300.00 : in:starting balances £-1300.00 0 :2010/07/01 - 2010/07/31 assets:bank:chequing £100.00 £100.00 : assets:bank:savings £253.53 £353.53 : expenses:food £150.00 £503.53 : expenses:rent £500.00 £1003.53 : income:interest £-3.53 £1000.00 : income:salary £-1000.00 0 :2010/08/01 - 2010/08/01 assets:bank:chequing £1000.00 £1000.00 : income:salary £-1000.00 0
We could also generate a monthly report on our assets showing how these are increasing (or decreasing!). In this case, the final column will be the running total of the assets in our ledger.
#+name: monthlyassetsregister #+begin_src ledger :cmdline -M reg assets :noweb yes <<income>> <<expenses>> #+end_src #+results: monthlyassetsregister : 2010/01/01 - 2010/01/31 assets:bank:savings £1300.00 £1300.00 : 2010/07/01 - 2010/07/31 assets:bank:chequing £100.00 £1400.00 : assets:bank:savings £253.53 £1653.53 : 2010/08/01 - 2010/08/01 assets:bank:chequing £1000.00 £2653.53
This short tutorial shows how Ledger entries can be embedded in an org file and manipulated using Babel. However, only simple Ledger features have been illustrated; please refer to the Ledger documentation for examples of more complex operations on a ledger.
pricemap commandIf you have the graphviz graph visualization package installed, ledger can generate a graph of the relationship between your various commodities. The output file is in the “dot” format.
This is probably not very interesting, unless you have many different commodities valued in terms of each other. For example, multiple currencies and multiple investments valued in those currencies.
xml commandBy default, Ledger uses a human-readable data format, and displays its reports in a manner meant to be read on screen. For the purpose of writing tools which use Ledger, however, it is possible to read and display data using XML. This section documents that format.
The general format used for Ledger data is:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <ledger> <xact>...</xact> <xact>...</xact> <xact>...</xact>... </ledger>
The data stream is enclosed in a ledger tag, which contains a
series of one or more transactions. Each xact describes one
transaction and contains a series of one or more postings:
<xact>
<en:date>2004/03/01</en:date>
<en:cleared/>
<en:code>100</en:code>
<en:payee>John Wiegley</en:payee>
<en:postings>
<posting>...</posting>
<posting>...</posting>
<posting>...</posting>...
</en:postings>
</xact>
The date format for en:date is always YYYY/MM/DD. The
en:cleared tag is optional, and indicates whether the posting has
been cleared or not. There is also an en:pending tag, for
marking pending postings. The en:code and en:payee tags
both contain whatever text the user wishes.
After the initial transaction data, there must follow a set of postings
marked with en:postings. Typically these postings will all
balance each other, but if not they will be automatically balanced into
an account named ‘Unknown’.
Within the en:postings tag is a series of one or more
posting’s, which have the following form:
<posting>
<tr:account>Expenses:Computer:Hardware</tr:account>
<tr:amount>
<value type="amount">
<amount>
<commodity flags="PT">$</commodity>
<quantity>90.00</quantity>
</amount>
</value>
</tr:amount>
</posting>
This is a basic posting. It may also begin with
tr:virtual and/or tr:generated tags, to indicate virtual
and auto-generated postings. Then follows the tr:account
tag, which contains the full name of the account the posting is
related to. Colons separate parent from child in an account name.
Lastly follows the amount of the posting, indicated by
tr:amount. Within this tag is a value tag, of which
there are four different kinds, each with its own format:
The format of a Boolean value is true or false
surrounded by a boolean tag, for example:
<boolean>true</boolean>
The format of an integer value is the numerical value surrounded by an
integer tag, for example:
<integer>12036</integer>
The format of an amount contains two members, the commodity and the quantity. The commodity can have a set of flags that indicate how to display it. The meaning of the flags (all of which are optional) are:
PThe commodity is prefixed to the value.
SThe commodity is separated from the value by a space.
TThousands markers are used to display the amount.
EThe format of the amount is European, with period used as a thousands marker, and comma used as the decimal point.
The actual quantity for an amount is an integer of arbitrary size. Ledger uses the GNU multiple precision arithmetic library to handle such values. The XML format assumes the reader to be equally capable. Here is an example amount:
<value type="amount">
<amount>
<commodity flags="PT">$</commodity>
<quantity>90.00</quantity>
</amount>
</value>
Lastly, a balance value contains a series of amounts, each with a different commodity. Unlike the name, such a value does need to balance. It is called a balance because it sums several amounts. For example:
<value type="balance">
<balance>
<amount>
<commodity flags="PT">$</commodity>
<quantity>90.00</quantity>
</amount>
<amount>
<commodity flags="TE">DM</commodity>
<quantity>200.00</quantity>
</amount>
</balance>
</value>
That is the extent of the XML data format used by Ledger. It will
output such data if the xml command is used, and can read
the same data.
prices and pricedb commandsThe prices command displays the price history for matching
commodities. The --average (-A) option is useful with this
report, to display the running average price, or --deviation
(-D) to show each price’s deviation from that average.
There is also a pricedb command which outputs the same
information as prices, but does so in a format that can be
parsed by Ledger. This is useful for generating and tidying up
pricedb database files.
accountsThe accounts command reports all of the accounts in the
journal. Following the command with a regular expression will limit the
output to accounts matching the regex. The output is sorted by name.
Using the --count option will tell you how many entries use
each account.
payeesThe payees command reports all of the unique payees in the
journal. Using the --count option will tell you how many
entries use each payee. To filter the payees displayed you must use the
prefix @:
$ ledger payees @Nic
Nicolas Nicolas BOILABUS Oudtshoorn Municipality Vaca Veronica
commoditiesReport all commodities present in the journals under consideration. The output is sorted by name. Using the --count option will tell you how many entries use each commodity.
tagsThe tags command reports all of the tags in the journal. The
output is sorted by name. Using the --count option will tell
you how many entries use each tag. Using the --values option
will report the values used by each tag.
xactThe xact command simplifies the creation of new transactions.
It works on the principle that 80% of all postings are variants of
earlier postings. Here’s how it works:
Say you currently have this posting in your ledger file:
2004/03/15 * Viva Italiano
Expenses:Food $12.45
Expenses:Tips $2.55
Liabilities:MasterCard $-15.00
Now it’s ‘2004/4/9’, and you’ve just eaten at ‘Viva Italiano’
again. The exact amounts are different, but the overall form is the
same. With the xact command you can type:
$ ledger xact 2004/4/9 viva food 11 tips 2.50
This produces the following output:
2004/04/09 Viva Italiano
Expenses:Food $11.00
Expenses:Tips $2.50
Liabilities:MasterCard
It works by finding a past posting matching the regular expression ‘viva’, and assuming that any accounts or amounts specified will be similar to that earlier posting. If Ledger does not succeed in generating a new transaction, an error is printed and the exit code is set to ‘1’.
Here are a few more examples of the xact command, assuming
the above journal transaction:
$ ledger xact 4/9 viva 11.50 $ ledger xact 4/9 viva 11.50 checking # (from `checking') $ ledger xact 4/9 viva food 11.50 tips 8 $ ledger xact 4/9 viva food 11.50 tips 8 cash $ ledger xact 4/9 viva food $11.50 tips $8 cash $ ledger xact 4/9 viva dining "DM 11.50"
draft and entry are both synonyms of
xact. entry is provided for backwards compatibility
with Ledger 2.X.
This chapter describes Ledger’s features and options. You may wish to survey this to get an overview before diving into the Ledger Tutorial and more detailed examples that follow.
Ledger has a very simple command-line interface, named—enticingly enough—ledger. It supports a few reporting commands, and a large number of options for refining the output from those commands. The basic syntax of any ledger command is:
$ ledger [OPTIONS...] COMMAND [ARGS...]
After the command word there may appear any number of arguments. For
most commands, these arguments are regular expressions that cause the
output to relate only to postings matching those regular expressions.
For the xact command, the arguments have a special meaning,
described below.
The regular expressions arguments always match the account name that a posting refers to. To match on the payee of the transaction instead, precede the regular expression with ‘payee’ or ‘@’. For example, the following balance command reports account totals for rent, food and movies, but only those whose payee matches Freddie:
$ ledger bal rent food movies payee freddie
or
$ ledger bal rent food movies @freddie
There are many, many command options available with the ledger program, and it takes a while to master them. However, none of them are required to use the basic reporting commands.
balance ¶bal ¶Show account balances.
register ¶reg ¶Show all transactions with running total.
csv ¶Show transactions in csv format, for exporting to other programs.
print ¶Print transactions in a format readable by ledger.
xml ¶Produce XML output of the register command.
lisp ¶emacs ¶Produce s-expression output, suitable for Emacs.
equity ¶Print account balances as transactions.
prices ¶Print price history for matching commodities.
pricedb ¶Print price history for matching commodities in a format readable by ledger.
xact ¶Generate transactions based on previous postings.
Display the man page for ledger.
Print version information and exit.
Read FILE as a ledger file.
Redirect output to FILE.
Specify an options file.
Import FILE as Python module.
Specify default account STR for QIF file postings.
Display only transactions on or before the current date.
Limit the processing to transactions on or after DATE.
Limit the processing to transactions before DATE.
Limit the processing to transactions in PERIOD_EXPRESSION (see Period Expressions).
Sort postings within each period according to VEXPR.
Display only cleared postings.
Display register or balance in debit/credit format.
Display only uncleared postings.
Display only real postings.
Display only actual postings, not automated ones.
Display related postings.
Display how close your postings meet your budget.
Show unbudgeted postings.
Show only unbudgeted postings.
Project balances into the future.
Limit which postings are used in calculations by EXPR.
Change value expression reported in register report.
Change the value expression used for “totals” column in
register and balance reports.
Accounts, tags or commodities not previously declared will cause warnings.
Accounts, tags or commodities not previously declared will cause errors.
Enable strict and pedantic checking for payees as well as accounts, commodities and tags. This only works in conjunction with --strict or --pedantic.
Instruct ledger to evaluate calculations immediately rather than lazily.
Collapse transactions with multiple postings.
Report register as a single subtotal.
Report subtotals by payee.
Include empty accounts in the report.
Report posting totals by week.
Report posting totals by quarter.
Report posting totals by year.
Report posting totals by day of week.
Sort a report using VEXPR.
Assume 132 columns instead of 80.
Report the first INT postings.
Report the last INT postings.
Direct output to FILE pager program.
Direct output to stdout, avoiding pager program.
Report the average posting value.
Report each posting’s deviation from the average.
Show subtotals in the balance report as percentages.
Produce a pivot table of the TAG type specified.
Show only the date and value columns to format the output for plots.
Specify the format for the plot output.
Show only the date and total columns to format the output for plots.
Specify the format for the plot output.
Display only postings that meet the criteria in the EXPR.
Change the basic date format used in reports.
Set the reporting format for various reports.
Print the ledger register with anonymized accounts and payees, useful for filing bug reports.
Group postings by common payee names.
Group postings by day.
Group postings by week.
Group postings by month.
Group postings by quarter.
Group postings by year.
Group by day of weeks.
Group postings together, similar to the balance report.
Use FILE for retrieving stored commodity prices.
Set expected freshness of prices in INT minutes.
Download quotes using the script named getquote.
Report commodity totals without conversion.
Report cost basis.
Report last known market value.
Report net gain or loss for commodities that have a price history.
Options for Ledger reports affect three separate scopes of operation: Global, Session, and Report. In practice there is very little difference between these scopes. Ledger 3.0 contains provisions for GUIs, which would make use of the different scopes by keeping an instance of Ledger running in the background and running multiple sessions with multiple reports per session.
Ignore all environment and init-file settings and use only command-line arguments to control Ledger. Useful for debugging or testing small journal files not associated with your main financial database.
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature. If ledger has been built with debug options this will provide extra data during the run.
Display the man page for ledger.
Specify the location of the init file. By default, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, ~/.config/ledger/ledgerrc, ~/.ledgerrc and ./.ledgerrc are tried in order.
Display the options in effect for this Ledger invocation, along with their values and the source of those values, for example:
$ ledger --options bal --cleared
===============================================================================
[Global scope options]
--args-only --args-only
[Session scope options]
--file = A9349E4.dat --file
[Report scope options]
--cleared --cleared
--columns = 80 --columns
--limit = cleared --cleared
===============================================================================
$15.00 Expenses
$12.45 Food
$2.55 Tips
$-15.00 Liabilities:MasterCard
--------------------
0
For the source column, a value starting with a ‘-’ or ‘--’
indicated the source was a command-line argument. If the entry starts
with a ‘$’, the source was an environment variable. If the source
is ?normalize the value was set internally by ledger, in
a function called normalize_options.
Execute a ledger script.
Enable tracing. The INT specifies the level of trace desired.
Print detailed information on the execution of Ledger.
Enable additional assertions during run-time. This causes a significant slowdown. When combined with --debug CODE ledger will produce memory trace information.
Verify that every constructed object is properly destructed. This is for debugging purposes only.
Print version information and exit.
Options for Ledger reports affect three separate scopes of operation: Global, Session, and Report. In practice there is very little difference between these scopes. Ledger 3.0 contains provisions for GUIs, which would make use of the different scopes by keeping an instance of Ledger running in the background and running multiple sessions with multiple reports per session.
Enable strict and pedantic checking for payees as well as accounts, commodities and tags. This only works in conjunction with --strict or --pedantic.
Break up register report of timelog entries that span multiple
days by day.
Direct Ledger to parse journals using the European standard comma as a decimal separator, not the usual period.
Direct Ledger to download prices.
Specify the input FILE for this invocation.
Specify the input date format for journal entries. For example,
$ ledger convert Export.csv --input-date-format "%m/%d/%Y"
Would convert the Export.csv file to ledger format, assuming the dates in the CSV file are like 12/23/2009 (see Date and Time Format Codes).
Prepend all account names with the argument.
$ ledger -f drewr3.dat bal --no-total --master-account HUMBUG
0 HUMBUG
$ -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
$ 180.00 Liabilities
$ -20.00 MasterCard
$ 200.00 Mortgage:Principal
Ledger does not expand any aliases if this option is specified.
Accounts, tags or commodities not previously declared will cause errors.
Quiet balance assertions.
Specify the location of the price entry data file.
Set the expected freshness of price quotes, in INT minutes. That is, if the last known quote for any commodity is older than this value, and if --download is being used, then the Internet will be consulted again for a newer price. Otherwise, the old price is still considered to be fresh enough.
Ledger normally silently accepts any account or commodity in a posting, even if you have misspelled a commonly used one. The option --strict changes that behavior. While running with --strict, Ledger interprets all cleared transactions as correct, and if it encounters a new account or commodity (same as a misspelled commodity or account) it will issue a warning giving you the file and line number of the problem.
Normally, ledger only expands aliases once. With this option, ledger tries to expand the result of alias expansion recursively, until no more expansions apply.
The --time-colon option will display the value for a seconds based commodity as real hours and minutes.
For example 8100 seconds by default will be displayed as 2.25 whereas with the --time-colon option they will be displayed as 2:15.
Set a global value expression annotation.
Options for Ledger reports affect three separate scopes of operation: Global, Session, and Report. In practice there is very little difference between these scopes. Ledger 3.0 contains provisions for GUIs, which would make use of the different scopes by keeping an instance of Ledger running in the background and running multiple sessions with multiple reports per session.
Set the minimum length an account can be abbreviated to if it doesn’t
fit inside the account-width. If INT is zero, then the
account name will be truncated on the right. If INT is greater
than account-width then the account will be truncated on the
left, with no shortening of the account names in order to fit into the
desired width.
Prepend STR to all accounts reported. That is, the option ‘--account Personal’ would tack ‘Personal:’ to the beginning of every account reported in a balance report or register report.
Set the width of the account column in the register report
to INT characters.
Report only real transactions, ignoring all automated or virtual transactions.
Show only unbudgeted postings.
Apply the given value expression to the posting amount (see Value Expressions). Using --amount EXPR you can apply an arbitrary transformation to the postings.
On a register report print only the date and amount of postings. Useful for graphing and spreadsheet applications.
Set the width in characters of the amount column in the
register report.
Anonymize registry output, mostly for sending in bug reports.
When generating a ledger transaction from a CSV file using the
convert command, automatically match an account from the
Ledger journal.
Show auxiliary dates for all calculations (see Effective Dates).
Print average values over the number of transactions instead of running totals.
Report the average price at which each commodity was purchased in a balance report.
Specify the format to use for the balance report (see Format Strings). The default is:
"%(justify(scrub(display_total), 20, -1, true, color))" " %(!options.flat ? depth_spacer : \"\")" "%-(ansify_if(partial_account(options.flat), blue if color))\n%/" "%$1\n%/" "--------------------\n"
Reduce convertible commodities down the bottom of the conversion, e.g. display time in seconds. This also applies to custom commodity conversions (see Commodity equivalences).
Report the cost basis on all posting.
Specify the start DATE of all calculations. Transactions before that date will be ignored.
Print the entire line in bold if the given value expression is true (see Value Expressions).
$ ledger reg Expenses --begin Dec --bold-if "amount>100"
list all transactions since the beginning of December and print in bold any posting greater than $100.
Only display budgeted items. In a register report this displays transactions in the budget, in a balance report this displays accounts in the budget (see Budgeting and Forecasting).
Specify the format to use for the budget report (see Format Strings). The default is:
"%(justify(scrub(get_at(display_total, 0)), 12, -1, true, color))"
" %(justify(-scrub(get_at(display_total, 1)), 12, "
" 12 + 1 + 12, true, color))"
" %(justify(scrub(get_at(display_total, 1) + "
" get_at(display_total, 0)), 12, "
" 12 + 1 + 12 + 1 + 12, true, color))"
" %(ansify_if("
" justify((get_at(display_total, 1) ? "
" (100% * quantity(scrub(get_at(display_total, 0)))) / "
" -quantity(scrub(get_at(display_total, 1))) : 0), "
" 5, -1, true, false),"
" magenta if (color and get_at(display_total, 1) and "
" (abs(quantity(scrub(get_at(display_total, 0))) / "
" quantity(scrub(get_at(display_total, 1)))) >= 1))))"
" %(!options.flat ? depth_spacer : \"\")"
"%-(ansify_if(partial_account(options.flat), blue if color))\n"
"%/%$1 %$2 %$3 %$4\n%/"
"%(prepend_width ? \" \" * int(prepend_width) : \"\")"
"------------ ------------ ------------ -----\n"
Group the register report by payee.
Consider only transactions that have been cleared for display and calculation.
Specify the format to use for the cleared report (see Format Strings). The default is:
"%(justify(scrub(get_at(total_expr, 0)), 16, 16 + prepend_width, " " true, color)) %(justify(scrub(get_at(total_expr, 1)), 18, " " 36 + prepend_width, true, color))" " %(latest_cleared ? format_date(latest_cleared) : \" \")" " %(!options.flat ? depth_spacer : \"\")" "%-(ansify_if(partial_account(options.flat), blue if color))\n%/" "%$1 %$2 %$3\n%/" "%(prepend_width ? \" \" * prepend_width : \"\")" "---------------- ---------------- ---------\n"
By default ledger prints all accounts in an account tree. With --collapse it prints only the top level account specified.
Collapse the account display only if it has a zero balance.
Use color if the terminal supports it.
Specify the width of the register report in characters.
Direct ledger to report the number of items when appended to the
commodities, accounts or payees command.
Specify the format to use for the csv report (see Format Strings). The default is:
"%(quoted(date))," "%(quoted(code))," "%(quoted(payee))," "%(quoted(display_account))," "%(quoted(commodity(scrub(display_amount))))," "%(quoted(quantity(scrub(display_amount))))," "%(quoted(cleared ? \"*\" : (pending ? \"!\" : \"\")))," "%(quoted(join(note | xact.note)))\n"
Shorthand for ‘--limit "date <= today"’.
Shorthand for ‘--period "daily"’.
Transform the date of the transaction using EXPR.
Specify the format ledger should use to read and print dates (see Date and Time Format Codes).
Specify the width, in characters, of the date column in the
register report.
Specify the format ledger should use to print datetimes.
Display register or balance in debit/credit format If you use
--dc with either the register (reg) or
balance (bal) commands, you will now get extra columns.
The register goes from this:
12-Mar-10 Employer Assets:Cash $100 $100
Income:Employer $-100 0
12-Mar-10 KFC Expenses:Food $20 $20
Assets:Cash $-20 0
12-Mar-10 KFC - Rebate Assets:Cash $5 $5
Expenses:Food $-5 0
12-Mar-10 KFC - Food & Reb.. Expenses:Food $20 $20
Expenses:Food $-5 $15
Assets:Cash $-15 0
To this:
12-Mar-10 Employer Assets:Cash $100 0 $100
In:Employer 0 $100 0
12-Mar-10 KFC Expens:Food $20 0 $20
Assets:Cash 0 $20 0
12-Mar-10 KFC - Rebate Assets:Cash $5 0 $5
Expens:Food 0 $5 0
12-Mar-10 KFC - Food &.. Expens:Food $20 0 $20
Expens:Food 0 $5 $15
Assets:Cash 0 $15 0
Where the first column is debits, the second is credits, and the third is the running total. Only the running total may contain negative values.
For the balance report without --dc:
$70 Assets:Cash
$30 Expenses:Food
$-100 Income:Employer
--------------------
0
And with --dc it becomes this:
$105 $35 $70 Assets:Cash
$40 $10 $30 Expenses:Food
0 $100 $-100 Income:Employer
--------------------------------------------
$145 $145 0
Limit the depth of displayed accounts in balance and register reports. Any accounts of greater depth are folded into their parent at the specified level. For example with ‘--depth 2’ the account ‘Expenses:Entertainment’ would be folded into ‘Expenses:Entertainment:Dining’ for display. Importantly, this is a display predicate, which means it only affects display, not the total calculations.
Report each posting’s deviation from the average. It is only meaningful in the register and prices reports.
Display only lines that satisfy the expression EXPR.
Apply a transformation to the displayed amount. This happens after calculations occur.
Apply a transformation to the displayed total. This happens after calculations occur.
Group transactions by the day of the week.
$ ledger reg Expenses --dow --collapse
Will print all Expenses totaled for each day of the week.
Include empty accounts in the report and in average calculations.
Specify the end DATE for a transaction to be considered in the report. All transactions on or after this date are ignored.
Related to the equity command (see The equity command). Gives current account balances in the form of a register
report.
Report beginning and ending of periods by the date of the first and last posting occurring in that period.
Display values in terms of the given COMMODITY. If multiple commodities are given, values in a listed commodity will remain as-is, and others will be displayed in the first listed commodity they can be converted to.
$ ledger balance assets
100 EUR
100 PHP
100 USD Assets
100 EUR EUR Bank
100 PHP PHP Bank
100 USD USD Bank
--------------------
100 EUR
100 PHP
100 USD
$ ledger balance assets --exchange PHP
11382 PHP Assets
5801 PHP EUR Bank
100 PHP PHP Bank
5481 PHP USD Bank
--------------------
11382 PHP
$ ledger balance assets --exchange "PHP, EUR"
100 EUR
5581 PHP Assets
100 EUR EUR Bank
100 PHP PHP Bank
5481 PHP USD Bank
--------------------
100 EUR
5581 PHP
The latest available price is used. The syntax -X COMMODITY1:COMMODITY2 displays values in COMMODITY1 in terms of COMMODITY2 using the latest available price, but will not automatically convert any other commodities to COMMODITY2. Multiple -X arguments may be used on a single command-line (as in -X COMMODITY1:COMMODITY2 -X COMMODITY3:COMMODITY2), which is particularly useful for situations where many prices are available for reporting in terms of COMMODITY2, but only a few should be displayed that way.
Force the full names of accounts to be used in the balance report. The balance report will not use an indented tree.
Output TTY color codes even if the TTY doesn’t support them. Useful for TTYs that don’t advertise their capabilities correctly.
Force Ledger to paginate its output.
Continue forecasting while VEXPR is true.
Forecast at most INT years into the future.
Use the given format string to print output.
Report on gains using the latest available prices.
Include auto-generated postings (such as those from automated transactions) in the report, in cases where you normally wouldn’t want them.
Group transactions together in the register report.
EXPR can be anything, although most common would be payee
or commodity. The tags() function is also useful here.
Set the format for the headers that separates the report sections of a grouped report. Only has an effect with a --group-by EXPR register report.
$ ledger reg Expenses --group-by "payee" --group-title-format "------------------------ %-20(value) ---------------------\n"
------------------------ 7-Eleven --------------------- 2011/08/13 7-Eleven Expenses:Auto:Misc $ 5.80 $ 5.80 ------------------------ AAA Dues --------------------- 2011/06/02 AAA Dues Expenses:Auto:Misc $ 215.00 $ 215.00 ------------------------ ABC Towing and Wrecking --------------------- 2011/03/17 ABC Towing and Wrec.. Expenses:Auto:Hobbies $ 48.20 $ 48.20 ...
Print the first INT entries. Opposite of --tail INT.
Value commodities at the time of their acquisition.
Evaluate calculations immediately rather than lazily.
Use Expected amounts in calculations. In case you know
what amount a transaction should be, but the actual transaction has the
wrong value you can use metadata to specify the expected amount:
2012-03-12 Paycheck
Income $-990; Expected:: $-1000.00
Checking
Then using the command ledger reg --inject=Expected Income would
treat the transaction as if the “Expected Value” was actual.
Change the sign of all reported values.
Only transactions that satisfy EXPR are considered in calculations and for display.
Report the date on which each commodity in a balance report was purchased.
Report the tag attached to each commodity in a balance report.
Report the price at which each commodity in a balance report was purchased.
Report the date and price at which each commodity was purchased in a balance report.
Preserve the uniqueness of commodities so they aren’t merged during reporting without printing the lot annotations.
Use the latest market value for all commodities.
In the register report, prepend the transaction with the value of the given TAG.
Specify the width of the Meta column used for the --meta TAG options.
Synonym for ‘--period "monthly"’.
Aliases are completely ignored.
Suppress any color TTY output.
Direct output to stdout, avoiding pager program.
Stop Ledger from showing <Revalued> postings. This option is useful
in combination with the --exchange or --market option.
Don’t output ‘<Adjustment>’ postings. Note that this will cause the running total to often not add up! Its main use is for --amount-data (-j) and --total-data (-J) reports.
Suppress the output of group titles.
Suppress printing the final total line in a balance report.
Define the current date in case you want to calculate in the past or future using --current.
This is a postings predicate that applies after certain transforms have been executed, such as periodic gathering.
Redirect the output of ledger to the file defined in FILE.
Direct output to FILE pager program.
Sets a value expression for formatting the payee. In the
register report this prevents the second entry from having
a date and payee for each transaction.
Set the number of columns dedicated to the payee in the register report to INT.
Use only postings that are marked pending.
Calculate the percentage value of each account in balance reports. Only works for accounts that have a single commodity.
Define a period expression that sets the time period during which
transactions are to be accounted. For a register report only
the transactions that satisfy the period expression with be displayed.
For a balance report only those transactions will be accounted
in the final balances.
Produce a balance pivot report around the given TAG. For example, if you have multiple cars and track each fuel purchase in ‘Expenses:Auto:Fuel’ and tag each fuel purchase with a tag identifying which car the purchase was for ‘; Car: Prius’, then the command:
$ ledger bal Fuel --pivot "Car" --period "this year"
$ 3491.26 Car
$ 1084.22 M3:Expenses:Auto:Fuel
$ 149.65 MG V11:Expenses:Auto:Fuel
$ 621.89 Prius:Expenses:Auto:Fuel
$ 1635.50 Sienna:Expenses:Auto:Fuel
$ 42.69 Expenses:Auto:Fuel
--------------------
$ 3533.95
See Metadata values.
Define the output format for an amount data plot. See Visualizing with Gnuplot.
Define the output format for a total data plot. See Visualizing with Gnuplot.
Prepend STR to every line of the output.
Reserve INT spaces at the beginning of each line of the output.
Use the price of the commodity purchase for performing calculations.
Set the format expected for the historical price file.
Set the format for the prices report.
Show primary dates for all calculations (see Effective Dates).
Report commodity totals (this is the default).
Synonym for ‘--period "quarterly"’.
In the print report, show transactions using the exact same
syntax as specified by the user in their data file. Don’t do any
massaging or interpreting. This can be useful for minor cleanups, like
just aligning amounts.
Account using only real transactions ignoring virtual and automatic transactions.
Define the output format for the register report.
In a register report show the related account. This is the
other side of the transaction.
Show all postings in a transaction, similar to --related but show both sides of each transaction.
Report discrepancy in values for manual reports by inserting <Revalued>
postings. This is implied when using the --exchange or
--market option.
Show only <Revalued> postings.
Display the sum of the revalued postings as the running total, which serves to show unrealized capital in a gain/losses report.
When generating a ledger transaction from a CSV file using the
convert command, add CSV, Imported, and UUID metadata.
Set the random seed to INT for the generate command.
Used as part of development testing.
Sort the register report based on the value expression given
to sort.
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
Sort the postings within transactions using the given value expression.
Tell ledger to use a particular day of the week to start its “weekly” summary. ‘--start-of-week=1’ specifies Monday as the start of the week.
Cause all transactions in a register report to be collapsed
into a single, subtotaled transaction.
Report only the last INT entries. Only useful in
a register report.
Add two columns to the balance report to show the earliest checkin and checkout times for timelog entries.
Define a value expression used to calculate the total in reports.
Show only dates and totals to format the output for plots.
Set the width of the total field in the register report.
Indicates how truncation should happen when the contents of columns exceed their width. Valid arguments are ‘leading’, ‘middle’, and ‘trailing’. The default is smarter than any of these three, as it considers sub-names within the account name (that style is called “abbreviate”).
Show only unbudgeted postings.
Use only uncleared transactions in calculations and reports.
Show generated unrealized gain and loss accounts in the balance report.
Allow the user to specify what account name should be used for unrealized gains. Defaults to ‘"Equity:Unrealized Gains"’. Often set in one’s init file to change the default.
Allow the user to specify what account name should be used for unrealized losses. Defaults to ‘"Equity:Unrealized Losses"’. Often set in one’s init file to change the default.
Perform all calculations without rounding and display results to full precision.
Shows the values used by each tag when used in combination with the
tags command.
Synonym for ‘--period "weekly"’.
Let the register report use 132 columns instead of 80 (the default). Identical to ‘--columns "132"’.
Synonym for ‘--period "yearly"’.
These are the most basic command options. Most likely, the user will want to set them using environment variables (see Environment variables), instead of using actual command-line options:
Display the man page for ledger.
Print the current version of ledger and exits. This is useful for sending bug reports, to let the author know which version of ledger you are using.
Read FILE as a ledger file. FILE can be ‘-’ which is
a synonym for ‘/dev/stdin’. This command may be used multiple
times. Typically, the environment variable LEDGER_FILE is set,
rather than using this command-line option.
Redirect output from any command to FILE. By default, all output goes to standard output.
Causes FILE to be read by ledger before any other ledger file. This file may not contain any postings, but it may contain option settings. To specify options in the init file, use the same syntax as on the command-line, but put each option on its own line. Here is an example init file:
--price-db ~/finance/.pricedb --wide ; ~/.ledgerrc ends here
Option settings on the command-line or in the environment always take precedence over settings in the init file.
Specify the default account which QIF file postings are assumed to relate to.
These options change which postings affect the outcome of a report, in ways other than just using regular expressions:
Display only transactions occurring on or before the current date.
Constrain the report to transactions on or after DATE. Only transactions after that date will be calculated, which means that the running total in the balance report will always start at zero with the first matching transaction. (Note: This is different from using --display EXPR to constrain what is displayed).
Constrain the report so that transactions on or after DATE are not considered.
Set the reporting period to STR. This will subtotal all matching transactions within each period separately, making it easy to see weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc., posting totals. A period string can even specify the beginning and end of the report range, using simple terms like ‘last June’ or ‘next month’. For more details on period expressions, see Period Expressions.
Sort the postings within each reporting period using the value expression EXPR. This is most often useful when reporting monthly expenses, in order to view the highest expense categories at the top of each month:
$ ledger -M --period-sort total reg ^Expenses
Display only postings whose transaction has been marked “cleared” (by placing an asterisk to the right of the date).
Display only postings whose transaction has not been marked “cleared” (i.e., if there is no asterisk to the right of the date).
Display only real postings, not virtual. (A virtual posting is indicated by surrounding the account name with parentheses or brackets; see Virtual postings for more information).
Display only actual postings, and not those created by automated transactions.
Display postings that are related to whichever postings would otherwise have matched the filtering criteria. In the register report, this shows where money went to, or the account it came from. In the balance report, it shows all the accounts affected by transactions having a related posting. For example, if a file had this transaction:
2004/03/20 Safeway
Expenses:Food $65.00
Expenses:Cash $20.00
Assets:Checking $-85.00
And the register command was:
$ ledger -f example.dat -r register food
The following would be printed, showing the postings related to the posting that matched:
04-Mar-20 Safeway Expenses:Cash $20.00 $20.00
Assets:Checking $-85.00 $-65.00
Useful for displaying how close your postings meet your budget. --add-budget also shows unbudgeted postings, while --unbudgeted shows only those. --forecast VEXPR is a related option that projects your budget into the future, showing how it will affect future balances. See Budgeting and Forecasting.
Limit which postings take part in the calculations of a report.
Change the value expression used to calculate the “value” column in
the register report, the amount used to calculate account
totals in the balance report, and the values printed in the
equity report. See Value Expressions.
Set the value expression used for the “totals” column in the
register and balance reports.
These options affect only the output, but not which postings are used to create it:
Cause transactions in a register report with multiple
postings to be collapsed into a single, subtotaled transaction.
Cause all transactions in a register report to be collapsed
into a single, subtotaled transaction.
Report subtotals by payee.
Include even empty accounts in the balance report.
Report posting totals by the week. The week begins on whichever day of the week begins the month containing that posting. To set a specific begin date, use a period string, such as ‘weekly from DATE’.
Report posting totals by month.
Report posting totals by year. For more complex periods, use --period.
Option described above.
Report posting totals for each day of the week. This is an easy way to see if weekend spending is more than on weekdays.
Sort a report by comparing the values determined using the value
expression VEXPR. For example, using ‘-S "-abs(total)"’ in
the balance report will sort account balances from greatest to
least, using the absolute value of the total. For more on how to use
value expressions, see Value Expressions.
Produce a pivot table around the TAG provided. This requires meta data using valued tags.
Cause the default register report to assume 132 columns
instead of 80.
Cause only the first INT transactions to be printed. This is different from using the command-line utility head, which would limit to the first INT postings. --tail INT outputs only the last INT transactions. Both options may be used simultaneously. If a negative amount is given, it will invert the meaning of the flag (instead of the first five transactions being printed, for example, it would print all but the first five).
Tell Ledger to pass its output to the given FILE pager program;
very useful when the output is especially long. This behavior can be
made the default by setting the LEDGER_PAGER environment variable.
Tell Ledger to not pass its output to a pager program; useful when a pager is set by default.
Report the average posting value.
Report each posting’s deviation from the average. It is only meaningful
in the register and prices reports.
Show account subtotals in the balance report as percentages of
the parent account.
Change the register report so that it prints nothing but the
date and the value column, and the latter without commodities. This is
only meaningful if the report uses a single commodity. This data can
then be fed to other programs, which could plot the date, analyze it,
etc.
Change the register report so that it prints nothing but the
date and total columns, without commodities.
Limit which postings or accounts are actually displayed in a report. They might still be calculated, and be part of the running total of a register report, for example, but they will not be displayed. This is useful for seeing last month’s checking postings, against a running balance which includes all posting values:
$ ledger -d "d>=[last month]" reg checking
The output from this command is very different from the following, whose running total includes only postings from the last month onward:
$ ledger -p "last month" reg checking
Which is more useful depends on what you’re looking to know: the total amount for the reporting range (using --period PERIOD_EXPRESSION (-p)), or simply a display restricted to the reporting range (using --display EXPR (-d)).
Change the basic date format used by reports. The default uses a date
like ‘2004/08/01’, which represents the default date format of
%Y/%m/%d. To change the way dates are printed in general, the
easiest way is to put --date-format DATE_FORMAT in the
Ledger init file (or the file referred to by LEDGER_INIT).
Set the reporting format for whatever report ledger is about to make. See Format Strings. There are also specific format commands for each report type:
Define the output format for the balance report. The default
(defined in report.h is:
"%(ansify_if(
justify(scrub(display_total), 20,
20 + int(prepend_width), true, color),
bold if should_bold))
%(!options.flat ? depth_spacer : \"\")
%-(ansify_if(
ansify_if(partial_account(options.flat), blue if color),
bold if should_bold))\n%/
%$1\n%/
%(prepend_width ? \" \" * int(prepend_width) : \"\")
--------------------\n"
Define the format for the cleared report. The default is:
"%(justify(scrub(get_at(display_total, 0)), 16, 16 + int(prepend_width),
true, color)) %(justify(scrub(get_at(display_total, 1)), 18,
36 + int(prepend_width), true, color))
%(latest_cleared ? format_date(latest_cleared) : \" \")
%(!options.flat ? depth_spacer : \"\")
%-(ansify_if(partial_account(options.flat), blue if color))\n%/
%$1 %$2 %$3\n%/
%(prepend_width ? \" \" * int(prepend_width) : \"\")
---------------- ---------------- ---------\n"
Define the output format for the register report. The default
(defined in report.h is:
"%(ansify_if(
ansify_if(justify(format_date(date), int(date_width)),
green if color and date > today),
bold if should_bold))
%(ansify_if(
ansify_if(justify(truncated(payee, int(payee_width)), int(payee_width)),
bold if color and !cleared and actual),
bold if should_bold))
%(ansify_if(
ansify_if(justify(truncated(display_account, int(account_width),
int(abbrev_len)), int(account_width)),
blue if color),
bold if should_bold))
%(ansify_if(
justify(scrub(display_amount), int(amount_width),
3 + int(meta_width) + int(date_width) + int(payee_width)
+ int(account_width) + int(amount_width) + int(prepend_width),
true, color),
bold if should_bold))
%(ansify_if(
justify(scrub(display_total), int(total_width),
4 + int(meta_width) + int(date_width) + int(payee_width)
+ int(account_width) + int(amount_width) + int(total_width)
+ int(prepend_width), true, color),
bold if should_bold))\n%/
%(justify(\" \", int(date_width)))
%(ansify_if(
justify(truncated(has_tag(\"Payee\") ? payee : \" \",
int(payee_width)), int(payee_width)),
bold if should_bold))
%$3 %$4 %$5\n"
Set the format for csv reports. The default is:
"%(quoted(date)), %(quoted(code)), %(quoted(payee)), %(quoted(display_account)), %(quoted(commodity(scrub(display_amount)))), %(quoted(quantity(scrub(display_amount)))), %(quoted(cleared ? \"*\" : (pending ? \"!\" : \"\"))), %(quoted(join(note | xact.note)))\n"
Set the format for amount plots, using the --amount-data (-j) option. The default is:
"%(format_date(date, \"%Y-%m-%d\")) %(quantity(scrub(display_amount)))\n"
Set the format for total plots, using the --total-data (-J) option. The default is:
"%(format_date(date, \"%Y-%m-%d\")) %(quantity(scrub(display_total)))\n"
Set the format expected for the historical price file. The default is:
"P %(datetime) %(display_account) %(scrub(display_amount))\n"
Set the format for the prices report. The default is:
"%(date) %-8(display_account) %(justify(scrub(display_amount), 12,
2 + 9 + 8 + 12, true, color))\n"
These options affect how commodity values are displayed:
Set the file that is used for recording downloaded commodity prices. It is always read on startup, to determine historical prices. Other settings can be placed in this file manually, to prevent downloading quotes for a specific commodity, for example. This is done by adding a line like the following:
; Don't download quotes for the dollar, or timelog values N $ N h
Note: Ledger NEVER writes output to files. You are responsible for updating the price-db file. The best way is to have your price download script maintain this file.
The format of the file can be changed by telling ledger to use the --pricedb-format FORMAT_STRING you define.
Set the expected freshness of price quotes, in INT minutes. That is, if the last known quote for any commodity is older than this value, and if --download is being used, then the Internet will be consulted again for a newer price. Otherwise, the old price is still considered to be fresh enough.
Cause quotes to be automagically downloaded, as needed, by running
a script named getquote and expecting that script to return
a value understood by ledger. A sample implementation of
a getquote script, implemented in Perl, is provided in the
distribution. Downloaded quote price are then appended to the price
database, usually specified using the environment variable
LEDGER_PRICE_DB.
There are several different ways that ledger can report the totals it displays. The most flexible way to adjust them is by using value expressions, and the --amount EXPR (-t) and --total VEXPR (-T) options. However, there are also several “default” reports, which will satisfy most users’ basic reporting needs:
Report commodity totals (this is the default).
Report the cost basis for all postings.
Use the last known value for commodities to calculate final values.
Report the net gain/loss for all commodities in the report that have a price history.
Often you will be more interested in the value of your entire holdings, in your preferred currency. It might be nice to know you hold 10,000 shares of PENNY, but you are more interested in whether or not that is worth $1000.00 or $10,000.00. However, the current day value of a commodity can mean different things to different people, depending on the accounts involved, the commodities, the nature of the transactions, etc.
When you specify --market (-V), or --exchange COMMODITY (-X), you are requesting that some or all of the commodities be valuated as of today (or whatever --now DATE is set to). But what does such a valuation mean? This meaning is governed by the presence of a VALUE meta-data property, whose content is an expression used to compute that value.
If no VALUE property is specified, each posting is assumed to have a default, as if you’d specified a global, automated transaction as follows:
= expr true
; VALUE:: market(amount, date, exchange)
This definition emulates the present day behavior of --market (-V) and --exchange COMMODITY (-X) (in the case of ‘-X’, the requested commodity is passed via the string ‘exchange’ above).
One thing many people have wanted to do is to fixate the valuation of old European currencies in terms of the Euro after a certain date:
= expr commodity == "DM"
; VALUE:: date < [Jun 2008] ? market(amount, date, exchange) : 1.44 EUR
This says: If --now DATE is some old date, use market prices as they were at that time; but if --now DATE is past June 2008, use a fixed price for converting Deutsche Mark to Euro.
Or how about never re-valuating commodities used in Expenses, since they cannot have a different future value:
= /^Expenses:/
; VALUE:: market(amount, post.date, exchange)
This says the future valuation is the same as the valuation at the time
of posting. post.date equals the posting’s date, while just ’date’ is
the value of --now DATE (defaults to today).
Or how about valuating miles based on a reimbursement rate during a specific time period:
= expr commodity == "miles" and date >= [2007] and date < [2008]
; VALUE:: market($1.05, date, exchange)
In this case, miles driven in 2007 will always be valuated at $1.05 each. If you use ‘-X EUR’ to expressly request all amounts in Euro, Ledger shall convert $1.05 to Euro by whatever means are appropriate for dollars.
Note that you can have a valuation expression specific to a particular posting or transaction, by overriding these general defaults using specific meta-data:
2010-12-26 Example
Expenses:Food $20
; Just to be silly, always valuate *these* $20 as 30 DM, no matter what
; the user asks for with -V or -X
; VALUE:: 30 DM
Assets:Cash
This example demonstrates that your value expression should be as symbolic as possible, using terms like ’amount’ and ’date’, rather than specific amounts and dates. Also, you should pass the amount along to the function ’market’ so it can be further revalued if the user has asked for a specific currency.
Or, if it better suits your accounting, you can be less symbolic, which allows you to report most everything in EUR if you use ‘-X EUR’, except for certain accounts or postings which should always be valuated in another currency. For example:
= /^Assets:Brokerage:CAD$/
; Always report the value of commodities in this account in
; terms of present day dollars, despite what was asked for
; on the command-line VALUE:: market(amount, date, ‘$’)
Ledger presently has no way of handling such things as FIFO and LIFO.
If you specify an unadorned commodity name, like AAPL, it will balance against itself. If --lots are not being displayed, then it will appear to balance against any lot of AAPL.
If you specify an adorned commodity, like AAPL {$10.00}, it will also balance against itself, and against any AAPL if --lots is not specified. But if you do specify --lot-prices, for example, then it will balance against that specific price for AAPL.
Normally when you use --exchange COMMODITY (-X) to request that amounts be reported in a specific commodity, Ledger uses these values:
register report, use the value of that commodity on
the date of the posting being reported, with a ‘<Revalued>’ posting
added at the end if today’s value is different from the value of the
last posting.
balance report, use the value of that commodity as of
today.
You can now specify --historical (-H) to ask that all valuations for any amount be done relative to the date that amount was encountered.
You can also now use --exchange COMMODITY (-X) (and --historical (-H)) in conjunction with --basis (-B) and --price (-I), to see valuation reports of just your basis costs or lot prices.
Finally, sometimes, you may seek to only report one (or some subset) of the commodities in terms of another commodity. In this situation, you can use the syntax --exchange COMMODITY1:COMMODITY2 to request that ledger always display COMMODITY1 in terms of COMMODITY2, but you want no other commodities to be automatically displayed in terms of COMMODITY2 without additional --exchange options. For example, if you wanted to report EUR and BTC in terms of USD, but report all other commodities without conversion to USD, you could use: --exchange EUR:USD --exchange BTC:USD.
Every option to ledger may be set using an environment variable if the
option has a long name. For example setting the environment variable
‘LEDGER_DATE_FORMAT="%d.%m.%Y"’ will have the same effect as specifying
‘--date-format '%d.%m.%Y'’ on the command-line. Options on the
command-line always take precedence over environment variable settings, however.
Note that you may also permanently specify option values by placing option settings in the file ~/.ledgerrc one option per line, for example:
--pager /bin/cat --date-format %d.%m.%Y
A period expression indicates a span of time, or a reporting interval, or both. Ledger’s end dates are always exclusive, imagine the date is followed by 00:00:00 time. They are instants in time not entire days. The full syntax is:
[INTERVAL] [BEGIN] [END]
The optional INTERVAL part may be any one of:
every day every week every month every quarter every year every N days # N is any integer every N weeks every N months every N quarters every N years daily weekly biweekly monthly bimonthly quarterly yearly
After the interval, a begin time, end time, both or neither may be specified. As for the begin time, it can be either of:
from <SPEC> since <SPEC>
The end time can be either of:
to <SPEC> until <SPEC>
Where SPEC can be any of:
2004 2004/10 2004/10/1 10/1 october oct this week # or day, month, quarter, year next week last week
The beginning and ending can be given at the same time, if it spans a single period. In that case, just use SPEC by itself. In that case, the period ‘oct’, for example, will cover all the days in October. The possible forms are:
<SPEC> in <SPEC>
Here are a few examples of period expressions:
monthly monthly in 2004 weekly from oct weekly from last month from sep to oct from 10/1 to 10/5 monthly until 2005 from apr until nov last oct weekly last august
Keeping a budget allows you to pay closer attention to your income and expenses, by reporting how far your actual financial activity is from your expectations.
To start keeping a budget, put some periodic transactions (see Periodic Transactions) at the top of your ledger file. A periodic transaction is almost identical to a regular transaction, except that it begins with a tilde and has a period expression in place of a payee. For example:
~ Monthly
Expenses:Rent $500.00
Expenses:Food $450.00
Expenses:Auto:Gas $120.00
Expenses:Insurance $150.00
Expenses:Phone $125.00
Expenses:Utilities $100.00
Expenses:Movies $50.00
Expenses $200.00 ; all other expenses
Assets
~ Yearly
Expenses:Auto:Repair $500.00
Assets
These two periodic transactions give the usual monthly expenses, as well as one typical yearly expense. For help on finding out what your average monthly expenses are for any category, use a command like:
$ ledger -p "this year" --monthly --average register ^expenses
The reported totals are the current year’s average for each account.
Once these periodic transactions are defined, creating a budget report is as easy as adding --budget to the command-line. For example, a typical monthly expense report would be:
$ ledger --monthly register ^expenses
To see the same report balanced against your budget, use:
$ ledger --budget --monthly register ^expenses
A budget report includes only those accounts that appear in the budget. To see all expenses balanced against the budget, use --add-budget. You can even see only the unbudgeted expenses using --unbudgeted:
$ ledger --unbudgeted --monthly register ^expenses
You can also use these flags with the balance command.
Sometimes it’s useful to know what your finances will look like in the future, such as determining when an account will reach zero. Ledger makes this easy to do, using the same periodic transactions as are used for budgeting. An example forecast report can be generated with:
$ ledger --file drewr3.dat --forecast "T>{\$-500.00}" register ^assets ^liabilities
This report continues outputting postings until the running total is greater than $-500.00. A final posting is always shown, to inform you what the total afterwards would be.
Forecasting can also be used with the balance report,
but by date only, and not against the running total:
$ ledger --forecast "d<[2010]" bal ^assets ^liabilities
Ledger directly supports “timelog” entries, which have this form:
i 2013/03/28 22:13:00 ACCOUNT[ PAYEE] o 2013/03/29 03:39:00
This records a check-in to the given ACCOUNT, and a check-out. You can be checked-in to multiple accounts at a time, if you wish, and they can span multiple days (use --day-break to break them up in the report). The number of seconds between check-in and check-out is accumulated as time to that ACCOUNT. If the checkout uses a capital ‘O’, the transaction is marked “cleared”. You can use an optional PAYEE for whatever meaning you like.
Now, there are a few ways to generate this information. You can use the timeclock.el package, which is part of Emacs. Or you can write a simple script in whichever language you prefer to emit similar information. Or you can use Org mode’s time-clocking abilities and the org2tc script developed by John Wiegley.
These timelog entries can appear in a separate file, or directly in your main ledger file. The initial ‘i’ and ‘o’ characters count as Ledger “directives”, and are accepted anywhere that ordinary transactions are valid.
Ledger uses value expressions to make calculations for many different purposes:
Value expressions support most simple math and logic operators, in addition to a set of functions and variables.
Display predicates are also very handy with register reports, to constrain which transactions are printed. For example, the following command shows only transactions from the beginning of the current month, while still calculating the running balance based on all transactions:
$ ledger -d "d>[this month]" register checking
The advantage of this command’s complexity is that it prints the running total in terms of all transactions in the register. The following, simpler command is similar, but totals only the displayed postings:
$ ledger -b "this month" register checking
Below are the one letter variables available in any value expression.
For the register and print commands, these variables
relate to individual postings, and sometimes the account affected by a
posting. For the balance command, these variables relate to
accounts, often with a subtle difference in meaning. The use of each
variable for both is specified.
tThis maps to whatever the user specified with --amount
EXPR (-t). In a register report, --amount
EXPR (-t) changes the value column; in a balance
report, it has no meaning by default. If --amount EXPR
(-t) was not specified, the current report style’s value expression is
used.
TThis maps to whatever the user specified with --total VEXPR (-T). In a register report, --total VEXPR (-T) changes the totals column; in a balance report, this is the value given for each account. If --total VEXPR (-T) was not specified, the current report style’s value expression is used.
mThis is always the present moment/date.
ddateA posting’s date, as the number of seconds past the epoch. This is always “today” for an account.
aux_dateA posting’s aux date
aamountThe posting’s amount; the balance of an account, without considering children.
bThe cost of a posting; the cost of an account, without its children.
vThe market value of a posting or an account, without its children.
gThe net gain (market value minus cost basis), for a posting or an account, without its children. It is the same as ‘v-b’.
depthThe depth (“level”) of an account. If an account has one parent, its depth is one.
nThe index of a posting, or the count of postings affecting an account.
Xcleared‘1’ if a posting’s transaction has been cleared, ‘0’ otherwise.
uncleared‘1’ if a posting’s transaction state is uncleared, ‘0’ otherwise.
pending‘1’ if a posting’s transaction state is pending, ‘0’ otherwise.
R‘1’ if a posting is not virtual, ‘0’ otherwise.
Z‘1’ if a posting is not automated, ‘0’ otherwise.
OThe total of all postings seen so far, or the total of an account and all its children.
NThe total count of postings affecting an account and all its children.
The available one letter functions are:
-Negates the argument.
UThe absolute (unsigned) value of the argument.
SStrips the commodity from the argument.
PThe present market value of the argument. The syntax ‘P(x,d)’ is supported, which yields the market value at time ‘d’. If no date is given, then the current moment is used.
The operators, in order of precedence, are:
* /
+ -
! < > =
& | ?:
not (!)
neg
==
<
<=
>
>=
and
or
+
-
*
/
QUERY
COLON
CONS
SEQ
DEFINE
LOOKUP
LAMBDA
CALL
MATCH
More complicated expressions are possible using:
expr "amount == COMMODITY AMOUNT"The amount can be any kind of amount supported by ledger, with or without a commodity. Use this for decimal values.
/REGEX/expr account =~ /REGEX/A regular expression that matches against an account’s full name. If a posting, this will match against the account affected by the posting.
@/REGEX/expr payee =~ /REGEX/A regular expression that matches against a transaction’s payee name.
%/REGEX/expr has_tag(/REGEX/)expr has_tag('TAG')A regular expression (REGEX) or string (TAG) that checks for the tags of a transaction.
expr has_meta(/REGEX/)expr has_meta('TAG')A regular expression (REGEX) or string (TAG) that checks for the metadata key of a transaction.
expr tag(REGEX) =~ /REGEX/A regular expression that matches a transaction’s tags against its values.
expr date =~ /REGEX/Useful for specifying a date in plain terms. For example, you could say ‘expr date =~ /2014/’.
expr comment =~ /REGEX/A regular expression that matches against a posting’s comment
field. This searches only a posting’s field, not the transaction’s note
or comment field. For example, ledger reg "expr" "comment =~
/landline/" will match:
2014/1/29 Phone bill
Assets:Checking $50.00
Expenses:Phone $-50.00 ; landline bill
but will not match:
2014/1/29 Phone bill ; landline bill
; landline bill
Assets:Checking $50.00
Expenses:Phone $-50.00
To match the latter, use ‘ledger reg "expr" "note =~ /landline/"’ instead.
expr note =~ /REGEX/A regular expression that matches against a transaction’s note field. This searches all comments in the transaction, including comments on individual postings. Thus, ‘ledger reg "expr" "note =~ /landline/"’ will match all the three examples below:
2014/1/29 Phone bill
Assets:Checking $50.00
Expenses:Phone $-50.00 ; landline bill
2014/1/29 Phone bill ; landline bill
Assets:Checking $50.00
Expenses:Phone $-50.00
2014/1/29 Phone bill
; landline bill
Assets:Checking $50.00
Expenses:Phone $-50.00
(EXPR)A sub-expression is nested in parenthesis. This can be useful passing more complicated arguments to functions, or for overriding the natural precedence order of operators.
expr base =~ /REGEX/A regular expression that matches against an account’s base name. If a posting, this will match against the account affected by the posting.
expr code =~ /REGEX/A regular expression that matches against the transaction code (the text that occurs between parentheses before the payee).
expr any(KEYWORD =~ /REGEX/)The any keyword is used to specify that at least one posting of
the transaction must match the expression in brackets. For example,
‘ledger -f d reg expr "any(account =~ /Assets:/)"’ can be used to
display all transactions which involve at least one ‘Assets:’
account.
expr all(KEYWORD =~ /REGEX/)The all keyword is used to specify that all postings of a
transactions must match the expression in brackets. For example,
‘ledger -f d reg expr "all(account =~ /Assets:/)"’ can be used to
display all transactions where all accounts are ‘Assets:’.
The query command can be used to see how Ledger interprets
your query. This can be useful if you are not getting the results you
expect (see Pre-Commands).
The following Ledger journal data (saved as expr.dat) is used to explain the behaviour of the functions and variables below:
2015/01/16 * (C0D3) Payee
Assets:Cash ¤ -123,45
; Payee: PiggyBank
Expenses:Office Supplies
Return the absolute value of the given value, e.g. amount.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(account) %(abs(amount))\n" reg assets
Assets:Cash ¤ 123,45
Return the calculated amount of the posting according to the --amount option.
Render the given expression as a string, applying the proper ANSI escape codes to display it in the given color if bool is true. It typically checks the value of the option --color. Since ANSI escape codes include non-printable character sequences, such as escape ^[ the following example may not appear as the final result on the command-line.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(ansify_if(account, blue, options.color))\n" reg
[34mAssets:Cash[0m [34mExpenses:Office Supplies[0m
Return the next integer of value toward +infinity.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(account) %(ceiling(amount))\n" reg
Assets:Cash ¤ -123,00 Expenses:Office Supplies ¤ 124,00
Return the transaction code, the string between the parenthesis after the date.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(account) %(code)\n" reg assets
Assets:Cash C0D3
Return the commodity of the posting amount.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(account) %(commodity)\n" reg
Assets:Cash ¤ Expenses:Office Supplies ¤
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(date) %(account)\n" reg assets
2015/01/16 Assets:Cash
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
Return the next integer of value toward -infinity.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(account) %(floor(amount))\n" reg
Assets:Cash ¤ -124,00 Expenses:Office Supplies ¤ 123,00
Evaluate string as format just like the --format option.
Return the date as a string using format. See
strftime (3) for format string details.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(format_date(date, '%A, %B %d. %Y'))\n" reg assets
Friday, January 16. 2015
Return the datetime as a string using format. Refer to
strftime (3) for format string details.
Return the value in sequence at index. The first element is index 0. For internal use only.
Return true if value is a sequence. For internal use only.
Replace all newlines in value with \n.
Right or left justify the string representing value. The width of the field in the first line is given by first_width. For subsequent lines the width is given by latter_width. If latter_width=-1, then first_width is used for all lines. If right_justify=true then the field is right justified within the width of the field. If it is false, then the field is left justified and padded to the full width of the field. If colorize is true, then ledger will honor color settings.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "»%(justify(account, 30, 30, true))«\n" reg
» Assets:Cash« » Expenses:Office Supplies«
Return the price of value at datetime. Note that datetime
must be surrounded by brackets in order to be parsed correctly,
e.g. [2012/03/23].
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
A variable that allows access to the values of the given command-line options
using the long option names, e.g. to see whether --daily or -D
was given use option.daily.
$ ledger -f expr.dat -X $ -D --format "%(options.daily) %(options.exchange)\n" reg assets
true $
Return the percentage of value_a in relation to value_b (used as 100%)
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(percent(amount, 200))\n" reg
-61.73% 61.73%
Print value to stdout. For internal use only.
Return the quantity of value for values that have a per-unit cost.
Surround expression with double quotes. If expression contains a double quote, it will be escaped with a backslash.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(quoted(account)) %(quoted(amount))\n" reg
"Assets:Cash" "¤ -123,45" "Expenses:Office Supplies" "¤ 123,45"
Similar, except an embedded double quote would be escaped by preceding it with another double quote, as prescribed by RFC 4180.
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
Return value rounded to n digits. Does not affect formatting.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(account) %(roundto(amount, 1))\n" reg
Assets:Cash ¤ -123,40 Expenses:Office Supplies ¤ 123,50
Clean value using various transformations such as round, stripping
value annotations, and more.
Return true if expression given to --bold-if evaluates to true. For internal use only.
Convert value to an amount. For internal use only.
Convert value to a balance. For internal use only.
Convert value to a boolean. For internal use only.
Convert value to a date. For internal use only.
Convert value to a datetime. For internal use only.
Return the integer value for value.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%(1 + to_int('1'))\n%(2,5 + int(2,5))\n" reg assets
2 4.5
Convert value to a mask. For internal use only.
Convert value to a sequence. For internal use only.
Return today’s date.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --now 2015/01/01 --format "%(today)\n" reg assets
2015/01/01
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
Return the calculated total of the posting according to the --total option.
Trim leading and trailing whitespace from value.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "»%(trim(' Trimmed '))«\n" reg assets
»Trimmed«
Truncate string to total_len ensuring that each account is at least account_len long.
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
Format strings may be used to change the output format of reports. They are specified by passing a formatting string to the --format FORMAT_STRING (-F) option. Within that string, constructs are allowed which make it possible to display the various parts of an account or posting in custom ways.
There are several additional flags that allow you to define formats for specific reports. These are useful to define in your configuration file and will allow you to run ledger reports from the command-line without having to enter a new format for each command.
Within a format string, a substitution is specified using a percent ‘%’ character. The basic format of all substitutions is:
%[-][MIN WIDTH][.MAX WIDTH](VALEXPR)
If the optional minus sign ‘-’ follows the percent character ‘%’, whatever is substituted will be left justified. The default is right justified. If a minimum width is given next, the substituted text will be at least that wide, perhaps wider. If a period and a maximum width is given, the substituted text will never be wider than this, and will be truncated to fit. Here are some examples:
%-20PA transaction’s payee, left justified and padded to 20 characters wide.
%20PThe same, right justified, at least 20 chars wide.
%.20PThe same, no more than 20 chars wide.
The expression following the format constraints can be a single letter, or an expression enclosed in parentheses or brackets.
For demonstration purposes the journal data from expr.dat is used. The allowable expressions are:
%Inserts a percent sign.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%%\n" reg assets
%
tInserts the results of the value expression specified by --amount EXPR (-t). If --amount EXPR (-t) was not specified, the current report style’s value expression is used.
TInserts the results of the value expression specified by --total VEXPR (-T). If --total VEXPR (-T) was not specified, the current report style’s value expression is used.
(EXPR)Inserts the amount resulting from the value expression given in parentheses. To insert five times the total value of an account, for example, one could say ‘%12(5*O)’. Note: It’s important to put the five first in that expression, so that the commodity doesn’t get stripped from the total.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%12(5*O)\n" reg assets
¤ -617,25
[DATEFMT]Inserts the result of formatting a posting’s date with a date format
string, exactly like those supported by strftime (3). For
example: ‘%[%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S]’.
SInsert the path name of the file from which the transaction’s data was
read. Only sensible in a register report.
$ ledger -f ~/journal.dat --format "%S\n" reg assets
/home/jwiegley/journal.dat
BInserts the beginning character position of that transaction within the file.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%B\n" reg assets
26
bInserts the beginning line of that transaction within the file.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%b\n" reg assets
2
EInserts the ending character position of that transaction within the file.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%E\n" reg assets
90
eInserts the ending line of that transaction within the file.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%e\n" reg assets
3
DReturns the date according to the default format.
dReturns the date according to the default format. If the transaction
has an effective date, it prints ACTUAL_DATE=EFFECTIVE_DATE.
XIf a posting has been cleared, this returns a 1, otherwise returns 0.
YThis is the same as ‘%X’, except that it only displays a state character if all of the member postings have the same state.
CInserts the transaction code. This is the value specified between parentheses on the first line of the transaction.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%C\n" reg assets
(C0D3)
PInserts the payee related to a posting.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%P\n" reg assets
PiggyBank
AInserts the full name of an account.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%A\n" reg
Assets:Cash Expenses:Office Supplies
NInserts the note associated with a posting, if one exists.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%N\n" reg assets
Payee: PiggyBank
/The ‘%/’ construct is special. It separates a format string between what is printed for the first posting of a transaction, and what is printed for all subsequent postings. If not used, the same format string is used for all postings.
$ ledger -f expr.dat --format "%P\n%/%A\n" reg
PiggyBank Expenses:Office Supplies
As an example of how flexible the --format FORMAT_STRING strings can be, the default balance format looks like this (the various functions are described later):
"%(justify(scrub(display_total), 20, -1, true, color))" " %(!options.flat ? depth_spacer : \"\")" "%-(ansify_if(partial_account(options.flat), blue if color))\n%/" "%$1\n%/" "--------------------\n"
The following codes return the width allocated for the specific fields. The defaults can be changed using the corresponding command-line options:
date_width
payee_width
account_width
amount_width
total_width
The character-based formatting ledger can do is limited to the ANSI terminal character colors and font highlights in a normal TTY session.
red | magenta | bold |
green | cyan | underline |
yellow | white | blink |
blue | black |
amount_exprabscommoditydisplay_amountdisplay_totalfloorget_atis_seqmarketpercentpricequantityroundedtruncatedtotal_exprtop_amountto_booleanto_intto_amountto_balanceunroundedThe following functions allow you to manipulate and format dates.
dateReturn the date of the current transaction.
format_date(date, "FORMAT_STRING")Format the date using the given format string.
nowReturn the current date and time. If the --now DATE option is defined it will return that value.
todayReturn the current date. If the --now DATE option is defined it will return that value.
to_datetimeConvert a string to a date-time value.
to_dateConvert a string to date value.
value_dateDate and time format are specified as strings of single letter codes preceded by percent signs. Any separator, or no separator can be specified.
Dates are formed from a combination of day, month and year codes, in whatever order you prefer:
%YFour digit year.
%yTwo digit year.
%mTwo digit month.
%dTwo digit date.
So "%Y%m%d" yields ‘20111214’ which provides a date that
is simple to sort on.
You can have additional weekday information in your date with ‘%A’ as
%m-%d-%Y %Ayields ‘02-10-2010 Wednesday’.
%A %m-%d-%Yyields ‘Wednesday 02-10-2010’.
These are options you can select for weekday
%aweekday, abbreviated Wed.
%Aweekday, full Wednesday.
%dday of the month (dd), zero padded up to 10.
%eday of the month (dd), no leading zero up to 10.
%jday of year, zero padded 000–366.
%uday of week starting with Monday (1), i.e. mtwtfss 3.
%wday of week starting with Sunday (0), i.e. smtwtfs 3.
You can have additional month information in your date with ‘%B’ as
%m-%d-%Y %Byields ‘02-10-2010 February’.
%B %m-%d-%Yyields ‘February 02-10-2010’.
These are options you can select for month
%m‘mm’ month as two digits.
%bLocale’s abbreviated month, for example ‘02’ might be abbreviated as ‘Feb’.
%BLocale’s full month, variable length, e.g. February.
Additional date format parameters which can be used:
%Uweek number Sunday as first day of week, ranging 01–53.
%Wweek number Monday as first day of week, ranging 01–53.
%Vweek of the year, ranging 01–53.
%Ccentury, ranging 00–99.
%Dyields %m/%d/%y as in ‘02/10/10’.
%xlocale’s date representation, as ‘02/10/2010’ for the U.S.
%Fyields %Y-%m-%d as in ‘2010-02-10’.
The following format functions allow you limited formatting of text:
ansify_if(value, color)Surrounds the string representing value with ANSI codes to give it
color on a TTY display. Has no effect if directed to a file.
justify(value, first_width, latter_width, right_justify, colorize)Right or left justify the string representing value. The width
of the field in the first line is given by first_width. For
subsequent lines the width is given by latter_width. If
latter_width=-1, then first_width is use for all lines.
If right_justify=true then the field is right justify within
the width of the field. If it is false, then the field is left
justified and padded to the full width of the field. If
colorize is true, then ledger will honor color settings.
join(STR)Replaces line feeds in STR with ‘\n’.
quoted(STR)Return STR surrounded by double quotes, ‘"STR"’.
strip(value)Values can have numerous annotations, such as effective dates and lot
prices. strip removes these annotations.
The following format strings provide locational metadata regarding the coordinates of entries in the source data file(s) that generated the posting.
filenamethe name of the ledger data file from whence the posting came, abbreviated ‘S’.
beg_poscharacter position in filename where entry for posting begins,
abbreviated ‘B’.
end_poscharacter position in filename where entry for posting ends,
abbreviated ‘E’.
beg_lineline number in filename where entry for posting begins,
abbreviated ‘b’.
end_lineline number in filename where entry for posting ends,
abbreviated ‘e’.
Python can be used to extend your Ledger experience. But first, a word must be said about Ledger’s data model, so that other things make sense later.
Every interaction with Ledger happens in the context of a Session. Even if you don’t create a session manually, one is created for you by the top-level interface functions. The Session is where objects live like the Commodities that Amounts refer to.
To make a Session useful, you must read a Journal into it, using the
function ‘read_journal‘. This reads Ledger data from the given
file, populates a Journal object within the current Session, and
returns a reference to that Journal object.
Within the Journal live all the Transactions, Postings, and other objects related to your data. There are also AutomatedTransactions and PeriodicTransactions, etc.
Here is how you would traverse all the postings in your data file:
import ledger
for xact in ledger.read_journal("sample.dat").xacts():
for post in xact.posts():
print "Transferring %s to/from %s" % (post.amount, post.account)
Ledger data exists in one of two forms: raw and cooked. Raw objects are what you get from a traversal like the above, and represent exactly what was seen in the data file. Consider this journal:
= true
(Assets:Cash) $100
2012-03-01 KFC
Expenses:Food $100
Assets:Credit
In this case, the raw regular transaction in this file is:
2012-03-01 KFC
Expenses:Food $100
Assets:Credit
While the cooked form is:
2012-03-01 KFC
Expenses:Food $100
Assets:Credit $-100
(Assets:Cash) $100
So the easy way to think about raw vs. cooked is that raw is the unprocessed data, and cooked has had all considerations applied.
When you traverse a Journal by iterating over its transactions, you are generally looking at raw data. In order to look at cooked data, you must generate a report of some kind by querying the journal:
for post in ledger.read_journal("sample.dat").query("food"):
print "Transferring %s to/from %s" % (post.amount, post.account)
The reason why queries iterate over postings instead of transactions is
that queries often return only a “slice” of the transactions they
apply to. You can always get at a matching posting’s transaction by
looking at its xact member:
last_xact = None
for post in ledger.read_journal("sample.dat").query(""):
if post.xact != last_xact:
for post in post.xact.posts():
print "Transferring %s to/from %s" % (post.amount,
post.account)
last_xact = post.xact
This query ends up reporting every cooked posting in the Journal, but does it transaction-wise. It relies on the fact that an unsorted report returns postings in the exact order they were parsed from the journal file.
The Journal.query() method accepts every argument you can specify on the command-line, including --options.
Since a query “cooks” the journal it applies to, only one query may be active for that journal at a given time. Once the query object is gone (after the for loop), then the data reverts back to its raw state.
You can embed Python into your data files using the ’python’ directive:
python
import os
def check_path(path_value):
print "%s => %s" % (str(path_value), os.path.isfile(str(path_value)))
return os.path.isfile(str(path_value))
tag PATH
assert check_path(value)
2012-02-29 KFC
; PATH: somebogusfile.dat
Expenses:Food $20
Assets:Cash
Any Python functions you define this way become immediately available as valexpr functions.
When numbers come from Ledger, like post.amount, the type of the value is Amount. It can be used just like an ordinary number, except that addition and subtraction are restricted to amounts with the same commodity. If you need to create sums of multiple commodities, use a Balance. For example:
total = Balance()
for post in ledger.read_journal("sample.dat").query(""):
total += post.amount
print total
Ledger is developed as a tiered set of functionality, where lower tiers know nothing about the higher tiers. In fact, multiple libraries are built during the development the process, and link unit tests to these libraries, so that it is a link error for a lower tier to violate this modularity.
Those tiers are:
There’s lots of general utility in Ledger for doing time parsing, using Boost.Regex, error handling, etc. It’s all done in a way that can be reused in other projects as needed.
A numerical abstraction combining multi-precision rational numbers (via GMP) with commodities. These structures can be manipulated like regular numbers in either C++ or Python (as Amount objects).
Commodities are all owned by a commodity pool, so that future parsing of amounts can link to the same commodity and established a consistent price history and record of formatting details.
Adds the concept of multiple amounts with varying commodities. Supports simple arithmetic, and multiplication and division with non-commoditized values.
Amounts have prices, and these are kept in a data graph which the amount code itself is only dimly aware of (there’s three points of access so an amount can query its revalued price on a given date).
Often the higher layers in Ledger don’t care if something is an amount
or a balance, they just want to add stuff to it or print it. For this,
I created a type-erasure class, value_t/Value, into which many things
can be stuffed and then operated on. They can contain amounts,
balances, dates, strings, etc. If you try to apply an operation between
two values that makes no sense (like dividing an amount by a balance),
an error occurs at runtime, rather than at compile-time (as would happen
if you actually tried to divide an amount_t by
a balance_t).
This is the core data type for the value expression language.
The next layer up adds functions and operators around the Value concept. This lets you apply transformations and tests to Values at runtime without having to bake it into C++. The set of functions available is defined by each object type in Ledger (posts, accounts, transactions, etc.), though the core engine knows nothing about these. At its base, it only knows how to apply operators to values, and how to pass them to and receive them from functions.
Expressions can be onerous to type at the command-line, so there’s a shorthand for reporting called “query expressions”. These add no functionality of their own, but are purely translated from the input string down to the corresponding value expression, for example the input string ‘cash’ is translated to ‘(account =~ /cash/)’. This is a convenience layer.
Format strings let you interpolate value expressions into strings, with
the requirement that any interpolated value have a string
representation. Really all this does is calculate the value expression
in the current report context, call the resulting value’s
to_string() method, and stuffs the result into the output string.
It also provides printf-like behavior, such as min/max width, right/left
justification, etc.
Next is a base type shared by anything that can appear in a journal: an item_t. It contains details common to all such parsed entities, like what file and line it was found on, etc.
The most numerous object found in a Journal, postings are a type of item that contain an account, an amount, a cost, and metadata. There are some other complications, like the account can be marked virtual, the amount could be an expression, etc.
Postings are owned by transactions, always. This subclass of item_t
knows about the date, the payee, etc. If a date or metadata tag is
requested from a posting and it doesn’t have that information, the
transaction is queried to see if it can provide it.
Postings are also shared by accounts, though the actual memory is managed by the transaction. Each account knows all the postings within it, but contains relatively little information of its own.
Finally, all transactions with their postings, and all accounts, are
owned by a journal_t object. This is the go-to object for
querying and reporting on your data.
There is a textual parser, wholly contained in textual.cc, which knows how to parse text into journal objects, which then get “finalized” and added to the journal. Finalization is the step that enforces the double-entry guarantee.
Every journal object is “iterable”, and these iterators are defined in iterators.h and iterators.cc. This iteration logic is kept out of the basic journal objects themselves for the sake of modularity.
Another abstraction isolated to its own layer, this class encapsulating the comparison of journal objects, based on whatever value expression the user passed to --sort VEXPR.
Many reports bring pseudo-journal objects into existence, like postings
which report totals in a ‘Total’ account. These objects are
created and managed by a temporaries_t object, which gets used in
many places by the reporting filters.
There is an option handling subsystem used by many of the layers further down. It makes it relatively easy for me to add new options, and to have those option settings immediately accessible to value expressions.
Every journal object is owned by a session, with the session providing support for that object. In GUI terms, this is the Controller object for the journal Data object, where every document window would be a separate session. They are all owned by the global scope.
Every time you create any report output, a report object is created to determine what you want to see. In the Ledger REPL, a new report object is created every time a command is executed. In CLI mode, only one report object ever comes into being, as Ledger immediately exits after displaying the results.
The way Ledger generates data is this: it asks the session for the current journal, and then creates an iterator applied to that journal. The kind of iterator depends on the type of report.
This iterator is then walked, and every object yielded from the iterator is passed to an “item handler”, whose type is directly related to the type of the iterator.
There are many, many item handlers, which can be chained together. Each one receives an item (post, account, xact, etc.), performs some action on it, and then passes it down to the next handler in the chain. There are filters which compute the running totals; that queue and sort all the input items before playing them back out in a new order; that filter out items which fail to match a predicate, etc. Almost every reporting feature in Ledger is related to one or more filters. Looking at filters.h, there are over 25 of them defined currently.
How filters get wired up, and in what order, is a complex process based on all the various options specified by the user. This is the job of the chain logic, found entirely in chain.cc. It took a really long time to get this logic exactly right, which is why I haven’t exposed this layer to the Python bridge yet.
Although filters are great and all, in the end you want to see stuff. This is the job of special “leaf” filters called output modules. They are implemented just like a regular filter, but they don’t have a “next” filter to pass the data on down to. Instead, they are the end of the line and must do something with the item that results in the user seeing something on their screen or in a file.
Select queries know a lot about everything, even though they implement their logic by implementing the user’s query in terms of all the other features thus presented. Select queries have no functionality of their own, they are simple a shorthand to provide access to much of Ledger’s functionality via a cleaner, more consistent syntax.
There is a master object which owns every other objects, and this is Ledger’s global scope. It creates the other objects, provides REPL behavior for the command-line utility, etc. In GUI terms, this is the Application object.
This creates the global scope object, performs error reporting, and handles command-line options which must precede even the creation of the global scope, such as --debug CODE.
And that’s Ledger in a nutshell. All the rest are details, such as which value expressions each journal item exposes, how many filters currently exist, which options the report and session scopes define, etc.
This chapter offers a complete description of the journal data format, suitable for implementers in other languages to follow. For users, the chapter on keeping a journal is less extensive, but more typical of common usage (see Keeping a Journal).
Data is collected in the form of transactions which occur in one or more journal files. Each transaction, in turn, is made up of one or more postings, which describe how amounts flow from one account to another. Here is an example of the simplest of journal files:
2010/05/31 Just an example
Expenses:Some:Account $100.00
Income:Another:Account
In this example, there is a transaction date, a payee, or description of the transaction, and two postings. The postings show movement of one hundred dollars from an account within the Income hierarchy, to the specified expense account. The name and meaning of these accounts is arbitrary, with no preferences implied, although you will find it useful to follow standard accounting practices (see Principles of Accounting with Ledger).
Since an amount is missing from the second posting, it is assumed to be the inverse of the first. This guarantees the cardinal rule of double-entry accounting: the sum of every transaction must balance to zero, or it is in error. Whenever Ledger encounters a null posting in a transaction, it uses it to balance the remainder.
It is also typical, though not enforced, to think of the first posting as the destination, and the final as the source. Thus, the amount of the first posting is typically positive. Consider:
2010/05/31 An income transaction
Assets:Checking $1,000.00
Income:Salary
2010/05/31 An expense transaction
Expenses:Dining $100.00
Assets:Checking
Comments are generally started using a ‘;’. However, in order to increase compatibility with other text manipulation programs and methods three additional comment characters are valid if used at the beginning of a line: ‘#’, ‘|’, and ‘*’.
The heart of a journal is the amounts it records, and this fact is reflected in the diversity of amount expressions allowed. All of them are covered here, though it must be said that sometimes, there are multiple ways to achieve a desired result.
Note: It is important to note that there must be at least two spaces between the end of the account and the beginning of the amount (including a commodity designator).
In the simplest form, bare decimal numbers are accepted:
2010/05/31 An income transaction
Assets:Checking 1000.00
Income:Salary
Such amounts may only use an optional period for a decimal point. These are referred to as integer amounts or uncommoditized amounts. In most ways they are similar to commoditized amounts, but for one significant difference: They always display in reports with full precision. More on this in a moment. For now, a word must be said about how Ledger stores numbers.
Every number parsed by Ledger is stored internally as an infinite-precision rational value. Floating-point math is never used, as it cannot be trusted to maintain precision of values. So, in the case of ‘1000.00’ above, the internal value is ‘100000/100’.
While rational numbers are great at not losing precision, the question arises: How should they be displayed? A number like ‘100000/100’ is no problem, since it represents a clean decimal fraction. But what about when the number ‘1/1’ is divided by three? How should one print ‘1/3’, an infinitely repeating decimal?
Ledger gets around this problem by rendering rationals into decimal at the last possible moment, and only for display. As such, some rounding must, at times, occur. If this rounding would affect the calculation of a running total, special accommodation postings are generated to make you aware it has happened. In practice, it happens rarely, but even then it does not reflect adjustment of the internal amount, only the displayed amount.
What has still not been answered is how Ledger rounds values. Should ‘1/3’ be printed as ‘0.33’ or ‘0.33333’? For commoditized amounts, the number of decimal places is decided by observing how each commodity is used; but in the case of integer amounts, an arbitrary factor must be chosen. Initially, this factor is six. Thus, ‘1/3’ is printed back as ‘0.333333’. Further, this rounding factor becomes associated with each particular value, and is carried through mathematical operations. For example, if that particular number were multiplied by itself, the decimal precision of the result would be twelve. Addition and subtraction do not affect precision.
Since each integer amount retains its own display precision, this is called full precision, as opposed to commoditized amounts, which always look to their commodity to know what precision they should round to, and so use commodity precision.
A commoditized amount is an integer amount which has an associated commodity. This commodity can appear before or after the amount, and may or may not be separated from it by a space. Most characters are allowed in a commodity name, except for the following:
.,;:?!
-+*/^&|=
<>[](){}
@
And yet, any of these may appear in a commodity name if it is surrounded by double quotes, for example:
100 "EUN+133"
If a quoted commodity is found, it is displayed in quotes as well, to avoid any confusion as to which part is the amount, and which part is the commodity.
Another feature of commoditized amounts is that they are reported back in the same form as parsed. If you specify dollar amounts using ‘$100’, they will print the same; likewise with ‘100 $’ or ‘$100.000’. You may even use decimal commas, such as ‘$100,00’, or thousand-marks, as in ‘$10,000.00’.
These display characteristics become associated with the commodity, with the result being that all amounts of the same commodity are reported consistently. Where this is most noticeable is the display precision, which is determined by the most precise value seen for a given commodity—in most cases.
Ledger makes a distinction between observed amounts and unobserved amounts. An observed amount is critiqued by Ledger to determine how amounts using that commodity should be displayed; unobserved amounts are significant in their value only—no matter how they are specified, it does not change how other amounts in that commodity will be displayed.
An example of this is found in cost expressions, covered next.
You have seen how to specify either a commoditized or an integer amount for a posting. But what if the amount you paid for something was in one commodity, and the amount received was another? There are two main ways to express this:
2010/05/31 Farmer's Market
Assets:My Larder 100 apples
Assets:Checking -$20.00
In this example, you have paid twenty dollars for one hundred apples. The cost to you is twenty cents per apple, and Ledger calculates this implied cost for you. You can also make the cost explicit using a cost amount:
2010/05/31 Farmer's Market
Assets:My Larder 100 apples @ $0.200000
Assets:Checking
Here the per-unit cost is given explicitly in the form of a cost amount; and since cost amounts are unobserved, the use of six decimal places has no effect on how dollar amounts are displayed in the final report. You can also specify the total cost:
2010/05/31 Farmer's Market
Assets:My Larder 100 apples @@ $20
Assets:Checking
These three forms have identical meaning. In most cases the first is preferred, but the second two are necessary when more than two postings are involved:
2010/05/31 Farmer's Market
Assets:My Larder 100 apples @ $0.200000
Assets:My Larder 100 pineapples @ $0.33
Assets:My Larder 100 "crab apples" @ $0.04
Assets:Checking
Here the implied cost is ‘$57.00’, which is entered into the null posting automatically so that the transaction balances.
In every transaction involving more than one commodity, there is always one which is the primary commodity. This commodity should be thought of as the exchange commodity, or the commodity used to buy and sell units of the other commodity. In the fruit examples above, dollars are the primary commodity. This is decided by Ledger based on the placement of the commodity in the transaction:
2010/05/31 Sample Transaction
Expenses 100 secondary
Assets -50 primary
2010/05/31 Sample Transaction
Expenses 100 secondary @ 0.5 primary
Assets
2010/05/31 Sample Transaction
Expenses 100 secondary @@ 50 primary
Assets
The only case where knowledge of primary versus secondary comes into play is in reports that use the --market (-V) or --basis (-B) options. With these, only primary commodities are shown.
If a transaction uses only one commodity, this commodity is also considered a primary. In fact, when Ledger goes about ensuring that all transactions balance to zero, it only ever asks this of primary commodities.
reloadForces ledger to reload any journal files. This function exists to support external programs controlling a running ledger process and does nothing for a command-line user.
sourceThe source command takes a journal file as an argument and
parses it checking for errors; no other reports are generated, and no
other arguments are necessary. Ledger will return success if no errors
are found.
These options are primarily for Ledger developers, but may be of some use to a user trying something new.
Ignore init files and environment variables for the ledger run.
If Ledger has been built with debug options this will provide extra
data during the run. Listed below are the available CODES to
debug. You can provide multiple using a regex expression like
"(account.display|expr.calc)".
account.display | draft.xact | option.names |
account.sorted | expr.calc | org.next_amount |
amount.commodities | expr.compile | org.next_total |
amount.convert | expr.merged.compile | parser.error |
amount.is_zero | filters.changed_value | pool.commodities |
amount.parse | filters.changed_value.rounding | post.assign |
amount.price | filters.collapse | python.init |
amount.refs | filters.forecast | python.interp |
amount.roundto | filters.interval | query.mask |
amount.truncate | filters.revalued | report.predicate |
amount.unround | format.abbrev | scope.search |
annotate.less | format.expr | scope.symbols |
archive.journal | generate.post | select.parse |
auto.columns | generate.post.string | textual.include |
budget.generate | history.find | textual.parse |
commodity.annotated.strip | history.map | timelog |
commodity.annotations | item.meta | times.epoch |
commodity.compare | ledger.read | times.interval |
commodity.download | ledger.validate | times.parse |
commodity.exchange | lookup | value.sort |
commodity.price.find | lookup.account | value.storage.refcount |
commodity.prices.add | mask.match | xact.extend |
commodity.prices.find | memory.debug | xact.extend.cleared |
csv.mappings | op.memory | xact.extend.fail |
csv.parse | option.args | xact.finalize |
Enable tracing. The INT specifies the level of trace desired:
LOG_OFF | 0 |
LOG_CRIT | 1 |
LOG_FATAL | 2 |
LOG_ASSERT | 3 |
LOG_ERROR | 4 |
LOG_VERIFY | 5 |
LOG_WARN | 6 |
LOG_INFO | 7 |
LOG_EXCEPT | 8 |
LOG_DEBUG | 9 |
LOG_TRACE | 10 |
LOG_ALL | 11 |
Print detailed information on the execution of Ledger.
Enable additional assertions during run-time. This causes a significant slowdown. When combined with --debug CODE ledger will produce memory trace information.
Verify that every constructed object is properly destructed. This is for debugging purposes only.
Print version information and exit.
Pre-commands are useful when you aren’t sure how a command or option will work. The difference between a pre-command and a regular command is that pre-commands ignore the journal data file completely, nor is the user’s init file read.
eval VEXPR ¶Evaluate the given value expression against the model transaction.
format FORMAT_STRING ¶Print details of how ledger uses the given formatting description and apply it against a model transaction.
generate ¶Randomly generates syntactically valid Ledger data from a seed. Used by the ‘GenerateTests’ harness for development testing.
parse VEXPR ¶expr VEXPR ¶Print details of how ledger uses the given value expression description and apply it against a model transaction.
period PERIOD_EXPRESSION ¶Evaluate the given period and report how Ledger interprets it:
$ ledger period "this year" --now 2011-01-01
--- Period expression tokens --- TOK_THIS: this TOK_YEAR: year END_REACHED: <EOF> --- Before stabilization --- range: in year 2011 --- After stabilization --- range: in year 2011 start: 11-Jan-01 finish: 12-Jan-01 --- Sample dates in range (max. 20) --- 1: 11-Jan-01
query ¶args ¶Evaluate the given arguments and report how Ledger interprets it against the following model transaction:
$ ledger query "/Book/"
--- Input arguments ---
("/Book/")
--- Context is first posting of the following transaction ---
2004/05/27 Book Store
; This note applies to all postings. :SecondTag:
Expenses:Books 20 BOOK @ $10
; Metadata: Some Value
; Typed:: $100 + $200
; :ExampleTag:
; Here follows a note describing the posting.
Liabilities:MasterCard $-200.00
--- Input expression ---
(account =~ /Book/)
--- Text as parsed ---
(account =~ /Book/)
--- Expression tree ---
0x7fd639c0da40 O_MATCH (1)
0x7fd639c10170 IDENT: account (1)
0x7fd639c10780 VALUE: /Book/ (1)
--- Compiled tree ---
0x7fd639c10520 O_MATCH (1)
0x7fd639c0d6c0 IDENT: account (1)
0x7fd639c0d680 FUNCTION (1)
0x7fd639c10780 VALUE: /Book/ (1)
--- Calculated value ---
true
script ¶UNDOCUMENTED! Please help by contributing documentation for this feature.
template ¶Shows the insertion template that the xact sub-command
generates. This is a debugging command.
Ledger source ships with a fairly complete set of tests to verify that
all is well, and no old errors have resurfaced. Tests are run
individually with ctest. All tests can be run using make
check or ninja check depending on which build tool you prefer.
Once built, the ledger executable resides under the build subdirectory in the source tree. Tests are built and stored in the test subdirectory for the build. For example, ~/ledger/build/ledger/opt/test.
The complete test suite can be run from the build directory using the
check option for the build tool you use. For example, make
check. The entire test suit lasts around a minute for the optimized
built and many times longer for the debug version. While developing
and debugging, running individual tests can save a great deal of time.
Individual tests can be run from the test subdirectory of the
build location. To execute a single test use ctest -V -R regex,
where the regex matches the name of the test you want to build.
There are nearly 300 tests stored under the test subdirectory
in the main source distribution. They are broken into two broad
categories, baseline and regression. To run the 5FBF2ED8 test,
for example, issue ctest -V -R "5FB".
To write a new test first decide to which broad category the test belongs:
baseline or regression. Depending on the category tests are named differently
baseline tests are prefixed with their type, e.g. ‘cmd’
(see Baseline Test Types for valid types), whereas regressions are either
named after the bug id, e.g. ‘1234.test’ or uuid ‘91416D62.test’.
In case several test files belong to the same bug number the files by appending
_X where ‘X’ is the number of the test, e.g. ‘1234_1.test’,
‘1234_2.test’.
cmdLedger commands like register or balance
dirLedger directives like account or alias
featLedger features such as balance assertions in journal file
optLedger options such as --period or --format
A ledger test file contains three sections:
Ledger has a special command directive for tests, everything between
test and end test is treated like a comment, so every
Ledger test is automatically a valid Ledger file.
The test scripts take the remainder of the test line and use
it as command-line arguments for ledger, the text enclosed in test
and end test is expected output, for example:
; This is the journal data year 2014 12/24 (C0d3) Santa Claus Assets:Bank ¤ -150,00 Expenses:Presents ; The following line specifies the ledger command-line options for this test and ; everything between the next line and `end test` specifies the expected output test reg --payee=code 14-Dec-24 C0d3 Assets:Bank ¤ -150,00 ¤ -150,00 14-Dec-24 C0d3 Expenses:Presents ¤ 150,00 0 end test
When it is necessary to test for errors printed to stderr redirect
the test output by adding -> to the test line and match the
expected error text in an __ERROR__ section:
2014/01/01 * Acme Corporation
Assets:Bank:Checking ¤ 1.000,00
[Fund:Vacation] ¤ 300,00
[Fund:Studies] ¤ 600,00
Income:Salary ¤ -2.000,00
test reg ->
__ERROR__
While parsing file "$FILE", line 5:
While balancing transaction from "$FILE", lines 1-5:
> 2014/01/01 * Acme Corporation
> Assets:Bank:Checking ¤ 1.000,00
> [Fund:Vacation] ¤ 300,00
> [Fund:Studies] ¤ 600,00
> Income:Salary ¤ -2.000,00
Unbalanced remainder is:
¤ -100,00
Amount to balance against:
¤ 1.900,00
Error: Transaction does not balance
end test
A special $FILE variable can be used to match the journal filename
used during the test.
To add new tests to the test suite use the rebuild_cache option for the
build tool you use, for example make rebuild_cache, now the
new tests can be run as documented in Running Tests.
The following have been removed from Ledger 3.0:
bal in 3.0 does what ‘-s
bal’ did in 2.x. To see 2.6 behavior, use --collapse (-n)
option in 3.0, like ‘bal -n’. The --subtotal (-s) option
no longer has any effect on balance reports.
The following are deprecated in Ledger 3.0:
LEDGERis now LEDGER_FILE,
LEDGER_INITis now LEDGER_INIT_FILE,
PRICE_HISTis now LEDGER_PRICE_DB,
PRICE_EXPis now LEDGER_PRICE_EXP.
The following journal file is included with the source distribution of ledger. It is called drewr3.dat and exhibits many ledger features, include automatic and virtual transactions,
; -*- ledger -*- = /^Income/ (Liabilities:Tithe) 0.12 ;~ Monthly ; Assets:Checking $500.00 ; Income:Salary ;~ Monthly ; Expenses:Food $100 ; Assets 2010/12/01 * Checking balance Assets:Checking $1,000.00 Equity:Opening Balances 2010/12/20 * Organic Co-op Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2011/01/01] Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2011/02/01] Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2011/03/01] Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2011/04/01] Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2011/05/01] Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 37.50 ; [=2011/06/01] Assets:Checking $ -225.00 2010/12/28=2011/01/01 Acme Mortgage Liabilities:Mortgage:Principal $ 200.00 Expenses:Interest:Mortgage $ 500.00 Expenses:Escrow $ 300.00 Assets:Checking $ -1000.00 2011/01/02 Grocery Store Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 65.00 Assets:Checking 2011/01/05 Employer Assets:Checking $ 2000.00 Income:Salary 2011/01/14 Bank ; Regular monthly savings transfer Assets:Savings $ 300.00 Assets:Checking 2011/01/19 Grocery Store Expenses:Food:Groceries $ 44.00 ; hastag: not block Assets:Checking 2011/01/25 Bank ; Transfer to cover car purchase Assets:Checking $ 5,500.00 Assets:Savings ; :nobudget: apply tag hastag: true 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 tag 2011/12/01 Sale Assets:Checking:Business $ 30.00 Income:Sales end tag
Various notes from the discussion list that I haven’t incorporated in to the main body of the documentation.
$ ledger --group-by "tag('trip')" bal
$ ledger cleared VWCU NFCU Tithe Misentry
$ ledger register Joint --uncleared
$ ledger register Checking --sort d -d 'd>[2011/04/01]' until 2011/05/25
= /^Income:Taxable/ (Liabilities:Tithe Owed) -0.1 = /Noah/ (Liabilities:Tithe Owed) -0.1 = /Jonah/ (Liabilities:Tithe Owed) -0.1 = /Tithe/ (Liabilities:Tithe Owed) -1.0
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In some special cases, it automatically balances this transaction for you.
This also means if you misspell an account it will end up getting counted separately from what you intended. An Emacs major mode ledger-mode provides tab completion for automatically filling in account names.
You can track anything, even time or distance traveled. As long as it cannot be created or destroyed inside your accounting system.