accounting is tracking the flow of valuable commodities, such as money or time. It clarifies activity, priorities, obligations, opportunities. It can reduce stress and even be enjoyable.
double-entry bookkeeping is a process for doing this reliably. For every movement of value (a transaction), both the source and destination are recorded. Simple arithmetic invariants help prevent errors.
In traditional double-entry bookkeeping, value at any point in time is tracked in various accounts, classified as asset (owned), liability (owed) or equity (invested). Two more classifications track changes during some period: revenues (inflows) and expenses (outflows).
Transactions consist of debits (increases to asset or expense accounts, or decreases to liability or equity accounts) or credits (decreases to asset or expense accounts, or increases to liability or equity accounts).
Ledger, hledger, beancount, and other Ledger-likes are minimalist software tools for efficient double-entry-style accounting. This site introduces them and their way of doing things.
Accounting data is valuable; we want to know that it will be accessible for ever - even without software. We want to know when it changes, and revision-control it. We want to search and manipulate it efficiently. So, we store it as human-readable plain text.
We simplify debits and credits by using signed numbers instead - positive for inflows to an account, negative for outflows from an account.
We define arbitrary account hierarchy to suit our needs. This scales smoothly from simple to complex scenarios, and from high-level overview to fine detail.
Ledger-likes are, at least in part, command-line tools. This makes them efficient to use and very scriptable and flexible.
Ledger-likes also, at their core, tend towards functional operation: they read the input data without changing it, and output a report. This simple model makes them easy to understand and rely on.
is there no graphical user interface ? Must I use the command line ?
Not entirely! A bit. Decreasingly. "Plain Text Accounting" is a broad description, referring mainly to the data format. GUIs are appearing.
who is this for ?
Techies, power users, and do-it-yourself-ers, for now. If you need a rich GUI providing lots of structure, you may prefer to use something else.
who is using it, and how ?
See Who's using Ledger? for some stories.
what are the alternatives ?
FOSS tools like GNUCash, Grisbi, KMyMoney. Proprietary tools like Quicken/Quickbooks, You Need A Budget. Online tools like Xero, FreeAgent. (There are many). Spreadsheets. Paper accounting. A bookkeeper.
why is this better than QuickBooks ?
Your data remains accessible. No yearly fees. Free software you can fix and port. Cross platform. Scriptable. Efficient.
how do I communicate with my accountant ?
Clean up text reports by hand, print them as PDF, export CSV reports to a spreadsheet..
what if my accountant only uses QuickBooks ?
You'll need a new accountant, or a duplicate set of books in QuickBooks, or to pioneer *ledger -> QuickBooks exporting.
can I use this to do my taxes ?
You can use this to track and report the data needed for tax reporting. Fill out and submit tax forms with another tool, or by hand.
| Code, committers | Mail list | IRC, size | |
| Ledger | C++ 101 | ledger-cli | #ledger 70 |
| hledger | Haskell 30 | hledger | #hledger 20 |
| Beancount | Python 8 | beancount | #beancount 1 |
| Abandon | Scala 5 | ||
| Ledger in Go | Go 2 |
| Inactive: | |
|---|---|
| cl-ledger | Common Lisp |
| ledger.pl | Perl |
| Penny | Haskell |
| UMM | Haskell |
Ledger Python 3 Support Python
ledgerhelpers Python + CLI
hledger-lib, hledger Haskell
hledger-api, examples JSON
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