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hledger
This doc is for version 1.13. []{.docversions}
NAME
hledger - a command-line accounting tool
SYNOPSIS
hledger [-f FILE] COMMAND [OPTIONS] [ARGS]
hledger [-f FILE] ADDONCMD -- [OPTIONS] [ARGS]
hledger
DESCRIPTION
hledger is a cross-platform program for tracking money, time, or any
other commodity, using double-entry accounting and a simple, editable
file format. hledger is inspired by and largely compatible with
ledger(1).
Tested on unix, mac, windows, hledger aims to be a reliable, practical
tool for daily use.
This is hledger’s command-line interface (there are also curses and web interfaces). Its basic function is to read a plain text file describing financial transactions (in accounting terms, a general journal) and print useful reports on standard output, or export them as CSV. hledger can also read some other file formats such as CSV files, translating them to journal format. Additionally, hledger lists other hledger-* executables found in the user’s $PATH and can invoke them as subcommands.
hledger reads data from one or more files in hledger journal, timeclock,
timedot, or CSV format specified with -f, or $LEDGER_FILE, or
$HOME/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal). If using $LEDGER_FILE, note this
must be a real environment variable, not a shell variable. You can
specify standard input with -f-.
Transactions are dated movements of money between two (or more) named accounts, and are recorded with journal entries like this:
2015/10/16 bought food
expenses:food $10
assets:cash
For more about this format, see hledger_journal(5).
Most users use a text editor to edit the journal, usually with an editor mode such as ledger-mode for added convenience. hledger’s interactive add command is another way to record new transactions. hledger never changes existing transactions.
To get started, you can either save some entries like the above in
~/.hledger.journal, or run hledger add and follow the prompts. Then
try some commands like hledger print or hledger balance. Run
hledger with no arguments for a list of commands.
EXAMPLES
Two simple transactions in hledger journal format:
2015/9/30 gift received
assets:cash $20
income:gifts
2015/10/16 farmers market
expenses:food $10
assets:cash
Some basic reports:
$ hledger print
2015/09/30 gift received
assets:cash $20
income:gifts $-20
2015/10/16 farmers market
expenses:food $10
assets:cash $-10
$ hledger accounts --tree
assets
cash
expenses
food
income
gifts
$ hledger balance
$10 assets:cash
$10 expenses:food
$-20 income:gifts
--------------------
0
$ hledger register cash
2015/09/30 gift received assets:cash $20 $20
2015/10/16 farmers market assets:cash $-10 $10
More commands:
$ hledger # show available commands
$ hledger add # add more transactions to the journal file
$ hledger balance # all accounts with aggregated balances
$ hledger balance --help # show detailed help for balance command
$ hledger balance --depth 1 # only top-level accounts
$ hledger register # show account postings, with running total
$ hledger reg income # show postings to/from income accounts
$ hledger reg 'assets:some bank:checking' # show postings to/from this checking account
$ hledger print desc:shop # show transactions with shop in the description
$ hledger activity -W # show transaction counts per week as a bar chart
OPTIONS
General options
To see general usage help, including general options which are supported
by most hledger commands, run hledger -h.
General help options:
-h --help- show general usage (or after COMMAND, command usage)
--version- show version
--debug[=N]- show debug output (levels 1-9, default: 1)
General input options:
-f FILE --file=FILE- use a different input file. For stdin, use - (default:
$LEDGER_FILEor$HOME/.hledger.journal) --rules-file=RULESFILE- Conversion rules file to use when reading CSV (default: FILE.rules)
--separator=CHAR- Field separator to expect when reading CSV (default: ‘,’)
--alias=OLD=NEW- rename accounts named OLD to NEW
--anon- anonymize accounts and payees
--pivot FIELDNAME- use some other field or tag for the account name
-I --ignore-assertions- ignore any failing balance assertions
General reporting options:
-b --begin=DATE- include postings/txns on or after this date
-e --end=DATE- include postings/txns before this date
-D --daily- multiperiod/multicolumn report by day
-W --weekly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by week
-M --monthly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by month
-Q --quarterly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by quarter
-Y --yearly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by year
-p --period=PERIODEXP- set start date, end date, and/or reporting interval all at once using period expressions syntax (overrides the flags above)
--date2- match the secondary date instead (see command help for other effects)
-U --unmarked- include only unmarked postings/txns (can combine with -P or -C)
-P --pending- include only pending postings/txns
-C --cleared- include only cleared postings/txns
-R --real- include only non-virtual postings
-NUM --depth=NUM- hide/aggregate accounts or postings more than NUM levels deep
-E --empty- show items with zero amount, normally hidden (and vice-versa in hledger-ui/hledger-web)
-B --cost- convert amounts to their cost at transaction time (using the transaction price, if any)
-V --value- convert amounts to their market value on the report end date (using the most recent applicable market price, if any)
--auto- apply automated posting rules to modify transactions.
--forecast- apply periodic transaction rules to generate future transactions, to 6 months from now or report end date.
When a reporting option appears more than once in the command line, the last one takes precedence.
Some reporting options can also be written as query arguments.
Command options
To see options for a particular command, including command-specific
options, run: hledger COMMAND -h.
Command-specific options must be written after the command name, eg:
hledger print -x.
Additionally, if the command is an addon, you may need to
put its options after a double-hyphen, eg: hledger ui -- --watch. Or,
you can run the addon executable directly: hledger-ui --watch.
Command arguments
Most hledger commands accept arguments after the command name, which are often a query, filtering the data in some way.
Argument files
You can save a set of command line options/arguments in a file, one per
line, and then reuse them by writing @FILENAME in a command line. To
prevent this expansion of @-arguments, precede them with a --
argument. For more, see Save frequently used
options.
Special characters in arguments and queries
In shell command lines, option and argument values which contain
“problematic” characters, ie spaces, and also characters significant to
your shell such as <, >, (, ), | and $, should be escaped by
enclosing them in quotes or by writing backslashes before the
characters. Eg:
hledger register -p 'last year' "accounts receivable (receivable|payable)" amt:\>100.
More escaping
Characters significant both to the shell and in regular expressions may need one extra level of escaping. These include parentheses, the pipe symbol and the dollar sign. Eg, to match the dollar symbol, bash users should do:
hledger balance cur:'\$'
or:
hledger balance cur:\\$
Even more escaping
When hledger runs an addon executable (eg you type hledger ui, hledger
runs hledger-ui), it de-escapes command-line options and arguments
once, so you might need to triple-escape. Eg in bash, running the ui
command and matching the dollar sign, it’s:
hledger ui cur:'\\$'
or:
hledger ui cur:\\\\$
If you asked why four slashes above, this may help:
unescaped: $
escaped: \$
double-escaped: \\$
triple-escaped: \\\\$
(The number of backslashes in fish shell is left as an exercise for the reader.)
You can always avoid the extra escaping for addons by running the addon directly:
hledger-ui cur:\\$
Less escaping
Inside an argument file, or in the search field of hledger-ui or hledger-web, or at a GHCI prompt, you need one less level of escaping than at the command line. And backslashes may work better than quotes. Eg:
ghci> :main balance cur:\$
Command line tips
If in doubt, keep things simple:
- write options after the command (
hledger CMD -OPTIONS ARGS) - run add-on executables directly (
hledger-ui -OPTIONS ARGS) - enclose problematic args in single quotes
- if needed, also add a backslash to escape regexp metacharacters
To find out exactly how a command line is being parsed, add --debug=2
to troubleshoot.
Unicode characters
hledger is expected to handle unicode (non-ascii) characters, but this requires a well-configured environment.
To handle unicode characters in the command line or input data, a system
locale that can decode them must be configured (POSIX’s default C
locale will not work). Eg in bash, you could do:
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
See Troubleshooting for more about this.
Unicode characters should appear correctly in hledger’s output. For the hledger and hledger-ui tools, this requires that
- your terminal supports unicode
- the terminal’s font includes the required unicode glyphs
- the terminal is configured to display “wide” characters as double width (otherwise report alignment will be off)
Input files
hledger reads transactions from a data file (and the add command writes
to it). By default this file is $HOME/.hledger.journal (or on Windows,
something like C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal). You can override this
with the $LEDGER_FILE environment variable:
$ setenv LEDGER_FILE ~/finance/2016.journal
$ hledger stats
or with the -f/--file option:
$ hledger -f /some/file stats
The file name - (hyphen) means standard input:
$ cat some.journal | hledger -f-
Usually the data file is in hledger’s journal format, but it can also be one of several other formats, listed below. hledger detects the format automatically based on the file extension, or if that is not recognised, by trying each built-in “reader” in turn:
Reader: Reads: Used for file extensions:
journal hledger’s journal format, also .journal .j
some Ledger journals .hledger .ledger
timeclock timeclock files (precise time .timeclock
logging)
timedot timedot files (approximate time .timedot
logging)
csv comma-separated values (data .csv
interchange)
If needed (eg to ensure correct error messages when a file has the “wrong” extension), you can force a specific reader/format by prepending it to the file path with a colon. Examples:
$ hledger -f csv:/some/csv-file.dat stats
$ echo 'i 2009/13/1 08:00:00' | hledger print -ftimeclock:-
You can also specify multiple -f options, to read multiple files as
one big journal. There are some limitations with this:
- directives in one file will not affect the other files
- balance assertions will not see any account balances from previous files
If you need those, either use the include
directive, or concatenate the
files, eg: cat a.journal b.journal | hledger -f- CMD.
Smart dates
hledger’s user interfaces accept a flexible “smart date” syntax (unlike dates in the journal file). Smart dates allow some english words, can be relative to today’s date, and can have less-significant date parts omitted (defaulting to 1).
Examples:
2004/10/1, 2004-01-01, 2004.9.1 exact date, several separators allowed. Year is 4+ digits, month is 1-12, day is 1-31
2004 start of year
2004/10 start of month
10/1 month and day in current year
21 day in current month
october, oct start of month in current year
yesterday, today, tomorrow -1, 0, 1 days from today
last/this/next day/week/month/quarter/year -1, 0, 1 periods from the current period
20181201 8 digit YYYYMMDD with valid year month and day
201812 6 digit YYYYMM with valid year and month
Counterexamples - malformed digit sequences might give surprising results:
201813 6 digits with an invalid month is parsed as start of 6-digit year
20181301 8 digits with an invalid month is parsed as start of 8-digit year
20181232 8 digits with an invalid day gives an error
201801012 9+ digits beginning with a valid YYYYMMDD gives an error
Report start & end date
Most hledger reports show the full span of time represented by the journal data, by default. So, the effective report start and end dates will be the earliest and latest transaction or posting dates found in the journal.
Often you will want to see a shorter time span, such as the current
month. You can specify a start and/or end date using
-b/--begin, -e/--end,
-p/--period or a date: query
(described below). All of these accept the smart date
syntax. One important thing to be aware of when specifying end dates: as
in Ledger, end dates are exclusive, so you need to write the date
after the last day you want to include.
Examples:
-b 2016/3/17 begin on St. Patrick’s day 2016
-e 12/1 end at the start of december 1st of the current year (11/30 will be the last date included)
-b thismonth all transactions on or after the 1st of the current month
-p thismonth all transactions in the current month
date:2016/3/17- the above written as queries instead
date:-12/1
date:thismonth-
date:thismonth
Report intervals
A report interval can be specified so that commands like
register, balance and activity
will divide their reports into multiple subperiods. The basic intervals
can be selected with one of -D/--daily, -W/--weekly, -M/--monthly,
-Q/--quarterly, or -Y/--yearly. More complex intervals may be
specified with a period expression. Report
intervals can not be specified with a query, currently.
Period expressions
The -p/--period option accepts period expressions, a shorthand way of
expressing a start date, end date, and/or report interval all at once.
Here’s a basic period expression specifying the first quarter of 2009. Note, hledger always treats start dates as inclusive and end dates as exclusive:
-p "from 2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1"
Keywords like “from” and “to” are optional, and so are the spaces, as long as you don’t run two dates together. “to” can also be written as “-”. These are equivalent to the above:
-p "2009/1/1 2009/4/1"
-p2009/1/1to2009/4/1
-p2009/1/1-2009/4/1
Dates are smart dates, so if the current year is 2009, the above can also be written as:
-p "1/1 4/1"
-p "january-apr"
-p "this year to 4/1"
If you specify only one date, the missing start or end date will be the earliest or latest transaction in your journal:
-p "from 2009/1/1" everything after january 1, 2009
-p "from 2009/1" the same
-p "from 2009" the same
-p "to 2009" everything before january 1, 2009
A single date with no “from” or “to” defines both the start and end date like so:
-p "2009" the year 2009; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2010/1/1”
-p "2009/1" the month of jan; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2009/2/1”
-p "2009/1/1" just that day; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2009/1/2”
The argument of -p can also begin with, or be, a report
interval expression. The basic report intervals are
daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly, which have the
same effect as the -D,-W,-M,-Q, or -Y flags. Between report
interval and start/end dates (if any), the word in is optional.
Examples:
-p "weekly from 2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1"
-p "monthly in 2008"
-p "quarterly"
Note that weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly intervals will
always start on the first day on week, month, quarter or year
accordingly, and will end on the last day of same period, even if
associated period expression specifies different explicit start and end
date.
For example:
-p "weekly from 2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1" – starts on 2008/12/29, closest preceeding Monday
-p "monthly in 2008/11/25" – starts on 2018/11/01
-p "quarterly from 2009-05-05 to 2009-06-01" - starts on 2009/04/01, ends on 2009/06/30, which are first and last days of Q2 2009
-p "yearly from 2009-12-29" - starts on 2009/01/01, first day of 2009
The following more complex report intervals are also supported:
biweekly, bimonthly, every day|week|month|quarter|year,
every N days|weeks|months|quarters|years.
All of these will start on the first day of the requested period and end on the last one, as described above.
Examples:
-p "bimonthly from 2008" – periods will have boundaries on 2008/01/01, 2008/03/01, …
-p "every 2 weeks" – starts on closest preceeding Monday
-p "every 5 month from 2009/03" – periods will have boundaries on 2009/03/01, 2009/08/01, …
If you want intervals that start on arbitrary day of your choosing and span a week, month or year, you need to use any of the following:
every Nth day of week, every <weekday>, every Nth day [of month],
every Nth weekday [of month], every MM/DD [of year],
every Nth MMM [of year], every MMM Nth [of year].
Examples:
-p "every 2nd day of week" – periods will go from Tue to Tue
-p "every Tue" – same
-p "every 15th day" – period boundaries will be on 15th of each month
-p "every 2nd Monday" – period boundaries will be on second Monday of each month
-p "every 11/05" – yearly periods with boundaries on 5th of Nov
-p "every 5th Nov" – same
-p "every Nov 5th" – same
Show historical balances at end of 15th each month (N is exclusive end date):
hledger balance -H -p "every 16th day"
Group postings from start of wednesday to end of next tuesday (N is start date and exclusive end date):
hledger register checking -p "every 3rd day of week"
Depth limiting
With the --depth N option (short form: -N), commands like
account, balance and register will
show only the uppermost accounts in the account tree, down to level N.
Use this when you want a summary with less detail. This flag has the
same effect as a depth: query argument (so -2, --depth=2 or
depth:2 are basically equivalent).
Pivoting
Normally hledger sums amounts, and organizes them in a hierarchy, based
on account name. The --pivot FIELD option causes it to sum and
organize hierarchy based on the value of some other field instead. FIELD
can be: code, description, payee, note, or the full name (case
insensitive) of any tag. As with account names,
values containing colon:separated:parts will be displayed
hierarchically in reports.
--pivot is a general option affecting all reports; you can think of
hledger transforming the journal before any other processing, replacing
every posting’s account name with the value of the specified field on
that posting, inheriting it from the transaction or using a blank value
if it’s not present.
An example:
2016/02/16 Member Fee Payment
assets:bank account 2 EUR
income:member fees -2 EUR ; member: John Doe
Normal balance report showing account names:
$ hledger balance
2 EUR assets:bank account
-2 EUR income:member fees
--------------------
0
Pivoted balance report, using member: tag values instead:
$ hledger balance --pivot member
2 EUR
-2 EUR John Doe
--------------------
0
One way to show only amounts with a member: value (using a query, described below):
$ hledger balance --pivot member tag:member=.
-2 EUR John Doe
--------------------
-2 EUR
Another way (the acct: query matches against the pivoted “account name”):
$ hledger balance --pivot member acct:.
-2 EUR John Doe
--------------------
-2 EUR
Cost
The -B/--cost flag converts amounts to their cost at transaction time,
if they have a transaction price
specified.
Market value
The -V/--value flag converts reported amounts to their current market
value.
Specifically, when there is a market price
(P directive) for the amount’s commodity, dated on or before today’s
date (or the report end date if specified),
the amount will be converted to the price’s commodity.
When there are multiple applicable P directives, -V chooses the most recent one, or in case of equal dates, the last-parsed one.
For example:
# one euro is worth this many dollars from nov 1
P 2016/11/01 € $1.10
# purchase some euros on nov 3
2016/11/3
assets:euros €100
assets:checking
# the euro is worth fewer dollars by dec 21
P 2016/12/21 € $1.03
How many euros do I have ?
$ hledger -f t.j bal -N euros
€100 assets:euros
What are they worth at end of nov 3 ?
$ hledger -f t.j bal -N euros -V -e 2016/11/4
$110.00 assets:euros
What are they worth after 2016/12/21 ? (no report end date specified, defaults to today)
$ hledger -f t.j bal -N euros -V
$103.00 assets:euros
Currently, hledger’s -V only uses market prices recorded with P directives, not transaction prices (unlike Ledger).
Currently, -V has a limitation in multicolumn balance reports: it uses the market prices on the report end date for all columns. (Instead of the prices on each column’s end date.)
Combining -B and -V
Using -B/–cost and -V/–value together is currently allowed, but the results are probably not meaningful. Let us know if you find a use for this.
Output destination
Some commands (print, register, stats, the balance commands) can write
their output to a destination other than the console. This is controlled
by the -o/--output-file option.
$ hledger balance -o - # write to stdout (the default)
$ hledger balance -o FILE # write to FILE
Output format
Some commands can write their output in other formats. Eg print and
register can output CSV, and the balance commands can output CSV or
HTML. This is controlled by the -O/--output-format option, or by
specifying a .csv or .html file extension with -o/--output-file.
$ hledger balance -O csv # write CSV to stdout
$ hledger balance -o FILE.csv # write CSV to FILE.csv
Regular expressions
hledger uses regular expressions in a number of places:
- query terms, on the command line and in the hledger-web
search form:
REGEX,desc:REGEX,cur:REGEX,tag:...=REGEX - CSV rules conditional blocks:
if REGEX ... - account alias directives and options:
alias /REGEX/ = REPLACEMENT,--alias /REGEX/=REPLACEMENT
hledger’s regular expressions come from the regex-tdfa library. In general they:
- are case insensitive
- are infix matching (do not need to match the entire thing being matched)
- are POSIX extended regular expressions
- also support GNU word boundaries (\<, \>, \b, \B)
- and parenthesised capturing groups and numeric backreferences in replacement strings
- do not support mode modifiers like (?s)
Some things to note:
-
In the
aliasdirective and--aliasoption, regular expressions must be enclosed in forward slashes (/REGEX/). Elsewhere in hledger, these are not required. -
In queries, to match a regular expression metacharacter like
$as a literal character, prepend a backslash. Eg to search for amounts with the dollar sign in hledger-web, writecur:\$. -
On the command line, some metacharacters like
$have a special meaning to the shell and so must be escaped at least once more. See Special characters.
QUERIES
One of hledger’s strengths is being able to quickly report on precise subsets of your data. Most commands accept an optional query expression, written as arguments after the command name, to filter the data by date, account name or other criteria. The syntax is similar to a web search: one or more space-separated search terms, quotes to enclose whitespace, prefixes to match specific fields, a not: prefix to negate the match.
We do not yet support arbitrary boolean combinations of search terms; instead most commands show transactions/postings/accounts which match (or negatively match):
- any of the description terms AND
- any of the account terms AND
- any of the status terms AND
- all the other terms.
The print command instead shows transactions which:
- match any of the description terms AND
- have any postings matching any of the positive account terms AND
- have no postings matching any of the negative account terms AND
- match all the other terms.
The following kinds of search terms can be used. Remember these can also
be prefixed with not:, eg to exclude a particular subaccount.
REGEX,acct:REGEX- match account names by this regular expression. (With no prefix,
acct:is assumed.) - same as above
amt:N, amt:<N, amt:<=N, amt:>N, amt:>=N- match postings with a single-commodity amount that is equal to, less than, or greater than N. (Multi-commodity amounts are not tested, and will always match.) The comparison has two modes: if N is preceded by a + or - sign (or is 0), the two signed numbers are compared. Otherwise, the absolute magnitudes are compared, ignoring sign.
code:REGEX- match by transaction code (eg check number)
cur:REGEX- match postings or transactions including any amounts whose
currency/commodity symbol is fully matched by REGEX. (For a partial
match, use
.*REGEX.*). Note, to match characters which are regex-significant, like the dollar sign ($), you need to prepend\. And when using the command line you need to add one more level of quoting to hide it from the shell, so eg do:hledger print cur:'\$'orhledger print cur:\\$. desc:REGEX- match transaction descriptions.
date:PERIODEXPR- match dates within the specified period. PERIODEXPR is a period
expression (with no report interval).
Examples:
date:2016,date:thismonth,date:2000/2/1-2/15,date:lastweek-. If the--date2command line flag is present, this matches secondary dates instead. date2:PERIODEXPR- match secondary dates within the specified period.
depth:N- match (or display, depending on command) accounts at or above this depth
note:REGEX- match transaction notes (part of
description right of
|, or whole description when there’s no|) payee:REGEX- match transaction payee/payer names
(part of description left of
|, or whole description when there’s no|) real:, real:0- match real or virtual postings respectively
status:, status:!, status:*- match unmarked, pending, or cleared transactions respectively
tag:REGEX[=REGEX]- match by tag name, and optionally also by tag value. Note a tag: query is considered to match a transaction if it matches any of the postings. Also remember that postings inherit the tags of their parent transaction.
The following special search term is used automatically in hledger-web, only:
inacct:ACCTNAME- tells hledger-web to show the transaction register for this account.
Can be filtered further with
acctetc.
Some of these can also be expressed as command-line options (eg
depth:2 is equivalent to --depth 2). Generally you can mix options
and query arguments, and the resulting query will be their intersection
(perhaps excluding the -p/--period option).
COMMANDS
hledger provides a number of subcommands; hledger with no arguments
shows a list.
If you install additional hledger-* packages, or if you put programs
or scripts named hledger-NAME in your PATH, these will also be listed
as subcommands.
Run a subcommand by writing its name as first argument (eg
hledger incomestatement). You can also write one of the standard short
aliases displayed in parentheses in the command list (hledger b), or
any any unambiguous prefix of a command name (hledger inc).
Here are all the builtin commands in alphabetical order. See also
hledger for a more organised command list, and hledger CMD -h for
detailed command help.
accounts
accounts, a
Show account names.
This command lists account names, either declared with account
directives (–declared), posted to (–used), or both (the default). With
query arguments, only matched account names and account names referenced
by matched postings are shown. It shows a flat list by default. With
--tree, it uses indentation to show the account hierarchy. In flat
mode you can add --drop N to omit the first few account name
components. Account names can be depth-clipped with depth:N or
--depth N or -N.
Examples:
$ hledger accounts
assets:bank:checking
assets:bank:saving
assets:cash
expenses:food
expenses:supplies
income:gifts
income:salary
liabilities:debts
activity
activity
Show an ascii barchart of posting counts per interval.
The activity command displays an ascii histogram showing transaction counts by day, week, month or other reporting interval (by day is the default). With query arguments, it counts only matched transactions.
Examples:
$ hledger activity --quarterly
2008-01-01 **
2008-04-01 *******
2008-07-01
2008-10-01 **
add
add
Prompt for transactions and add them to the journal.
Many hledger users edit their journals directly with a text editor, or
generate them from CSV. For more interactive data entry, there is the
add command, which prompts interactively on the console for new
transactions, and appends them to the journal file (if there are
multiple -f FILE options, the first file is used.) Existing
transactions are not changed. This is the only hledger command that
writes to the journal file.
To use it, just run hledger add and follow the prompts. You can add as
many transactions as you like; when you are finished, enter . or press
control-d or control-c to exit.
Features:
- add tries to provide useful defaults, using the most similar (by description) recent transaction (filtered by the query, if any) as a template.
- You can also set the initial defaults with command line arguments.
- Readline-style edit keys can be used during data entry.
- The tab key will auto-complete whenever possible - accounts,
descriptions, dates (
yesterday,today,tomorrow). If the input area is empty, it will insert the default value. - If the journal defines a default commodity, it will be added to any bare numbers entered.
- A parenthesised transaction code may be entered following a date.
- Comments and tags may be entered following a description or amount.
- If you make a mistake, enter
<at any prompt to restart the transaction. - Input prompts are displayed in a different colour when the terminal supports it.
Example (see the tutorial for a detailed explanation):
$ hledger add
Adding transactions to journal file /src/hledger/examples/sample.journal
Any command line arguments will be used as defaults.
Use tab key to complete, readline keys to edit, enter to accept defaults.
An optional (CODE) may follow transaction dates.
An optional ; COMMENT may follow descriptions or amounts.
If you make a mistake, enter < at any prompt to restart the transaction.
To end a transaction, enter . when prompted.
To quit, enter . at a date prompt or press control-d or control-c.
Date [2015/05/22]:
Description: supermarket
Account 1: expenses:food
Amount 1: $10
Account 2: assets:checking
Amount 2 [$-10.0]:
Account 3 (or . or enter to finish this transaction): .
2015/05/22 supermarket
expenses:food $10
assets:checking $-10.0
Save this transaction to the journal ? [y]:
Saved.
Starting the next transaction (. or ctrl-D/ctrl-C to quit)
Date [2015/05/22]: <CTRL-D> $
balance
balance, bal, b
Show accounts and their balances.
The balance command is hledger’s most versatile command. Note, despite the name, it is not always used for showing real-world account balances; the more accounting-aware balancesheet and incomestatement may be more convenient for that.
By default, it displays all accounts, and each account’s change in balance during the entire period of the journal. Balance changes are calculated by adding up the postings in each account. You can limit the postings matched, by a query, to see fewer accounts, changes over a different time period, changes from only cleared transactions, etc.
If you include an account’s complete history of postings in the report, the balance change is equivalent to the account’s current ending balance. For a real-world account, typically you won’t have all transactions in the journal; instead you’ll have all transactions after a certain date, and an “opening balances” transaction setting the correct starting balance on that date. Then the balance command will show real-world account balances. In some cases the -H/–historical flag is used to ensure this (more below).
The balance command can produce several styles of report:
Classic balance report
This is the original balance report, as found in Ledger. It usually looks like this:
$ hledger balance
$-1 assets
$1 bank:saving
$-2 cash
$2 expenses
$1 food
$1 supplies
$-2 income
$-1 gifts
$-1 salary
$1 liabilities:debts
--------------------
0
By default, accounts are displayed hierarchically, with subaccounts
indented below their parent. At each level of the tree, accounts are
sorted by account code if any, then
by account name. Or with -S/--sort-amount, by their balance amount.
“Boring” accounts, which contain a single interesting subaccount and no
balance of their own, are elided into the following line for more
compact output. (Eg above, the “liabilities” account.) Use --no-elide
to prevent this.
Account balances are “inclusive” - they include the balances of any subaccounts.
Accounts which have zero balance (and no non-zero subaccounts) are
omitted. Use -E/--empty to show them.
A final total is displayed by default; use -N/--no-total to suppress
it, eg:
$ hledger balance -p 2008/6 expenses --no-total
$2 expenses
$1 food
$1 supplies
Customising the classic balance report
You can customise the layout of classic balance reports with
--format FMT:
$ hledger balance --format "%20(account) %12(total)"
assets $-1
bank:saving $1
cash $-2
expenses $2
food $1
supplies $1
income $-2
gifts $-1
salary $-1
liabilities:debts $1
---------------------------------
0
The FMT format string (plus a newline) specifies the formatting applied to each account/balance pair. It may contain any suitable text, with data fields interpolated like so:
%[MIN][.MAX](FIELDNAME)
-
MIN pads with spaces to at least this width (optional)
-
MAX truncates at this width (optional)
-
FIELDNAME must be enclosed in parentheses, and can be one of:
depth_spacer- a number of spaces equal to the account’s depth, or if MIN is specified, MIN * depth spaces.account- the account’s nametotal- the account’s balance/posted total, right justified
Also, FMT can begin with an optional prefix to control how multi-commodity amounts are rendered:
%_- render on multiple lines, bottom-aligned (the default)%^- render on multiple lines, top-aligned%,- render on one line, comma-separated
There are some quirks. Eg in one-line mode, %(depth_spacer) has no
effect, instead %(account) has indentation built in. Experimentation may be needed to get pleasing results.
Some example formats:
%(total)- the account’s total%-20.20(account)- the account’s name, left justified, padded to 20 characters and clipped at 20 characters%,%-50(account) %25(total)- account name padded to 50 characters, total padded to 20 characters, with multiple commodities rendered on one line%20(total) %2(depth_spacer)%-(account)- the default format for the single-column balance report
Colour support
The balance command shows negative amounts in red, if:
- the
TERMenvironment variable is not set todumb - the output is not being redirected or piped anywhere
Flat mode
To see a flat list instead of the default hierarchical display, use
--flat. In this mode, accounts (unless depth-clipped) show their full
names and “exclusive” balance, excluding any subaccount balances. In
this mode, you can also use --drop N to omit the first few account
name components.
$ hledger balance -p 2008/6 expenses -N --flat --drop 1
$1 food
$1 supplies
Depth limited balance reports
With --depth N or depth:N or just -N, balance reports show
accounts only to the specified numeric depth. This is very useful to
summarise a complex set of accounts and get an overview.
$ hledger balance -N -1
$-1 assets
$2 expenses
$-2 income
$1 liabilities
Flat-mode balance reports, which normally show exclusive balances, show inclusive balances at the depth limit.
Multicolumn balance report
Multicolumn or tabular balance reports are a very useful hledger feature, and usually the preferred style. They share many of the above features, but they show the report as a table, with columns representing time periods. This mode is activated by providing a reporting interval.
There are three types of multicolumn balance report, showing different information:
-
By default: each column shows the sum of postings in that period, ie the account’s change of balance in that period. This is useful eg for a monthly income statement: <!-- multicolumn income statement:
$ hledger balance ^income ^expense -p 'monthly this year' --depth 3 or cashflow statement: $ hledger balance ^assets ^liabilities 'not:(receivable|payable)' -p 'weekly this month' -->$ hledger balance --quarterly income expenses -E Balance changes in 2008: || 2008q1 2008q2 2008q3 2008q4 ===================++================================= expenses:food || 0 $1 0 0 expenses:supplies || 0 $1 0 0 income:gifts || 0 $-1 0 0 income:salary || $-1 0 0 0 -------------------++--------------------------------- || $-1 $1 0 0 -
With
--cumulative: each column shows the ending balance for that period, accumulating the changes across periods, starting from 0 at the report start date:$ hledger balance --quarterly income expenses -E --cumulative Ending balances (cumulative) in 2008: || 2008/03/31 2008/06/30 2008/09/30 2008/12/31 ===================++================================================= expenses:food || 0 $1 $1 $1 expenses:supplies || 0 $1 $1 $1 income:gifts || 0 $-1 $-1 $-1 income:salary || $-1 $-1 $-1 $-1 -------------------++------------------------------------------------- || $-1 0 0 0 -
With
--historical/-H: each column shows the actual historical ending balance for that period, accumulating the changes across periods, starting from the actual balance at the report start date. This is useful eg for a multi-period balance sheet, and when you are showing only the data after a certain start date:$ hledger balance ^assets ^liabilities --quarterly --historical --begin 2008/4/1 Ending balances (historical) in 2008/04/01-2008/12/31: || 2008/06/30 2008/09/30 2008/12/31 ======================++===================================== assets:bank:checking || $1 $1 0 assets:bank:saving || $1 $1 $1 assets:cash || $-2 $-2 $-2 liabilities:debts || 0 0 $1 ----------------------++------------------------------------- || 0 0 0
Multicolumn balance reports display accounts in flat mode by default; to
see the hierarchy, use --tree.
With a reporting interval (like --quarterly above), the report
start/end dates will be adjusted if necessary so that they encompass the
displayed report periods. This is so that the first and last periods
will be “full” and comparable to the others.
The -E/--empty flag does two things in multicolumn balance reports:
first, the report will show all columns within the specified report
period (without -E, leading and trailing columns with all zeroes are not
shown). Second, all accounts which existed at the report start date will
be considered, not just the ones with activity during the report period
(use -E to include low-activity accounts which would otherwise would be
omitted). With --budget, --empty also shows unbudgeted accounts.
The -T/--row-total flag adds an additional column showing the total
for each row.
The -A/--average flag adds a column showing the average value in each
row.
Here’s an example of all three:
$ hledger balance -Q income expenses --tree -ETA
Balance changes in 2008:
|| 2008q1 2008q2 2008q3 2008q4 Total Average
============++===================================================
expenses || 0 $2 0 0 $2 $1
food || 0 $1 0 0 $1 0
supplies || 0 $1 0 0 $1 0
income || $-1 $-1 0 0 $-2 $-1
gifts || 0 $-1 0 0 $-1 0
salary || $-1 0 0 0 $-1 0
------------++---------------------------------------------------
|| $-1 $1 0 0 0 0
# Average is rounded to the dollar here since all journal amounts are
Limitations:
In multicolumn reports the -V/--value flag uses the
market price on the report end date, for all columns (not the price on
each column’s end date).
Eliding of boring parent accounts in tree mode, as in the classic balance report, is not yet supported in multicolumn reports.
Budget report
With --budget, extra columns are displayed showing budget goals for
each account and period, if any. Budget goals are defined by periodic
transactions. This is very useful
for comparing planned and actual income, expenses, time usage, etc.
–budget is most often combined with a report
interval.
For example, you can take average monthly expenses in the common expense categories to construct a minimal monthly budget:
;; Budget
~ monthly
income $2000
expenses:food $400
expenses:bus $50
expenses:movies $30
assets:bank:checking
;; Two months worth of expenses
2017-11-01
income $1950
expenses:food $396
expenses:bus $49
expenses:movies $30
expenses:supplies $20
assets:bank:checking
2017-12-01
income $2100
expenses:food $412
expenses:bus $53
expenses:gifts $100
assets:bank:checking
You can now see a monthly budget report:
$ hledger balance -M --budget
Budget performance in 2017/11/01-2017/12/31:
|| Nov Dec
======================++====================================================
assets || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
assets:bank || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
assets:bank:checking || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
expenses || $495 [ 103% of $480] $565 [ 118% of $480]
expenses:bus || $49 [ 98% of $50] $53 [ 106% of $50]
expenses:food || $396 [ 99% of $400] $412 [ 103% of $400]
expenses:movies || $30 [ 100% of $30] 0 [ 0% of $30]
income || $1950 [ 98% of $2000] $2100 [ 105% of $2000]
----------------------++----------------------------------------------------
|| 0 [ 0] 0 [ 0]
By default, only accounts with budget goals during the report period are
shown. In the example above, transactions in expenses:gifts and
expenses:supplies are counted towards expenses budget, but accounts
expenses:gifts and expenses:supplies are not shown, as they don’t
have any budgets.
You can use --empty shows unbudgeted accounts as well:
$ hledger balance -M --budget --empty
Budget performance in 2017/11/01-2017/12/31:
|| Nov Dec
======================++====================================================
assets || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
assets:bank || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
assets:bank:checking || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
expenses || $495 [ 103% of $480] $565 [ 118% of $480]
expenses:bus || $49 [ 98% of $50] $53 [ 106% of $50]
expenses:food || $396 [ 99% of $400] $412 [ 103% of $400]
expenses:gifts || 0 $100
expenses:movies || $30 [ 100% of $30] 0 [ 0% of $30]
expenses:supplies || $20 0
income || $1950 [ 98% of $2000] $2100 [ 105% of $2000]
----------------------++----------------------------------------------------
|| 0 [ 0] 0 [ 0]
You can roll over unspent budgets to next period with --cumulative:
$ hledger balance -M --budget --cumulative
Budget performance in 2017/11/01-2017/12/31:
|| Nov Dec
======================++====================================================
assets || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-5110 [ 103% of $-4960]
assets:bank || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-5110 [ 103% of $-4960]
assets:bank:checking || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-5110 [ 103% of $-4960]
expenses || $495 [ 103% of $480] $1060 [ 110% of $960]
expenses:bus || $49 [ 98% of $50] $102 [ 102% of $100]
expenses:food || $396 [ 99% of $400] $808 [ 101% of $800]
expenses:movies || $30 [ 100% of $30] $30 [ 50% of $60]
income || $1950 [ 98% of $2000] $4050 [ 101% of $4000]
----------------------++----------------------------------------------------
|| 0 [ 0] 0 [ 0]
Note, the -S/--sort-amount flag is not yet fully supported with
--budget.
For more examples, see Budgeting and Forecasting.
Nested budgets
You can add budgets to any account in your account hierarchy. If you have budgets on both parent account and some of its children, then budget(s) of the child account(s) would be added to the budget of their parent, much like account balances behave.
In the most simple case this means that once you add a budget to any account, all its parents would have budget as well.
To illustrate this, consider the following budget:
~ monthly from 2019/01
expenses:personal $1,000.00
expenses:personal:electronics $100.00
liabilities
With this, monthly budget for electronics is defined to be $100 and
budget for personal expenses is an additional $1000, which implicity
means that budget for both expenses:personal and expenses is $1100.
Transactions in expenses:personal:electronics will be counted both
towards its $100 budget and $1100 of expenses:personal , and
transactions in any other subaccount of expenses:personal would be
counted towards only towards the budget of expenses:personal.
For example, let’s consider these transactions:
~ monthly from 2019/01
expenses:personal $1,000.00
expenses:personal:electronics $100.00
liabilities
2019/01/01 Google home hub
expenses:personal:electronics $90.00
liabilities $-90.00
2019/01/02 Phone screen protector
expenses:personal:electronics:upgrades $10.00
liabilities
2019/01/02 Weekly train ticket
expenses:personal:train tickets $153.00
liabilities
2019/01/03 Flowers
expenses:personal $30.00
liabilities
As you can see, we have transactions in
expenses:personal:electronics:upgrades and
expenses:personal:train tickets, and since both of these accounts are
without explicitly defined budget, these transactions would be counted
towards budgets of expenses:personal:electronics and
expenses:personal accordingly:
$ hledger balance --budget -M
Budget performance in 2019/01:
|| Jan
===============================++===============================
expenses || $283.00 [ 26% of $1100.00]
expenses:personal || $283.00 [ 26% of $1100.00]
expenses:personal:electronics || $100.00 [ 100% of $100.00]
liabilities || $-283.00 [ 26% of $-1100.00]
-------------------------------++-------------------------------
|| 0 [ 0]
And with --empty, we can get a better picture of budget allocation and
consumption:
$ hledger balance --budget -M --empty
Budget performance in 2019/01:
|| Jan
========================================++===============================
expenses || $283.00 [ 26% of $1100.00]
expenses:personal || $283.00 [ 26% of $1100.00]
expenses:personal:electronics || $100.00 [ 100% of $100.00]
expenses:personal:electronics:upgrades || $10.00
expenses:personal:train tickets || $153.00
liabilities || $-283.00 [ 26% of $-1100.00]
----------------------------------------++-------------------------------
|| 0 [ 0]
Output format
The balance command supports output destination and output format selection.
balancesheet
balancesheet, bs
This command displays a simple balance sheet, showing historical ending
balances of asset and liability accounts (ignoring any report begin
date). It assumes that these accounts are under a top-level asset or
liability account (case insensitive, plural forms also allowed).
Note this report shows all account balances with normal positive sign (like conventional financial statements, unlike balance/print/register) (experimental).
Example:
$ hledger balancesheet
Balance Sheet
Assets:
$-1 assets
$1 bank:saving
$-2 cash
--------------------
$-1
Liabilities:
$1 liabilities:debts
--------------------
$1
Total:
--------------------
0
With a reporting interval, multiple columns will
be shown, one for each report period. As with multicolumn balance
reports, you can alter the report mode
with --change/--cumulative/--historical. Normally balancesheet
shows historical ending balances, which is what you need for a balance
sheet; note this means it ignores report begin dates.
This command also supports output destination and output format selection.
balancesheetequity
balancesheetequity, bse
Just like balancesheet, but also reports Equity (which
it assumes is under a top-level equity account).
Example:
$ hledger balancesheetequity
Balance Sheet With Equity
Assets:
$-2 assets
$1 bank:saving
$-3 cash
--------------------
$-2
Liabilities:
$1 liabilities:debts
--------------------
$1
Equity:
$1 equity:owner
--------------------
$1
Total:
--------------------
0
cashflow
cashflow, cf
This command displays a simple cashflow statement, showing changes in
“cash” accounts. It assumes that these accounts are under a top-level
asset account (case insensitive, plural forms also allowed) and do not
contain receivable or A/R in their name. Note this report shows all
account balances with normal positive sign (like conventional financial
statements, unlike balance/print/register) (experimental).
Example:
$ hledger cashflow
Cashflow Statement
Cash flows:
$-1 assets
$1 bank:saving
$-2 cash
--------------------
$-1
Total:
--------------------
$-1
With a reporting interval, multiple columns will
be shown, one for each report period. Normally cashflow shows changes in
assets per period, though as with multicolumn balance
reports you can alter the report mode
with --change/--cumulative/--historical.
This command also supports output destination and output format selection.
check-dates
check-dates
Check that transactions are sorted by increasing date. With –date2,
checks secondary dates instead. With –strict, dates must also be unique.
With a query, only matched transactions’ dates are checked. Reads the
default journal file, or another specified with -f.
check-dupes
check-dupes
Reports account names having the same leaf but different prefixes. In
other words, two or more leaves that are categorized differently. Reads
the default journal file, or another specified as an argument.
An example: http://stefanorodighiero.net/software/hledger-dupes.html
close
close, equity
Prints a “closing balances” transaction and an “opening balances”
transaction that bring account balances to and from zero, respectively.
Useful for bringing asset/liability balances forward into a new journal
file, or for closing out revenues/expenses to retained earnings at the
end of a period.
The closing transaction transfers balances to “equity:closing balances”.
The opening transaction transfers balances from “equity:opening
balances”. You can chose to print just one of the transactions by using
the --opening or --closing flag.
If you split your journal files by time (eg yearly), you will typically
run this command at the end of the year, and save the closing
transaction as last entry of the old file, and the opening transaction
as the first entry of the new file. This makes the files self contained,
so that correct balances are reported no matter which of them are
loaded. Ie, if you load just one file, the balances are initialised
correctly; or if you load several files, the redundant closing/opening
transactions cancel each other out. (They will show up in print or
register reports; you can exclude them with a query like
not:desc:'(opening|closing) balances'.)
If you’re running a business, you might also use this command to “close the books” at the end of an accounting period, transferring income statement account balances to retained earnings. (You may want to change the equity account name to something like “equity:retained earnings”.)
By default, the closing transaction is dated yesterday, the balances are
calculated as of end of yesterday, and the opening transaction is dated
today. To close on some other date, use: hledger close -e OPENINGDATE.
Eg, to close/open on the 2018/2019 boundary, use -e 2019. You can also
use -p or date:PERIOD (any starting date is ignored).
Both transactions will include balance assertions for the
closed/reopened accounts. You probably shouldn’t use status or realness
filters (like -C or -R or status:) with this command, or the generated
balance assertions will depend on these flags. Likewise, if you run this
command with –auto, the balance assertions will probably always require
–auto.
Examples:
Carrying asset/liability balances into a new file for 2019, all from command line:
Warning: we use >> here to append; be careful not to type a single
> which would wipe your journal!
$ hledger close -f 2018.journal -e 2019 assets liabilities --opening >>2019.journal
$ hledger close -f 2018.journal -e 2019 assets liabilities --closing >>2018.journal
Now:
$ hledger bs -f 2019.journal # one file - balances are correct
$ hledger bs -f 2018.journal -f 2019.journal # two files - balances still correct
$ hledger bs -f 2018.journal not:desc:closing # to see year-end balances, must exclude closing txn
Transactions spanning the closing date can complicate matters, breaking balance assertions:
2018/12/30 a purchase made in 2018, clearing the following year
expenses:food 5
assets:bank:checking -5 ; [2019/1/2]
Here’s one way to resolve that:
; in 2018.journal:
2018/12/30 a purchase made in 2018, clearing the following year
expenses:food 5
liabilities:pending
; in 2019.journal:
2019/1/2 clearance of last year's pending transactions
liabilities:pending 5 = 0
assets:checking
files
files
List all files included in the journal. With a REGEX argument, only file
names matching the regular expression (case sensitive) are shown.
help
help
Show any of the hledger manuals.
The help command displays any of the main hledger
manuals, in one of several ways. Run it with no argument to
list the manuals, or provide a full or partial manual name to select
one.
hledger manuals are available in several formats. hledger help will use
the first of these display methods that it finds: info, man, $PAGER,
less, stdout (or when non-interactive, just stdout). You can force a
particular viewer with the --info, --man, --pager, --cat flags.
Examples:
$ hledger help
Please choose a manual by typing "hledger help MANUAL" (a substring is ok).
Manuals: hledger hledger-ui hledger-web hledger-api journal csv timeclock timedot
$ hledger help h --man
hledger(1) hledger User Manuals hledger(1)
NAME
hledger - a command-line accounting tool
SYNOPSIS
hledger [-f FILE] COMMAND [OPTIONS] [ARGS]
hledger [-f FILE] ADDONCMD -- [OPTIONS] [ARGS]
hledger
DESCRIPTION
hledger is a cross-platform program for tracking money, time, or any
...
import
import
Read new transactions added to each FILE since last run, and add them to
the main journal file. Or with –dry-run, just print the transactions
that would be added.
The input files are specified as arguments - no need to write -f before
each one. So eg to add new transactions from all CSV files to the main
journal, it’s just: hledger import *.csv
New transactions are detected in the same way as print –new: by assuming
transactions are always added to the input files in increasing date
order, and by saving .latest.FILE state files.
The –dry-run output is in journal format, so you can filter it, eg to see only uncategorised transactions:
$ hledger import --dry ... | hledger -f- print unknown --ignore-assertions
incomestatement
incomestatement, is
This command displays a simple income statement, showing revenues and
expenses during a period. It assumes that these accounts are under a
top-level revenue or income or expense account (case insensitive,
plural forms also allowed). Note this report shows all account balances
with normal positive sign (like conventional financial statements,
unlike balance/print/register) (experimental).
This command displays a simple income
statement. It currently
assumes that you have top-level accounts named income (or revenue)
and expense (plural forms also allowed.)
$ hledger incomestatement
Income Statement
Revenues:
$-2 income
$-1 gifts
$-1 salary
--------------------
$-2
Expenses:
$2 expenses
$1 food
$1 supplies
--------------------
$2
Total:
--------------------
0
With a reporting interval, multiple columns will
be shown, one for each report period. Normally incomestatement shows
revenues/expenses per period, though as with multicolumn balance
reports you can alter the report mode
with --change/--cumulative/--historical.
This command also supports output destination and output format selection.
prices
prices
Print market price directives from the journal.
With –costs, also print synthetic market prices based on transaction
prices. With –inverted-costs, also print
inverse prices based on transaction prices. Prices (and postings
providing prices) can be filtered by a query.
print, txns, p
Show transaction journal entries, sorted by date.
The print command displays full journal entries (transactions) from the journal file in date order, tidily formatted. With –date2, transactions are sorted by secondary date instead.
print’s output is always a valid hledger journal.
It preserves all transaction information, but it does not preserve
directives or inter-transaction comments
$ hledger print
2008/01/01 income
assets:bank:checking $1
income:salary $-1
2008/06/01 gift
assets:bank:checking $1
income:gifts $-1
2008/06/02 save
assets:bank:saving $1
assets:bank:checking $-1
2008/06/03 * eat & shop
expenses:food $1
expenses:supplies $1
assets:cash $-2
2008/12/31 * pay off
liabilities:debts $1
assets:bank:checking $-1
Normally, the journal entry’s explicit or implicit amount style is
preserved. Ie when an amount is omitted in the journal, it will be
omitted in the output. You can use the -x/--explicit flag to make
all amounts explicit, which can be useful for troubleshooting or for
making your journal more readable and robust against data entry errors.
Note, -x will cause postings with a multi-commodity amount (these can
arise when a multi-commodity transaction has an implicit amount) will be
split into multiple single-commodity postings, for valid journal output.
With -B/--cost, amounts with transaction
prices are converted to cost using
that price. This can be used for troubleshooting.
With -m/--match and a STR argument, print will show at most one
transaction: the one one whose description is most similar to STR, and
is most recent. STR should contain at least two characters. If there is
no similar-enough match, no transaction will be shown.
With --new, for each FILE being read, hledger reads (and writes) a
special state file (.latest.FILE in the same directory), containing
the latest transaction date(s) that were seen last time FILE was read.
When this file is found, only transactions with newer dates (and new
transactions on the latest date) are printed. This is useful for
ignoring already-seen entries in import data, such as downloaded CSV
files. Eg:
$ hledger -f bank1.csv print --new
# shows transactions added since last print --new on this file
This assumes that transactions added to FILE always have same or increasing dates, and that transactions on the same day do not get reordered. See also the import command.
This command also supports output destination and output format selection. Here’s an example of print’s CSV output:
$ hledger print -Ocsv
"txnidx","date","date2","status","code","description","comment","account","amount","commodity","credit","debit","posting-status","posting-comment"
"1","2008/01/01","","","","income","","assets:bank:checking","1","$","","1","",""
"1","2008/01/01","","","","income","","income:salary","-1","$","1","","",""
"2","2008/06/01","","","","gift","","assets:bank:checking","1","$","","1","",""
"2","2008/06/01","","","","gift","","income:gifts","-1","$","1","","",""
"3","2008/06/02","","","","save","","assets:bank:saving","1","$","","1","",""
"3","2008/06/02","","","","save","","assets:bank:checking","-1","$","1","","",""
"4","2008/06/03","","*","","eat & shop","","expenses:food","1","$","","1","",""
"4","2008/06/03","","*","","eat & shop","","expenses:supplies","1","$","","1","",""
"4","2008/06/03","","*","","eat & shop","","assets:cash","-2","$","2","","",""
"5","2008/12/31","","*","","pay off","","liabilities:debts","1","$","","1","",""
"5","2008/12/31","","*","","pay off","","assets:bank:checking","-1","$","1","","",""
- There is one CSV record per posting, with the parent transaction’s fields repeated.
- The “txnidx” (transaction index) field shows which postings belong to the same transaction. (This number might change if transactions are reordered within the file, files are parsed/included in a different order, etc.)
- The amount is separated into “commodity” (the symbol) and “amount” (numeric quantity) fields.
- The numeric amount is repeated in either the “credit” or “debit” column, for convenience. (Those names are not accurate in the accounting sense; it just puts negative amounts under credit and zero or greater amounts under debit.)
print-unique
print-unique
Print transactions which do not reuse an already-seen description.
Example:
$ cat unique.journal
1/1 test
(acct:one) 1
2/2 test
(acct:two) 2
$ LEDGER_FILE=unique.journal hledger print-unique
(-f option not supported)
2015/01/01 test
(acct:one) 1
register
register, reg, r
Show postings and their running total.
The register command displays postings in date order, one per line, and their running total. This is typically used with a query selecting a particular account, to see that account’s activity:
$ hledger register checking
2008/01/01 income assets:bank:checking $1 $1
2008/06/01 gift assets:bank:checking $1 $2
2008/06/02 save assets:bank:checking $-1 $1
2008/12/31 pay off assets:bank:checking $-1 0
With –date2, it shows and sorts by secondary date instead.
The --historical/-H flag adds the balance from any undisplayed prior
postings to the running total. This is useful when you want to see only
recent activity, with a historically accurate running balance:
$ hledger register checking -b 2008/6 --historical
2008/06/01 gift assets:bank:checking $1 $2
2008/06/02 save assets:bank:checking $-1 $1
2008/12/31 pay off assets:bank:checking $-1 0
The --depth option limits the amount of sub-account detail displayed.
The --average/-A flag shows the running average posting amount
instead of the running total (so, the final number displayed is the
average for the whole report period). This flag implies --empty (see
below). It is affected by --historical. It works best when showing
just one account and one commodity.
The --related/-r flag shows the other postings in the transactions
of the postings which would normally be shown.
With a reporting interval, register shows summary postings, one per interval, aggregating the postings to each account:
$ hledger register --monthly income
2008/01 income:salary $-1 $-1
2008/06 income:gifts $-1 $-2
Periods with no activity, and summary postings with a zero amount, are
not shown by default; use the --empty/-E flag to see them:
$ hledger register --monthly income -E
2008/01 income:salary $-1 $-1
2008/02 0 $-1
2008/03 0 $-1
2008/04 0 $-1
2008/05 0 $-1
2008/06 income:gifts $-1 $-2
2008/07 0 $-2
2008/08 0 $-2
2008/09 0 $-2
2008/10 0 $-2
2008/11 0 $-2
2008/12 0 $-2
Often, you’ll want to see just one line per interval. The --depth
option helps with this, causing subaccounts to be aggregated:
$ hledger register --monthly assets --depth 1h
2008/01 assets $1 $1
2008/06 assets $-1 0
2008/12 assets $-1 $-1
Note when using report intervals, if you specify start/end dates these will be adjusted outward if necessary to contain a whole number of intervals. This ensures that the first and last intervals are full length and comparable to the others in the report.
Custom register output
register uses the full terminal width by default, except on windows. You
can override this by setting the COLUMNS environment variable (not a
bash shell variable) or by using the --width/-w option.
The description and account columns normally share the space equally
(about half of (width - 40) each). You can adjust this by adding a
description width as part of –width’s argument, comma-separated:
--width W,D . Here’s a diagram (won’t display correctly in –help):
<--------------------------------- width (W) ---------------------------------->
date (10) description (D) account (W-41-D) amount (12) balance (12)
DDDDDDDDDD dddddddddddddddddddd aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa AAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAA
and some examples:
$ hledger reg # use terminal width (or 80 on windows)
$ hledger reg -w 100 # use width 100
$ COLUMNS=100 hledger reg # set with one-time environment variable
$ export COLUMNS=100; hledger reg # set till session end (or window resize)
$ hledger reg -w 100,40 # set overall width 100, description width 40
$ hledger reg -w $COLUMNS,40 # use terminal width, & description width 40
This command also supports output destination and output format selection.
register-match
register-match
Print the one posting whose transaction description is closest to DESC,
in the style of the register command. If there are multiple equally good
matches, it shows the most recent. Query options (options, not
arguments) can be used to restrict the search space. Helps
ledger-autosync detect already-seen transactions when importing.
rewrite
rewrite
Print all transactions, rewriting the postings of matched transactions.
For now the only rewrite available is adding new postings, like print
–auto.
This is a start at a generic rewriter of transaction entries. It reads the default journal and prints the transactions, like print, but adds one or more specified postings to any transactions matching QUERY. The posting amounts can be fixed, or a multiplier of the existing transaction’s first posting amount.
Examples:
hledger-rewrite.hs ^income --add-posting '(liabilities:tax) *.33 ; income tax' --add-posting '(reserve:gifts) $100'
hledger-rewrite.hs expenses:gifts --add-posting '(reserve:gifts) *-1"'
hledger-rewrite.hs -f rewrites.hledger
rewrites.hledger may consist of entries like:
= ^income amt:<0 date:2017
(liabilities:tax) *0.33 ; tax on income
(reserve:grocery) *0.25 ; reserve 25% for grocery
(reserve:) *0.25 ; reserve 25% for grocery
Note the single quotes to protect the dollar sign from bash, and the two spaces between account and amount.
More:
$ hledger rewrite -- [QUERY] --add-posting "ACCT AMTEXPR" ...
$ hledger rewrite -- ^income --add-posting '(liabilities:tax) *.33'
$ hledger rewrite -- expenses:gifts --add-posting '(budget:gifts) *-1"'
$ hledger rewrite -- ^income --add-posting '(budget:foreign currency) *0.25 JPY; diversify'
Argument for --add-posting option is a usual posting of transaction
with an exception for amount specification. More precisely, you can use
'*' (star symbol) before the amount to indicate that that this is a
factor for an amount of original matched posting. If the amount includes
a commodity name, the new posting amount will be in the new commodity;
otherwise, it will be in the matched posting amount’s commodity.
Re-write rules in a file
During the run this tool will execute so called “Automated Transactions” found in any journal it process. I.e instead of specifying this operations in command line you can put them in a journal file.
$ rewrite-rules.journal
Make contents look like this:
= ^income
(liabilities:tax) *.33
= expenses:gifts
budget:gifts *-1
assets:budget *1
Note that '=' (equality symbol) that is used instead of date in
transactions you usually write. It indicates the query by which you want
to match the posting to add new ones.
$ hledger rewrite -- -f input.journal -f rewrite-rules.journal > rewritten-tidy-output.journal
This is something similar to the commands pipeline:
$ hledger rewrite -- -f input.journal '^income' --add-posting '(liabilities:tax) *.33' \
| hledger rewrite -- -f - expenses:gifts --add-posting 'budget:gifts *-1' \
--add-posting 'assets:budget *1' \
> rewritten-tidy-output.journal
It is important to understand that relative order of such entries in journal is important. You can re-use result of previously added postings.
Diff output format
To use this tool for batch modification of your journal files you may find useful output in form of unified diff.
$ hledger rewrite -- --diff -f examples/sample.journal '^income' --add-posting '(liabilities:tax) *.33'
Output might look like:
--- /tmp/examples/sample.journal
+++ /tmp/examples/sample.journal
@@ -18,3 +18,4 @@
2008/01/01 income
- assets:bank:checking $1
+ assets:bank:checking $1
income:salary
+ (liabilities:tax) 0
@@ -22,3 +23,4 @@
2008/06/01 gift
- assets:bank:checking $1
+ assets:bank:checking $1
income:gifts
+ (liabilities:tax) 0
If you’ll pass this through patch tool you’ll get transactions
containing the posting that matches your query be updated. Note that
multiple files might be update according to list of input files
specified via --file options and include directives inside of these
files.
Be careful. Whole transaction being re-formatted in a style of output
from hledger print.
See also:
https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/99
rewrite vs. print –auto
This command predates print –auto, and currently does much the same thing, but with these differences:
-
with multiple files, rewrite lets rules in any file affect all other files. print –auto uses standard directive scoping; rules affect only child files.
-
rewrite’s query limits which transactions can be rewritten; all are printed. print –auto’s query limits which transactions are printed.
-
rewrite applies rules specified on command line or in the journal. print –auto applies rules specified in the journal.
roi
roi
Shows the time-weighted (TWR) and money-weighted (IRR) rate of return on
your investments.
This command assumes that you have account(s) that hold nothing but your investments and whenever you record current appraisal/valuation of these investments you offset unrealized profit and loss into account(s) that, again, hold nothing but unrealized profit and loss.
Any transactions affecting balance of investment account(s) and not originating from unrealized profit and loss account(s) are assumed to be your investments or withdrawals.
At a minimum, you need to supply a query (which could be just an account
name) to select your investments with --inv, and another query to
identify your profit and loss transactions with --pnl.
It will compute and display the internalized rate of return (IRR) and time-weighted rate of return (TWR) for your investments for the time period requested. Both rates of return are annualized before display, regardless of the length of reporting interval.
stats
stats
Show some journal statistics.
The stats command displays summary information for the whole journal, or a matched part of it. With a reporting interval, it shows a report for each report period.
Example:
$ hledger stats
Main journal file : /src/hledger/examples/sample.journal
Included journal files :
Transactions span : 2008-01-01 to 2009-01-01 (366 days)
Last transaction : 2008-12-31 (2333 days ago)
Transactions : 5 (0.0 per day)
Transactions last 30 days: 0 (0.0 per day)
Transactions last 7 days : 0 (0.0 per day)
Payees/descriptions : 5
Accounts : 8 (depth 3)
Commodities : 1 ($)
This command also supports output destination and output format selection.
tags
tags
List all the tag names used in the journal. With a TAGREGEX argument,
only tag names matching the regular expression (case insensitive) are
shown. With QUERY arguments, only transactions matching the query are
considered.
test
test
Run built-in unit tests.
This command runs the unit tests built in to hledger-lib and hledger, printing test names and results on stdout. If any test fails, the exit code will be non-zero.
Test names include a group prefix. If a (exact, case sensitive) group prefix, or a full test name is provided as the first argument, only that group or test is run.
If a numeric second argument is provided, it will set the randomness seed, for repeatable results from tests using randomness (currently none of them).
This is mainly used by developers, but it’s nice to be able to sanity-check your installed hledger executable at any time. All tests are expected to pass - if you ever see otherwise, something has gone wrong, please report a bug!
ADD-ON COMMANDS
hledger also searches for external add-on commands, and will include
these in the commands list. These are programs or scripts in your PATH
whose name starts with hledger- and ends with a recognised file
extension (currently: no extension, bat,com,exe,
hs,lhs,pl,py,rb,rkt,sh).
Add-ons can be invoked like any hledger command, but there are a few
things to be aware of. Eg if the hledger-web add-on is installed,
-
hledger -h webshows hledger’s help, whilehledger web -hshows hledger-web’s help. -
Flags specific to the add-on must have a preceding
--to hide them from hledger. Sohledger web --serve --port 9000will be rejected; you must usehledger web -- --serve --port 9000. -
You can always run add-ons directly if preferred:
hledger-web --serve --port 9000.
Add-ons are a relatively easy way to add local features or experiment with new ideas. They can be written in any language, but haskell scripts have a big advantage: they can use the same hledger (and haskell) library functions that built-in commands do, for command-line options, journal parsing, reporting, etc.
Here are some hledger add-ons available:
Official add-ons
These are maintained and released along with hledger.
api
hledger-api serves hledger data as a JSON web API.
ui
hledger-ui provides an efficient curses-style interface.
web
hledger-web provides a simple web interface.
Third party add-ons
These are maintained separately, and usually updated shortly after a hledger release.
diff
hledger-diff shows differences in an account’s transactions between one journal file and another.
iadd
hledger-iadd is a curses-style, more interactive replacement for the add command.
interest
hledger-interest generates interest transactions for an account according to various schemes.
irr
hledger-irr calculates the internal rate of return of an investment account, but it’s superseded now by the built-in roi command.
Experimental add-ons
These are available in source form in the hledger repo’s bin/ directory; installing them is pretty easy. They may be less mature and documented than built-in commands. Reading and tweaking these is a good way to start making your own!
autosync
hledger-autosync is a symbolic link for easily running ledger-autosync, if installed. ledger-autosync does deduplicating conversion of OFX data and some CSV formats, and can also download the data if your bank offers OFX Direct Connect.
chart
hledger-chart.hs is an old pie chart generator, in need of some love.
check
hledger-check.hs checks more powerful account balance assertions.
ENVIRONMENT
COLUMNS The screen width used by the register command. Default: the full terminal width.
LEDGER_FILE The journal file path when not specified with -f.
Default: ~/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal).
FILES
Reads data from one or more files in hledger journal, timeclock,
timedot, or CSV format specified with -f, or $LEDGER_FILE, or
$HOME/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal).
BUGS
The need to precede addon command options with -- when invoked from
hledger is awkward.
When input data contains non-ascii characters, a suitable system locale must be configured (or there will be an unhelpful error). Eg on POSIX, set LANG to something other than C.
In a Microsoft Windows CMD window, non-ascii characters and colours are not supported.
In a Cygwin/MSYS/Mintty window, the tab key is not supported in hledger add.
Not all of Ledger’s journal file syntax is supported. See file format differences.
On large data files, hledger is slower and uses more memory than Ledger.
TROUBLESHOOTING
Here are some issues you might encounter when you run hledger (and remember you can also seek help from the IRC channel, mail list or bug tracker):
Successfully installed, but “No command ‘hledger’ found”
stack and cabal install binaries into a special directory, which should
be added to your PATH environment variable. Eg on unix-like systems,
that is ~/.local/bin and ~/.cabal/bin respectively.
I set a custom LEDGER_FILE, but hledger is still using the default
file
LEDGER_FILE should be a real environment variable, not just a shell
variable. The command env | grep LEDGER_FILE should show it. You may
need to use export. Here’s an
explanation.
“Illegal byte sequence” or “Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide
character” errors
In order to handle non-ascii letters and symbols (like £), hledger needs
an appropriate locale. This is usually configured system-wide; you can
also configure it temporarily. The locale may need to be one that
supports UTF-8, if you built hledger with GHC < 7.2 (or possibly
always, I’m not sure yet).
Here’s an example of setting the locale temporarily, on ubuntu gnu/linux:
$ file my.journal
my.journal: UTF-8 Unicode text # <- the file is UTF8-encoded
$ locale -a
C
en_US.utf8 # <- a UTF8-aware locale is available
POSIX
$ LANG=en_US.utf8 hledger -f my.journal print # <- use it for this command
Here’s one way to set it permanently, there are probably better ways:
$ echo "export LANG=en_US.UTF-8" >>~/.bash_profile
$ bash --login
If we preferred to use eg fr_FR.utf8, we might have to install that
first:
$ apt-get install language-pack-fr
$ locale -a
C
en_US.utf8
fr_BE.utf8
fr_CA.utf8
fr_CH.utf8
fr_FR.utf8
fr_LU.utf8
POSIX
$ LANG=fr_FR.utf8 hledger -f my.journal print
Note some platforms allow variant locale spellings, but not all (ubuntu
accepts fr_FR.UTF8, mac osx requires exactly fr_FR.UTF-8).
hledger-ui
This doc is for version 1.13. []{.docversions}
NAME
hledger-ui - curses-style interface for the hledger accounting tool
SYNOPSIS
hledger-ui [OPTIONS] [QUERYARGS]
hledger ui -- [OPTIONS] [QUERYARGS]
DESCRIPTION
hledger is a cross-platform program for tracking money, time, or any other commodity, using double-entry accounting and a simple, editable file format. hledger is inspired by and largely compatible with ledger(1).
hledger-ui is hledger’s curses-style interface, providing an efficient full-window text UI for viewing accounts and transactions, and some limited data entry capability. It is easier than hledger’s command-line interface, and sometimes quicker and more convenient than the web interface.
Note hledger-ui has some different defaults (experimental):
- it generates rule-based transactions and postings by default (–forecast and –auto are always on).
- it hides transactions dated in the future by default (change this with –future or the F key).
Like hledger, it reads data from one or more files in hledger journal,
timeclock, timedot, or CSV format specified with -f, or
$LEDGER_FILE, or $HOME/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal). For more about this see hledger(1),
hledger_journal(5) etc.
OPTIONS
Note: if invoking hledger-ui as a hledger subcommand, write -- before
options as shown above.
Any QUERYARGS are interpreted as a hledger search query which filters the data.
--watch- watch for data and date changes and reload automatically
--theme=default|terminal|greenterm- use this custom display theme
--register=ACCTREGEX- start in the (first) matched account’s register screen
--change- show period balances (changes) at startup instead of historical balances
-F --flat- show accounts as a list (default)
-T --tree- show accounts as a tree
--future- show transactions dated later than today (normally hidden)
hledger input options:
-f FILE --file=FILE- use a different input file. For stdin, use - (default:
$LEDGER_FILEor$HOME/.hledger.journal) --rules-file=RULESFILE- Conversion rules file to use when reading CSV (default: FILE.rules)
--separator=CHAR- Field separator to expect when reading CSV (default: ‘,’)
--alias=OLD=NEW- rename accounts named OLD to NEW
--anon- anonymize accounts and payees
--pivot FIELDNAME- use some other field or tag for the account name
-I --ignore-assertions- ignore any failing balance assertions
hledger reporting options:
-b --begin=DATE- include postings/txns on or after this date
-e --end=DATE- include postings/txns before this date
-D --daily- multiperiod/multicolumn report by day
-W --weekly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by week
-M --monthly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by month
-Q --quarterly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by quarter
-Y --yearly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by year
-p --period=PERIODEXP- set start date, end date, and/or reporting interval all at once using period expressions syntax (overrides the flags above)
--date2- match the secondary date instead (see command help for other effects)
-U --unmarked- include only unmarked postings/txns (can combine with -P or -C)
-P --pending- include only pending postings/txns
-C --cleared- include only cleared postings/txns
-R --real- include only non-virtual postings
-NUM --depth=NUM- hide/aggregate accounts or postings more than NUM levels deep
-E --empty- show items with zero amount, normally hidden (and vice-versa in hledger-ui/hledger-web)
-B --cost- convert amounts to their cost at transaction time (using the transaction price, if any)
-V --value- convert amounts to their market value on the report end date (using the most recent applicable market price, if any)
--auto- apply automated posting rules to modify transactions.
--forecast- apply periodic transaction rules to generate future transactions, to 6 months from now or report end date.
When a reporting option appears more than once in the command line, the last one takes precedence.
Some reporting options can also be written as query arguments.
hledger help options:
-h --help- show general usage (or after COMMAND, command usage)
--version- show version
--debug[=N]- show debug output (levels 1-9, default: 1)
A @FILE argument will be expanded to the contents of FILE, which should
contain one command line option/argument per line. (To prevent this,
insert a -- argument before.)
KEYS
? shows a help dialog listing all keys. (Some of these also appear in
the quick help at the bottom of each screen.) Press ? again (or
ESCAPE, or LEFT) to close it. The following keys work on most
screens:
The cursor keys navigate: right (or enter) goes deeper, left
returns to the previous screen,
up/down/page up/page down/home/end move up and down through
lists. Vi-style (h/j/k/l) and Emacs-style
(CTRL-p/CTRL-n/CTRL-f/CTRL-b) movement keys are also supported.
A tip: movement speed is limited by your keyboard repeat rate, to move
faster you may want to adjust it. (If you’re on a mac, the Karabiner app
is one way to do that.)
With shift pressed, the cursor keys adjust the report period, limiting
the transactions to be shown (by default, all are shown).
shift-down/up steps downward and upward through these standard report
period durations: year, quarter, month, week, day. Then,
shift-left/right moves to the previous/next period. t sets the
report period to today. With the --watch option, when viewing a
“current” period (the current day, week, month, quarter, or year), the
period will move automatically to track the current date. To set a
non-standard period, you can use / and a date: query.
/ lets you set a general filter query limiting the data shown, using
the same query terms as in hledger and
hledger-web. While editing the query, you can use CTRL-a/e/d/k, BS,
cursor
keys;
press ENTER to set it, or ESCAPEto cancel. There are also keys for
quickly adjusting some common filters like account depth and transaction
status (see below). BACKSPACE or DELETE removes all filters, showing
all transactions.
As mentioned above, hledger-ui shows auto-generated periodic
transactions, and hides future transactions (auto-generated or not) by
default. F toggles showing and hiding these future transactions. This
is similar to using a query like date:-tomorrow, but more convenient.
(experimental)
ESCAPE removes all filters and jumps back to the top screen. Or, it
cancels a minibuffer edit or help dialog in progress.
CTRL-l redraws the screen and centers the selection if possible
(selections near the top won’t be centered, since we don’t scroll above
the top).
g reloads from the data file(s) and updates the current screen and any
previous screens. (With large files, this could cause a noticeable
pause.)
I toggles balance assertion checking. Disabling balance assertions
temporarily can be useful for troubleshooting.
a runs command-line hledger’s add command, and reloads the updated
file. This allows some basic data entry.
A is like a, but runs the
hledger-iadd tool,
which provides a curses-style interface. This key will be available if
hledger-iadd is installed in $PATH.
E runs $HLEDGER_UI_EDITOR, or $EDITOR, or a default
(emacsclient -a "" -nw) on the journal file. With some editors (emacs,
vi), the cursor will be positioned at the current transaction when
invoked from the register and transaction screens, and at the error
location (if possible) when invoked from the error screen.
q quits the application.
Additional screen-specific keys are described below.
SCREENS
Accounts screen
This is normally the first screen displayed. It lists accounts and their balances, like hledger’s balance command. By default, it shows all accounts and their latest ending balances (including the balances of subaccounts). if you specify a query on the command line, it shows just the matched accounts and the balances from matched transactions.
Account names are shown as a flat list by default. Press T to toggle
tree mode. In flat mode, account balances are exclusive of subaccounts,
except where subaccounts are hidden by a depth limit (see below). In
tree mode, all account balances are inclusive of subaccounts.
To see less detail, press a number key, 1 to 9, to set a depth
limit. Or use - to decrease and +/= to increase the depth limit.
0 shows even less detail, collapsing all accounts to a single total.
To remove the depth limit, set it higher than the maximum account depth,
or press ESCAPE.
H toggles between showing historical balances or period balances.
Historical balances (the default) are ending balances at the end of the
report period, taking into account all transactions before that date
(filtered by the filter query if any), including transactions before the
start of the report period. In other words, historical balances are what
you would see on a bank statement for that account (unless disturbed by
a filter query). Period balances ignore transactions before the report
start date, so they show the change in balance during the report period.
They are more useful eg when viewing a time log.
U toggles filtering by unmarked status,
including or excluding unmarked postings in the balances. Similarly, P
toggles pending postings, and C toggles cleared postings. (By default,
balances include all postings; if you activate one or two status
filters, only those postings are included; and if you activate all
three, the filter is removed.)
R toggles real mode, in which virtual
postings are ignored.
Z toggles nonzero mode, in which only accounts with nonzero balances
are shown (hledger-ui shows zero items by default, unlike command-line
hledger).
Press right or enter to view an account’s transactions register.
Register screen
This screen shows the transactions affecting a particular account, like a check register. Each line represents one transaction and shows:
-
the other account(s) involved, in abbreviated form. (If there are both real and virtual postings, it shows only the accounts affected by real postings.)
-
the overall change to the current account’s balance; positive for an inflow to this account, negative for an outflow.
-
the running historical total or period total for the current account, after the transaction. This can be toggled with
H. Similar to the accounts screen, the historical total is affected by transactions (filtered by the filter query) before the report start date, while the period total is not. If the historical total is not disturbed by a filter query, it will be the running historical balance you would see on a bank register for the current account.
Transactions affecting this account’s subaccounts will be included in
the register if the accounts screen is in tree mode, or if it’s in flat
mode but this account has subaccounts which are not shown due to a depth
limit. In other words, the register always shows the transactions
contributing to the balance shown on the accounts screen.
Tree mode/flat mode can be toggled with T here also.
U toggles filtering by unmarked status,
showing or hiding unmarked transactions. Similarly, P toggles pending
transactions, and C toggles cleared transactions. (By default,
transactions with all statuses are shown; if you activate one or two
status filters, only those transactions are shown; and if you activate
all three, the filter is removed.)
R toggles real mode, in which virtual
postings are ignored.
Z toggles nonzero mode, in which only transactions posting a nonzero
change are shown (hledger-ui shows zero items by default, unlike
command-line hledger).
Press right (or enter) to view the selected transaction in detail.
Transaction screen
This screen shows a single transaction, as a general journal entry, similar to hledger’s print command and journal format (hledger_journal(5)).
The transaction’s date(s) and any cleared flag, transaction code, description, comments, along with all of its account postings are shown. Simple transactions have two postings, but there can be more (or in certain cases, fewer).
up and down will step through all transactions listed in the
previous account register screen. In the title bar, the numbers in
parentheses show your position within that account register. They will
vary depending on which account register you came from (remember most
transactions appear in multiple account registers). The #N number
preceding them is the transaction’s position within the complete
unfiltered journal, which is a more stable id (at least until the next
reload).
Error screen
This screen will appear if there is a problem, such as a parse error, when you press g to reload. Once you have fixed the problem, press g again to reload and resume normal operation. (Or, you can press escape to cancel the reload attempt.)
ENVIRONMENT
COLUMNS The screen width to use. Default: the full terminal width.
LEDGER_FILE The journal file path when not specified with -f.
Default: ~/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal).
FILES
Reads data from one or more files in hledger journal, timeclock,
timedot, or CSV format specified with -f, or $LEDGER_FILE, or
$HOME/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal).
BUGS
The need to precede options with -- when invoked from hledger is
awkward.
-f- doesn’t work (hledger-ui can’t read from stdin).
-V affects only the accounts screen.
When you press g, the current and all previous screens are
regenerated, which may cause a noticeable pause with large files. Also
there is no visual indication that this is in progress.
--watch is not yet fully robust. It works well for normal usage, but
many file changes in a short time (eg saving the file thousands of times
with an editor macro) can cause problems at least on OSX. Symptoms
include: unresponsive UI, periodic resetting of the cursor position,
momentary display of parse errors, high CPU usage eventually subsiding,
and possibly a small but persistent build-up of CPU usage until the
program is restarted.
hledger-web
This doc is for version 1.13. []{.docversions}
NAME
hledger-web - web interface for the hledger accounting tool
SYNOPSIS
hledger-web [OPTIONS]
hledger web -- [OPTIONS]
DESCRIPTION
hledger is a cross-platform program for tracking money, time, or any other commodity, using double-entry accounting and a simple, editable file format. hledger is inspired by and largely compatible with ledger(1).
hledger-web is hledger’s web interface. It starts a simple web application for browsing and adding transactions, and optionally opens it in a web browser window if possible. It provides a more user-friendly UI than the hledger CLI or hledger-ui interface, showing more at once (accounts, the current account register, balance charts) and allowing history-aware data entry, interactive searching, and bookmarking.
hledger-web also lets you share a ledger with multiple users, or even the public web. There is no access control, so if you need that you should put it behind a suitable web proxy. As a small protection against data loss when running an unprotected instance, it writes a numbered backup of the main journal file (only ?) on every edit.
Like hledger, it reads data from one or more files in hledger journal,
timeclock, timedot, or CSV format specified with -f, or
$LEDGER_FILE, or $HOME/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal). For more about this see hledger(1),
hledger_journal(5) etc.
By default, hledger-web starts the web app in “transient mode” and also
opens it in your default web browser if possible. In this mode the web
app will keep running for as long as you have it open in a browser
window, and will exit after two minutes of inactivity (no requests and
no browser windows viewing it). With --serve, it just runs the web app
without exiting, and logs requests to the console.
By default the server listens on IP address 127.0.0.1, accessible only
to local requests. You can use --host to change this, eg
--host 0.0.0.0 to listen on all configured addresses.
Similarly, use --port to set a TCP port other than 5000, eg if you are
running multiple hledger-web instances.
You can use --base-url to change the protocol, hostname, port and path
that appear in hyperlinks, useful eg for integrating hledger-web within
a larger website. The default is http://HOST:PORT/ using the server’s
configured host address and TCP port (or http://HOST if PORT is 80).
With --file-url you can set a different base url for static files, eg
for better caching or cookie-less serving on high performance websites.
Note there is no built-in access control (aside from listening on 127.0.0.1 by default). So you will need to hide hledger-web behind an authenticating proxy (such as apache or nginx) if you want to restrict who can see and add entries to your journal.
Command-line options and arguments may be used to set an initial filter on the data. This is not shown in the web UI, but it will be applied in addition to any search query entered there.
With journal and timeclock files (but not CSV files, currently) the web app detects changes made by other means and will show the new data on the next request. If a change makes the file unparseable, hledger-web will show an error until the file has been fixed.
OPTIONS
Note: if invoking hledger-web as a hledger subcommand, write -- before
options as shown above.
--serve- serve and log requests, don’t browse or auto-exit
--host=IPADDR- listen on this IP address (default: 127.0.0.1)
--port=PORT- listen on this TCP port (default: 5000)
--base-url=URL- set the base url (default: http://IPADDR:PORT). You would change this when sharing over the network, or integrating within a larger website.
--file-url=URL- set the static files url (default: BASEURL/static). hledger-web normally serves static files itself, but if you wanted to serve them from another server for efficiency, you would set the url with this.
hledger input options:
-f FILE --file=FILE- use a different input file. For stdin, use - (default:
$LEDGER_FILEor$HOME/.hledger.journal) --rules-file=RULESFILE- Conversion rules file to use when reading CSV (default: FILE.rules)
--separator=CHAR- Field separator to expect when reading CSV (default: ‘,’)
--alias=OLD=NEW- rename accounts named OLD to NEW
--anon- anonymize accounts and payees
--pivot FIELDNAME- use some other field or tag for the account name
-I --ignore-assertions- ignore any failing balance assertions
hledger reporting options:
-b --begin=DATE- include postings/txns on or after this date
-e --end=DATE- include postings/txns before this date
-D --daily- multiperiod/multicolumn report by day
-W --weekly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by week
-M --monthly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by month
-Q --quarterly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by quarter
-Y --yearly- multiperiod/multicolumn report by year
-p --period=PERIODEXP- set start date, end date, and/or reporting interval all at once using period expressions syntax (overrides the flags above)
--date2- match the secondary date instead (see command help for other effects)
-U --unmarked- include only unmarked postings/txns (can combine with -P or -C)
-P --pending- include only pending postings/txns
-C --cleared- include only cleared postings/txns
-R --real- include only non-virtual postings
-NUM --depth=NUM- hide/aggregate accounts or postings more than NUM levels deep
-E --empty- show items with zero amount, normally hidden (and vice-versa in hledger-ui/hledger-web)
-B --cost- convert amounts to their cost at transaction time (using the transaction price, if any)
-V --value- convert amounts to their market value on the report end date (using the most recent applicable market price, if any)
--auto- apply automated posting rules to modify transactions.
--forecast- apply periodic transaction rules to generate future transactions, to 6 months from now or report end date.
When a reporting option appears more than once in the command line, the last one takes precedence.
Some reporting options can also be written as query arguments.
hledger help options:
-h --help- show general usage (or after COMMAND, command usage)
--version- show version
--debug[=N]- show debug output (levels 1-9, default: 1)
A @FILE argument will be expanded to the contents of FILE, which should
contain one command line option/argument per line. (To prevent this,
insert a -- argument before.)
ENVIRONMENT
LEDGER_FILE The journal file path when not specified with -f.
Default: ~/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal).
FILES
Reads data from one or more files in hledger journal, timeclock,
timedot, or CSV format specified with -f, or $LEDGER_FILE, or
$HOME/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal).
BUGS
The need to precede options with -- when invoked from hledger is
awkward.
-f- doesn’t work (hledger-web can’t read from stdin).
Query arguments and some hledger options are ignored.
Does not work in text-mode browsers.
Does not work well on small screens.
hledger-api
This doc is for version 1.13. []{.docversions}
NAME
hledger-api - web API server for the hledger accounting tool
SYNOPSIS
hledger-api [OPTIONS]
hledger api -- [OPTIONS]
DESCRIPTION
hledger is a cross-platform program for tracking money, time, or any other commodity, using double-entry accounting and a simple, editable file format. hledger is inspired by and largely compatible with ledger(1).
hledger-api is a simple web API server, intended to support client-side web apps operating on hledger data. It comes with a series of simple client-side app examples, which drive its evolution.
Like hledger, it reads data from one or more files in hledger journal,
timeclock, timedot, or CSV format specified with -f, or
$LEDGER_FILE, or $HOME/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal). For more about this see hledger(1),
hledger_journal(5) etc.
The server listens on IP address 127.0.0.1, accessible only to local
requests, by default. You can change this with --host, eg
--host 0.0.0.0 to listen on all addresses. Note there is no other
access control, and hledger-api allows file browsing, so on shared
machines you will certainly need to put it behind an authenticating
proxy to restrict access.
You can change the TCP port it listens on (default: 8001) with
-p PORT.
API methods look like:
/api/v1/accountnames
/api/v1/transactions
/api/v1/prices
/api/v1/commodities
/api/v1/accounts
/api/v1/accounts/ACCTNAME
See /api/swagger.json for a full list in Swagger 2.0 format. (Or you
can run hledger-api --swagger to print this in the console.)
hledger-api also serves files, from the current directory by default,
and the / path will also show a directory listing. This is convenient
for serving client-side web code, in addition to the server-side api.
OPTIONS
Note: if invoking hledger-api as a hledger subcommand, write -- before
options as shown above.
-f --file=FILE- use a different input file. For stdin, use - (default:
$LEDGER_FILEor$HOME/.hledger.journal) -d --static-dir=DIR- serve files from a different directory (default:
.) --host=IPADDR- listen on this IP address (default: 127.0.0.1)
-p --port=PORT- listen on this TCP port (default: 8001)
--swagger- print API docs in Swagger 2.0 format, and exit
--version- show version
-h --help- show usage
ENVIRONMENT
LEDGER_FILE The journal file path when not specified with -f.
Default: ~/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal).
FILES
Reads data from one or more files in hledger journal, timeclock,
timedot, or CSV format specified with -f, or $LEDGER_FILE, or
$HOME/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal).
BUGS
The need to precede options with -- when invoked from hledger is
awkward.
journal format
This doc is for version 1.13. []{.docversions}
NAME
Journal - hledger’s default file format, representing a General Journal
DESCRIPTION
hledger’s usual data source is a plain text file containing journal
entries in hledger journal format. This file represents a standard
accounting general
journal. I use file names
ending in .journal, but that’s not required. The journal file contains
a number of transaction entries, each describing a transfer of money (or
any commodity) between two or more named accounts, in a simple format
readable by both hledger and humans.
hledger’s journal format is a compatible subset, mostly, of ledger’s journal format, so hledger can work with compatible ledger journal files as well. It’s safe, and encouraged, to run both hledger and ledger on the same journal file, eg to validate the results you’re getting.
You can use hledger without learning any more about this file; just use the add or web commands to create and update it. Many users, though, also edit the journal file directly with a text editor, perhaps assisted by the helper modes for emacs or vim.
Here’s an example:
; A sample journal file. This is a comment.
2008/01/01 income ; <- transaction's first line starts in column 0, contains date and description
assets:bank:checking $1 ; <- posting lines start with whitespace, each contains an account name
income:salary $-1 ; followed by at least two spaces and an amount
2008/06/01 gift
assets:bank:checking $1 ; <- at least two postings in a transaction
income:gifts $-1 ; <- their amounts must balance to 0
2008/06/02 save
assets:bank:saving $1
assets:bank:checking ; <- one amount may be omitted; here $-1 is inferred
2008/06/03 eat & shop ; <- description can be anything
expenses:food $1
expenses:supplies $1 ; <- this transaction debits two expense accounts
assets:cash ; <- $-2 inferred
2008/10/01 take a loan
assets:bank:checking $1
liabilities:debts $-1
2008/12/31 * pay off ; <- an optional * or ! after the date means "cleared" (or anything you want)
liabilities:debts $1
assets:bank:checking
FILE FORMAT
Transactions
Transactions are movements of some quantity of commodities between named accounts. Each transaction is represented by a journal entry beginning with a simple date in column 0. This can be followed by any of the following, separated by spaces:
- (optional) a status character (empty,
!, or*) - (optional) a transaction code (any short number or text, enclosed in parentheses)
- (optional) a transaction description (any remaining text until end of line or a semicolon)
- (optional) a transaction comment (any remaining text following a semicolon until end of line)
Then comes zero or more (but usually at least 2) indented lines representing…
Postings
A posting is an addition of some amount to, or removal of some amount from, an account. Each posting line begins with at least one space or tab (2 or 4 spaces is common), followed by:
- (optional) a status character (empty,
!, or*), followed by a space - (required) an account name (any text, optionally containing single spaces, until end of line or a double space)
- (optional) two or more spaces or tabs followed by an amount.
Positive amounts are being added to the account, negative amounts are being removed.
The amounts within a transaction must always sum up to zero. As a convenience, one amount may be left blank; it will be inferred so as to balance the transaction.
Be sure to note the unusual two-space delimiter between account name and amount. This makes it easy to write account names containing spaces. But if you accidentally leave only one space (or tab) before the amount, the amount will be considered part of the account name.
Dates
Simple dates
Within a journal file, transaction dates use Y/M/D (or Y-M-D or Y.M.D)
Leading zeros are optional. The year may be omitted, in which case it
will be inferred from the context - the current transaction, the default
year set with a default year directive, or the current
date when the command is run. Some examples: 2010/01/31, 1/31,
2010-01-31, 2010.1.31.
Secondary dates
Real-life transactions sometimes involve more than one date - eg the date you write a cheque, and the date it clears in your bank. When you want to model this, eg for more accurate balances, you can specify individual posting dates, which I recommend. Or, you can use the secondary dates (aka auxiliary/effective dates) feature, supported for compatibility with Ledger.
A secondary date can be written after the primary date, separated by an
equals sign. The primary date, on the left, is used by default; the
secondary date, on the right, is used when the --date2 flag is
specified (--aux-date or --effective also work).
The meaning of secondary dates is up to you, but it’s best to follow a consistent rule. Eg write the bank’s clearing date as primary, and when needed, the date the transaction was initiated as secondary.
Here’s an example. Note that a secondary date will use the year of the primary date if unspecified.
2010/2/23=2/19 movie ticket
expenses:cinema $10
assets:checking
$ hledger register checking
2010/02/23 movie ticket assets:checking $-10 $-10
$ hledger register checking --date2
2010/02/19 movie ticket assets:checking $-10 $-10
Secondary dates require some effort; you must use them consistently in
your journal entries and remember whether to use or not use the
--date2 flag for your reports. They are included in hledger for Ledger
compatibility, but posting dates are a more powerful and less confusing
alternative.
Posting dates
You can give individual postings a different date from their parent
transaction, by adding a posting comment containing a
tag (see below) like date:DATE. This is probably the best way
to control posting dates precisely. Eg in this example the expense
should appear in May reports, and the deduction from checking should be
reported on 6/1 for easy bank reconciliation:
2015/5/30
expenses:food $10 ; food purchased on saturday 5/30
assets:checking ; bank cleared it on monday, date:6/1
$ hledger -f t.j register food
2015/05/30 expenses:food $10 $10
$ hledger -f t.j register checking
2015/06/01 assets:checking $-10 $-10
DATE should be a simple date; if the year is not
specified it will use the year of the transaction’s date. You can set
the secondary date similarly, with date2:DATE2. The date: or
date2: tags must have a valid simple date value if they are present,
eg a date: tag with no value is not allowed.
Ledger’s earlier, more compact bracketed date syntax is also supported:
[DATE], [DATE=DATE2] or [=DATE2]. hledger will attempt to parse
any square-bracketed sequence of the 0123456789/-.= characters in this
way. With this syntax, DATE infers its year from the transaction and
DATE2 infers its year from DATE.
Status
Transactions, or individual postings within a transaction, can have a status mark, which is a single character before the transaction description or posting account name, separated from it by a space, indicating one of three statuses:
mark status
unmarked
! pending
* cleared
When reporting, you can filter by status with the -U/--unmarked,
-P/--pending, and -C/--cleared flags; or the status:, status:!,
and status:* queries; or the U, P, C keys in
hledger-ui.
Note, in Ledger and in older versions of hledger, the “unmarked” state is called “uncleared”. As of hledger 1.3 we have renamed it to unmarked for clarity.
To replicate Ledger and old hledger’s behaviour of also matching pending, combine -U and -P.
Status marks are optional, but can be helpful eg for reconciling with real-world accounts. Some editor modes provide highlighting and shortcuts for working with status. Eg in Emacs ledger-mode, you can toggle transaction status with C-c C-e, or posting status with C-c C-c.
What “uncleared”, “pending”, and “cleared” actually mean is up to you. Here’s one suggestion:
status meaning
uncleared recorded but not yet reconciled; needs review
pending tentatively reconciled (if needed, eg during a big reconciliation)
cleared complete, reconciled as far as possible, and considered correct
With this scheme, you would use -PC to see the current balance at your
bank, -U to see things which will probably hit your bank soon (like
uncashed checks), and no flags to see the most up-to-date state of your
finances.
Description
A transaction’s description is the rest of the line following the date and status mark (or until a comment begins). Sometimes called the “narration” in traditional bookkeeping, it can be used for whatever you wish, or left blank. Transaction descriptions can be queried, unlike comments.
Payee and note
You can optionally include a | (pipe) character in a description to
subdivide it into a payee/payer name on the left and additional notes on
the right. This may be worthwhile if you need to do more precise
querying and pivoting
by payee.
Account names
Account names typically have several parts separated by a full colon,
from which hledger derives a hierarchical chart of accounts. They can be
anything you like, but in finance there are traditionally five top-level
accounts: assets, liabilities, income, expenses, and equity.
Account names may contain single spaces, eg:
assets:accounts receivable. Because of this, they must always be
followed by two or more spaces (or newline).
Account names can be aliased.
Amounts
After the account name, there is usually an amount. Important: between account name and amount, there must be two or more spaces.
Amounts consist of a number and (usually) a currency symbol or commodity name. Some examples:
2.00001
$1
4000 AAPL
3 "green apples"
-$1,000,000.00
INR 9,99,99,999.00
EUR -2.000.000,00
1 999 999.9455
EUR 1E3
1000E-6s
As you can see, the amount format is somewhat flexible:
- amounts are a number (the “quantity”) and optionally a currency symbol/commodity name (the “commodity”).
- the commodity is a symbol, word, or phrase, on the left or right, with or without a separating space. If the commodity contains numbers, spaces or non-word punctuation it must be enclosed in double quotes.
- negative amounts with a commodity on the left can have the minus sign before or after it
- digit groups (thousands, or any other grouping) can be separated by space or comma or period and should be used as separator between all groups
- decimal part can be separated by comma or period and should be different from digit groups separator
- scientific E-notation is allowed. Be careful not to use a digit group separator character in scientific notation, as it’s not supported and it might get mistaken for a decimal point. (Declaring the digit group separator character explicitly with a commodity directive will prevent this.)
You can use any of these variations when recording data. However, there
is some ambiguous way of representing numbers like $1.000 and $1,000
both may mean either one thousand or one dollar. By default hledger will
assume that this is sole delimiter is used only for decimals. On the
other hand commodity format declared prior to that line will help to
resolve that ambiguity differently:
commodity $1,000.00
2017/12/25 New life of Scrooge
expenses:gifts $1,000
assets
Though journal may contain mixed styles to represent amount, when hledger displays amounts, it will choose a consistent format for each commodity. (Except for price amounts, which are always formatted as written). The display format is chosen as follows:
- if there is a commodity directive specifying the format, that is used
- otherwise the format is inferred from the first posting amount in that commodity in the journal, and the precision (number of decimal places) will be the maximum from all posting amounts in that commmodity
- or if there are no such amounts in the journal, a default format is
used (like
$1000.00).
Price amounts and amounts in D directives usually don’t affect amount
format inference, but in some situations they can do so indirectly. (Eg
when D’s default commodity is applied to a commodity-less amount, or
when an amountless posting is balanced using a price’s commodity, or
when -V is used.) If you find this causing problems, set the desired
format with a commodity directive.
Virtual Postings
When you parenthesise the account name in a posting, we call that a virtual posting, which means:
- it is ignored when checking that the transaction is balanced
- it is excluded from reports when the
--real/-Rflag is used, or thereal:1query.
You could use this, eg, to set an account’s opening balance without
needing to use the equity:opening balances account:
1/1 special unbalanced posting to set initial balance
(assets:checking) $1000
When the account name is bracketed, we call it a balanced virtual
posting. This is like an ordinary virtual posting except the balanced
virtual postings in a transaction must balance to 0, like the real
postings (but separately from them). Balanced virtual postings are also
excluded by --real/-R or real:1.
1/1 buy food with cash, and update some budget-tracking subaccounts elsewhere
expenses:food $10
assets:cash $-10
[assets:checking:available] $10
[assets:checking:budget:food] $-10
Virtual postings have some legitimate uses, but those are few. You can usually find an equivalent journal entry using real postings, which is more correct and provides better error checking.
Balance Assertions
hledger supports Ledger-style balance
assertions
in journal files. These look like =EXPECTEDBALANCE following a
posting’s amount. Eg in this example we assert the expected dollar
balance in accounts a and b after each posting:
2013/1/1
a $1 =$1
b =$-1
2013/1/2
a $1 =$2
b $-1 =$-2
After reading a journal file, hledger will check all balance assertions
and report an error if any of them fail. Balance assertions can protect
you from, eg, inadvertently disrupting reconciled balances while
cleaning up old entries. You can disable them temporarily with the
--ignore-assertions flag, which can be useful for troubleshooting or
for reading Ledger files.
Assertions and ordering
hledger sorts an account’s postings and assertions first by date and then (for postings on the same day) by parse order. Note this is different from Ledger, which sorts assertions only by parse order. (Also, Ledger assertions do not see the accumulated effect of repeated postings to the same account within a transaction.)
So, hledger balance assertions keep working if you reorder differently-dated transactions within the journal. But if you reorder same-dated transactions or postings, assertions might break and require updating. This order dependence does bring an advantage: precise control over the order of postings and assertions within a day, so you can assert intra-day balances.
Assertions and included files
With included files, things are a little more complicated. Including preserves the ordering of postings and assertions. If you have multiple postings to an account on the same day, split across different files, and you also want to assert the account’s balance on the same day, you’ll have to put the assertion in the right file.
Assertions and multiple -f options
Balance assertions don’t work well across files specified with multiple -f options. Use include or concatenate the files instead.
Assertions and commodities
The asserted balance must be a simple single-commodity amount, and in
fact the assertion checks only this commodity’s balance within the
(possibly multi-commodity) account balance.
This is how assertions work in Ledger also. We could call this a
“partial” balance assertion.
To assert the balance of more than one commodity in an account, you can write multiple postings, each asserting one commodity’s balance.
You can make a stronger kind of balance assertion, by writing a double
equals sign (==EXPECTEDBALANCE). This “complete” balance assertion
asserts the absence of other commodities (or, that their balance is 0,
which to hledger is equivalent.)
2013/1/1
a $1
a 1€
b $-1
c -1€
2013/1/2 ; These assertions succeed
a 0 = $1
a 0 = 1€
b 0 == $-1
c 0 == -1€
2013/1/3 ; This assertion fails as 'a' also contains 1€
a 0 == $1
It’s not yet possible to make a complete assertion about a balance that has multiple commodities. One workaround is to isolate each commodity into its own subaccount:
2013/1/1
a:usd $1
a:euro 1€
b
2013/1/2
a 0 == 0
a:usd 0 == $1
a:euro 0 == 1€
Assertions and prices
Balance assertions ignore transaction prices, and should normally be written without one:
2019/1/1
(a) $1 @ €1 = $1
We do allow prices to be written there, however, and print shows them, even though they don’t affect whether the assertion passes or fails. This is for backward compatibility (hledger’s close command used to generate balance assertions with prices), and because balance assignments do use them (see below).
Assertions and subaccounts
Balance assertions do not count the balance from subaccounts; they check the posted account’s exclusive balance. For example:
1/1
checking:fund 1 = 1 ; post to this subaccount, its balance is now 1
checking 1 = 1 ; post to the parent account, its exclusive balance is now 1
equity
The balance report’s flat mode shows these exclusive balances more clearly:
$ hledger bal checking --flat
1 checking
1 checking:fund
--------------------
2
Assertions and virtual postings
Balance assertions are checked against all postings, both real and
virtual. They are not affected by the --real/-R
flag or real: query.
Assertions and precision
Balance assertions compare the exactly calculated amounts, which are not always what is shown by reports. Eg a commodity directive may limit the display precision, but this will not affect balance assertions. Balance assertion failure messages show exact amounts.
Balance Assignments
Ledger-style balance assignments are also supported. These are like balance assertions, but with no posting amount on the left side of the equals sign; instead it is calculated automatically so as to satisfy the assertion. This can be a convenience during data entry, eg when setting opening balances:
; starting a new journal, set asset account balances
2016/1/1 opening balances
assets:checking = $409.32
assets:savings = $735.24
assets:cash = $42
equity:opening balances
or when adjusting a balance to reality:
; no cash left; update balance, record any untracked spending as a generic expense
2016/1/15
assets:cash = $0
expenses:misc
The calculated amount depends on the account’s balance in the commodity at that point (which depends on the previously-dated postings of the commodity to that account since the last balance assertion or assignment). Note that using balance assignments makes your journal a little less explicit; to know the exact amount posted, you have to run hledger or do the calculations yourself, instead of just reading it.
Balance assignments and prices
A transaction price in a balance assignment will cause the calculated amount to have that price attached:
2019/1/1
(a) = $1 @ €2
$ hledger print --explicit
2019/01/01
(a) $1 @ €2 = $1 @ €2
Transaction prices
Within a transaction, you can note an amount’s price in another commodity. This can be used to document the cost (in a purchase) or selling price (in a sale). For example, transaction prices are useful to record purchases of a foreign currency. Note transaction prices are fixed at the time of the transaction, and do not change over time. See also market prices, which represent prevailing exchange rates on a certain date.
There are several ways to record a transaction price:
-
Write the price per unit, as
@ UNITPRICEafter the amount:2009/1/1 assets:euros €100 @ $1.35 ; one hundred euros purchased at $1.35 each assets:dollars ; balancing amount is -$135.00 -
Write the total price, as
@@ TOTALPRICEafter the amount:2009/1/1 assets:euros €100 @@ $135 ; one hundred euros purchased at $135 for the lot assets:dollars -
Specify amounts for all postings, using exactly two commodities, and let hledger infer the price that balances the transaction:
2009/1/1 assets:euros €100 ; one hundred euros purchased assets:dollars $-135 ; for $135
(Ledger users: Ledger uses a different
syntax
for fixed prices, {=UNITPRICE}, which hledger currently ignores).
Use the -B/--cost flag to convert
amounts to their transaction price’s commodity, if any. (mnemonic: “B”
is from “cost Basis”, as in Ledger). Eg here is how -B affects the
balance report for the example above:
$ hledger bal -N --flat
$-135 assets:dollars
€100 assets:euros
$ hledger bal -N --flat -B
$-135 assets:dollars
$135 assets:euros # <- the euros' cost
Note -B is sensitive to the order of postings when a transaction price is inferred: the inferred price will be in the commodity of the last amount. So if example 3’s postings are reversed, while the transaction is equivalent, -B shows something different:
2009/1/1
assets:dollars $-135 ; 135 dollars sold
assets:euros €100 ; for 100 euros
$ hledger bal -N --flat -B
€-100 assets:dollars # <- the dollars' selling price
€100 assets:euros
Comments
Lines in the journal beginning with a semicolon (;) or hash (#) or
star (*) are comments, and will be ignored. (Star comments cause
org-mode nodes to be ignored, allowing emacs users to fold and navigate
their journals with org-mode or orgstruct-mode.)
You can attach comments to a transaction by writing them after the
description and/or indented on the following lines (before the
postings). Similarly, you can attach comments to an individual posting
by writing them after the amount and/or indented on the following lines.
Transaction and posting comments must begin with a semicolon (;).
Some examples:
# a file comment
; also a file comment
comment
This is a multiline file comment,
which continues until a line
where the "end comment" string
appears on its own (or end of file).
end comment
2012/5/14 something ; a transaction comment
; the transaction comment, continued
posting1 1 ; a comment for posting 1
posting2
; a comment for posting 2
; another comment line for posting 2
; a file comment (because not indented)
You can also comment larger regions of a file using comment and
end comment directives.
Tags
Tags are a way to add extra labels or labelled data to postings and transactions, which you can then search or pivot on.
A simple tag is a word (which may contain hyphens) followed by a full colon, written inside a transaction or posting comment line:
2017/1/16 bought groceries ; sometag:
Tags can have a value, which is the text after the colon, up to the next comma or end of line, with leading/trailing whitespace removed:
expenses:food $10 ; a-posting-tag: the tag value
Note this means hledger’s tag values can not contain commas or newlines. Ending at commas means you can write multiple short tags on one line, comma separated:
assets:checking ; a comment containing tag1:, tag2: some value ...
Here,
- “
a comment containing” is just comment text, not a tag - “
tag1” is a tag with no value - “
tag2” is another tag, whose value is “some value ...”
Tags in a transaction comment affect the transaction and all of its
postings, while tags in a posting comment affect only that posting. For
example, the following transaction has three tags (A, TAG2,
third-tag) and the posting has four (those plus posting-tag):
1/1 a transaction ; A:, TAG2:
; third-tag: a third transaction tag, <- with a value
(a) $1 ; posting-tag:
Tags are like Ledger’s metadata feature, except hledger’s tag values are simple strings.
Directives
A directive is a line in the journal beginning with a special keyword, that influences how the journal is processed. hledger’s directives are based on a subset of Ledger’s, but there are many differences (and also some differences between hledger versions).
Directives’ behaviour and interactions can get a little bit complex, so here is a table summarising the directives and their effects, with links to more detailed docs.
directive end directive subdirectives purpose can affect (as of 2018/06)
account any text document account all entries in
names, declare all files, before
account types & or after
display order
alias end aliases rewrite account following
names inline/included
entries until end
of current file
or end directive
apply account end apply account prepend a common following
parent to account inline/included
names entries until end
of current file
or end directive
comment end comment ignore part of following
journal inline/included
entries until end
of current file
or end directive
commodity format declare a commodity number notation:
and its number following entries
notation & display in that commodity
style in all files;
display
style: amounts of
that commodity in
reports
D declare a commodity, commodity: all
number notation & commodityless
display style for entries in all
commodityless files;
number
amounts notation:
following
commodityless
entries and
entries in that
commodity in all
files;
display
style: amounts of
that commodity in
reports
include include what the included
entries/directives directives affect
from another file
P declare a market amounts of that
price for a commodity in
commodity reports, when -V
is used
Y declare a year for following
yearless dates inline/included
entries until end
of current file
And some definitions:
subdirective optional indented directive line immediately following a parent directive
number how to interpret numbers when parsing journal entries notation (the identity of the decimal separator character). (Currently each commodity can have its own notation, even in the same file.)
display style how to display amounts of a commodity in reports (symbol side and spacing, digit groups, decimal separator, decimal places)
directive which entries and (when there are multiple files) which scope files are affected by a directive
As you can see, directives vary in which journal entries and files they affect, and whether they are focussed on input (parsing) or output (reports). Some directives have multiple effects.
If you have a journal made up of multiple files, or pass multiple -f options on the command line, note that directives which affect input typically last only until the end of their defining file. This provides more simplicity and predictability, eg reports are not changed by writing file options in a different order. It can be surprising at times though. <!-- TODO: retest For example, in:
hledger -f a.aliases -f b.journal
you might expect account aliases defined in a.aliases to affect b.journal, but they will not,
unless you include a.aliases in b.journal, or vice versa.
-->
Comment blocks
A line containing just comment starts a commented region of the file,
and a line containing just end comment (or the end of the current
file) ends it. See also comments.
Including other files
You can pull in the content of additional files by writing an include directive, like this:
include path/to/file.journal
If the path does not begin with a slash, it is relative to the current
file. The include file path may contain common glob
patterns
(e.g. *).
The include directive can only be used in journal files. It can
include journal, timeclock or timedot files, but not CSV files.
Default year
You can set a default year to be used for subsequent dates which don’t
specify a year. This is a line beginning with Y followed by the year.
Eg:
Y2009 ; set default year to 2009
12/15 ; equivalent to 2009/12/15
expenses 1
assets
Y2010 ; change default year to 2010
2009/1/30 ; specifies the year, not affected
expenses 1
assets
1/31 ; equivalent to 2010/1/31
expenses 1
assets
Declaring commodities
The commodity directive declares commodities which may be used in the
journal (though currently we do not enforce this). It may be written on
a single line, like this:
; commodity EXAMPLEAMOUNT
; display AAAA amounts with the symbol on the right, space-separated,
; using period as decimal point, with four decimal places, and
; separating thousands with comma.
commodity 1,000.0000 AAAA
or on multiple lines, using the “format” subdirective. In this case the commodity symbol appears twice and should be the same in both places:
; commodity SYMBOL
; format EXAMPLEAMOUNT
; display indian rupees with currency name on the left,
; thousands, lakhs and crores comma-separated,
; period as decimal point, and two decimal places.
commodity INR
format INR 9,99,99,999.00
Commodity directives have a second purpose: they define the standard display format for amounts in the commodity. Normally the display format is inferred from journal entries, but this can be unpredictable; declaring it with a commodity directive overrides this and removes ambiguity. Towards this end, amounts in commodity directives must always be written with a decimal point (a period or comma, followed by 0 or more decimal digits).
Default commodity
The D directive sets a default commodity (and display format), to be
used for amounts without a commodity symbol (ie, plain numbers). (Note
this differs from Ledger’s default commodity directive.) The commodity
and display format will be applied to all subsequent commodity-less
amounts, or until the next D directive.
# commodity-less amounts should be treated as dollars
# (and displayed with symbol on the left, thousands separators and two decimal places)
D $1,000.00
1/1
a 5 ; <- commodity-less amount, becomes $1
b
As with the commodity directive, the amount must always be written
with a decimal point.
Market prices
The P directive declares a market price, which is an exchange rate
between two commodities on a certain date. (In Ledger, they are called
“historical prices”.) These are often obtained from a stock
exchange, cryptocurrency
exchange, or the foreign exchange
market.
Here is the format:
P DATE COMMODITYA COMMODITYBAMOUNT
- DATE is a simple date
- COMMODITYA is the symbol of the commodity being priced
- COMMODITYBAMOUNT is an amount (symbol and quantity) in a second commodity, giving the price in commodity B of one unit of commodity A.
These two market price directives say that one euro was worth 1.35 US dollars during 2009, and $1.40 from 2010 onward:
P 2009/1/1 € $1.35
P 2010/1/1 € $1.40
The -V/--value flag can be used to convert
reported amounts to another commodity using these prices.
Declaring accounts
account directives can be used to pre-declare accounts. Though not
required, they can provide several benefits:
- They can document your intended chart of accounts, providing a reference.
- They can store extra information about accounts (account numbers, notes, etc.)
- They can help hledger know your accounts’ types (asset, liability, equity, revenue, expense), useful for reports like balancesheet and incomestatement.
- They control account display order in reports, allowing non-alphabetic sorting (eg Revenues to appear above Expenses).
- They help with account name completion in the add command, hledger-iadd, hledger-web, ledger-mode etc.
The simplest form is just the word account followed by a hledger-style
account name, eg:
account assets:bank:checking
Account comments
Comments, beginning with a semicolon, optionally including tags, can be written after the account name, and/or on following lines. Eg:
account assets:bank:checking ; a comment
; another comment
; acctno:12345, a tag
Tip: comments on the same line require hledger 1.12+. If you need your journal to be compatible with older hledger versions, write comments on the next line instead.
Account subdirectives
We also allow (and ignore) Ledger-style indented subdirectives, just for compatibility.:
account assets:bank:checking
format blah blah ; <- subdirective, ignored
Here is the full syntax of account directives:
account ACCTNAME [ACCTTYPE] [;COMMENT]
[;COMMENTS]
[LEDGER-STYLE SUBDIRECTIVES, IGNORED]
Account types
hledger recognises five types (or classes) of account: Asset, Liability, Equity, Revenue, Expense. This is used by a few accounting-aware reports such as balancesheet, incomestatement and cashflow.
####### Auto-detected account types
If you name your top-level accounts with some variation of assets,
liabilities/debts, equity, revenues/income, or expenses,
their types are detected automatically.
####### Account types declared with tags
More generally, you can declare an account’s type with an account
directive, by writing a type: tag in a comment,
followed by one of the words Asset, Liability, Equity, Revenue,
Expense, or one of the letters ALERX (case insensitive):
account assets ; type:Asset
account liabilities ; type:Liability
account equity ; type:Equity
account revenues ; type:Revenue
account expenses ; type:Expenses
####### Account types declared with account type codes
Or, you can write one of those letters separated from the account name by two or more spaces, but this should probably be considered deprecated as of hledger 1.13:
account assets A
account liabilities L
account equity E
account revenues R
account expenses X
####### Overriding auto-detected types
If you ever override the types of those auto-detected english account names mentioned above, you might need to help the reports a bit. Eg:
; make "liabilities" not have the liability type - who knows why
account liabilities ; type:E
; we need to ensure some other account has the liability type,
; otherwise balancesheet would still show "liabilities" under Liabilities
account - ; type:L
Account display order
Account directives also set the order in which accounts are displayed, eg in reports, the hledger-ui accounts screen, and the hledger-web sidebar. By default accounts are listed in alphabetical order. But if you have these account directives in the journal:
account assets
account liabilities
account equity
account revenues
account expenses
you’ll see those accounts displayed in declaration order, not alphabetically:
$ hledger accounts -1
assets
liabilities
equity
revenues
expenses
Undeclared accounts, if any, are displayed last, in alphabetical order.
Note that sorting is done at each level of the account tree (within each group of sibling accounts under the same parent). And currently, this directive:
account other:zoo
would influence the position of zoo among other’s subaccounts, but
not the position of other among the top-level accounts. This means: -
you will sometimes declare parent accounts (eg account other above)
that you don’t intend to post to, just to customize their display order
- sibling accounts stay together (you couldn’t display
x:yin betweena:banda:c).
Rewriting accounts
You can define account alias rules which rewrite your account names, or parts of them, before generating reports. This can be useful for:
- expanding shorthand account names to their full form, allowing easier data entry and a less verbose journal
- adapting old journals to your current chart of accounts
- experimenting with new account organisations, like a new hierarchy or combining two accounts into one
- customising reports
Account aliases also rewrite account names in account directives. They do not affect account names being entered via hledger add or hledger-web.
See also Cookbook: Rewrite account names.
Basic aliases
To set an account alias, use the alias directive in your journal file.
This affects all subsequent journal entries in the current file or its
included files. The spaces around the = are
optional:
alias OLD = NEW
Or, you can use the --alias 'OLD=NEW' option on the command line. This
affects all entries. It’s useful for trying out aliases interactively.
OLD and NEW are case sensitive full account names. hledger will replace any occurrence of the old account name with the new one. Subaccounts are also affected. Eg:
alias checking = assets:bank:wells fargo:checking
# rewrites "checking" to "assets:bank:wells fargo:checking", or "checking:a" to "assets:bank:wells fargo:checking:a"
Regex aliases
There is also a more powerful variant that uses a regular expression, indicated by the forward slashes:
alias /REGEX/ = REPLACEMENT
or --alias '/REGEX/=REPLACEMENT'.
REGEX is a case-insensitive regular expression. Anywhere it matches inside an account name, the matched part will be replaced by REPLACEMENT. If REGEX contains parenthesised match groups, these can be referenced by the usual numeric backreferences in REPLACEMENT. Eg:
alias /^(.+):bank:([^:]+)(.*)/ = \1:\2 \3
# rewrites "assets:bank:wells fargo:checking" to "assets:wells fargo checking"
Also note that REPLACEMENT continues to the end of line (or on command line, to end of option argument), so it can contain trailing whitespace.
Multiple aliases
You can define as many aliases as you like using directives or command-line options. Aliases are recursive - each alias sees the result of applying previous ones. (This is different from Ledger, where aliases are non-recursive by default). Aliases are applied in the following order:
- alias directives, most recently seen first (recent directives take precedence over earlier ones; directives not yet seen are ignored)
- alias options, in the order they appear on the command line
end aliases
You can clear (forget) all currently defined aliases with the
end aliases directive:
end aliases
Default parent account
You can specify a parent account which will be prepended to all accounts
within a section of the journal. Use the apply account and
end apply account directives like so:
apply account home
2010/1/1
food $10
cash
end apply account
which is equivalent to:
2010/01/01
home:food $10
home:cash $-10
If end apply account is omitted, the effect lasts to the end of the
file. Included files are also affected, eg:
apply account business
include biz.journal
end apply account
apply account personal
include personal.journal
Prior to hledger 1.0, legacy account and end spellings were also
supported.
A default parent account also affects account directives. It does not affect account names being entered via hledger add or hledger-web. If account aliases are present, they are applied after the default parent account.
Periodic transactions
Periodic transaction rules describe transactions that recur. They allow
you to generate future transactions for forecasting, without having to
write them out explicitly in the journal (with --forecast). Secondly,
they also can be used to define budget goals (with --budget).
A periodic transaction rule looks like a normal journal entry, with the
date replaced by a tilde (~) followed by a period
expression (mnemonic: ~ looks like a
recurring sine wave.):
~ monthly
expenses:rent $2000
assets:bank:checking
There is an additional constraint on the period expression: the start
date must fall on a natural boundary of the interval. Eg
monthly from 2018/1/1 is valid, but monthly from 2018/1/15 is not.
Partial or relative dates (M/D, D, tomorrow, last week) in the period expression can work (useful or not). They will be relative to today’s date, unless a Y default year directive is in effect, in which case they will be relative to Y/1/1.
Two spaces after the period expression
If the period expression is followed by a transaction description, these must be separated by two or more spaces. This helps hledger know where the period expression ends, so that descriptions can not accidentally alter their meaning, as in this example:
; 2 or more spaces needed here, so the period is not understood as "every 2 months in 2020"
; ||
; vv
~ every 2 months in 2020, we will review
assets:bank:checking $1500
income:acme inc
Forecasting with periodic transactions
With the --forecast flag, each periodic transaction rule generates
future transactions recurring at the specified interval. These are not
saved in the journal, but appear in all reports. They will look like
normal transactions, but with an extra tag named
recur, whose value is the generating period expression.
Forecast transactions start on the first occurrence, and end on the last occurrence, of their interval within the forecast period. The forecast period:
- begins on the later of
- the report start date if specified with -b/-p/date:
- the day after the latest normal (non-periodic) transaction in the journal, or today if there are no normal transactions.
- ends on the report end date if specified with -e/-p/date:, or 180 days from today.
where “today” means the current date at report time. The “later of” rule ensures that forecast transactions do not overlap normal transactions in time; they will begin only after normal transactions end.
Forecasting can be useful for estimating balances into the future, and experimenting with different scenarios. Note the start date logic means that forecasted transactions are automatically replaced by normal transactions as you add those.
Forecasting can also help with data entry: describe most of your
transactions with periodic rules, and every so often copy the output of
print --forecast to the journal.
You can generate one-time transactions too: just write a period expression specifying a date with no report interval. (You could also write a normal transaction with a future date, but remember this disables forecast transactions on previous dates.)
Budgeting with periodic transactions
With the --budget flag, currently supported by the balance command,
each periodic transaction rule declares recurring budget goals for the
specified accounts. Eg the first example above declares a goal of
spending $2000 on rent (and also, a goal of depositing $2000 into
checking) every month. Goals and actual performance can then be compared
in budget reports.
For more details, see: balance: Budget report and Cookbook: Budgeting and Forecasting.
Transaction modifiers
Transaction modifier rules describe changes that should be applied
automatically to certain transactions. They can be enabled by using the
--auto flag. Currently, just one kind of change is possible: adding
extra postings. These rule-generated postings are known as “automated
postings” or “auto postings”.
A transaction modifier rule looks quite like a normal transaction,
except the first line is an equals sign followed by a
query that matches certain postings (mnemonic:
= suggests matching). And each “posting” is actually a
posting-generating rule:
= QUERY
ACCT AMT
ACCT [AMT]
...
These posting rules look like normal postings, except the amount can be:
- a normal amount with a commodity symbol, eg
$2. This will be used as-is. - a number, eg
2. The commodity symbol (if any) from the matched posting will be added to this. - a numeric multiplier, eg
*2(a star followed by a number N). The matched posting’s amount (and total price, if any) will be multiplied by N. - a multiplier with a commodity symbol, eg
*$2(a star, number N, and symbol S). The matched posting’s amount will be multiplied by N, and its commodity symbol will be replaced with S.
Some examples:
; every time I buy food, schedule a dollar donation
= expenses:food
(liabilities:charity) $-1
; when I buy a gift, also deduct that amount from a budget envelope subaccount
= expenses:gifts
assets:checking:gifts *-1
assets:checking *1
2017/12/1
expenses:food $10
assets:checking
2017/12/14
expenses:gifts $20
assets:checking
$ hledger print --auto
2017/12/01
expenses:food $10
assets:checking
(liabilities:charity) $-1
2017/12/14
expenses:gifts $20
assets:checking
assets:checking:gifts -$20
assets:checking $20
Auto postings and transaction balancing / inferred amounts / balance assertions
Currently, transaction modifiers are applied / auto postings are added:
- after missing amounts are inferred, and transactions are checked for balancedness,
- but before balance assertions are checked.
Note this means that journal entries must be balanced both before and after auto postings are added. This changed in hledger 1.12+; see #893 for background.
EDITOR SUPPORT
Add-on modes exist for various text editors, to make working with journal files easier. They add colour, navigation aids and helpful commands. For hledger users who edit the journal file directly (the majority), using one of these modes is quite recommended.
These were written with Ledger in mind, but also work with hledger files:
Editor
Emacs http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger-mode.html
Vim https://github.com/ledger/vim-ledger
Sublime https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Editing-Ledger-files-with-Sublime-Text-or-RubyMine Text
Textmate https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Using-TextMate-2
Text https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Editing-Ledger-files-with-TextWrangler Wrangler
Visual https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mark-hansen.hledger-vscode
Studio
Code
csv format
This doc is for version 1.13. []{.docversions}
NAME
CSV - how hledger reads CSV data, and the CSV rules file format
DESCRIPTION
hledger can read CSV (comma-separated value) files as if they were journal files, automatically converting each CSV record into a transaction. (To learn about writing CSV, see CSV output.)
Converting CSV to transactions requires some special conversion rules. These do several things:
- they describe the layout and format of the CSV data
- they can customize the generated journal entries using a simple templating language
- they can add refinements based on patterns in the CSV data, eg categorizing transactions with more detailed account names.
When reading a CSV file named FILE.csv, hledger looks for a conversion
rules file named FILE.csv.rules in the same directory. You can
override this with the --rules-file option. If the rules file does not
exist, hledger will auto-create one with some example rules, which
you’ll need to adjust.
At minimum, the rules file must identify the date and amount fields.
It may also be necessary to specify the date format, and the number of
header lines to skip. Eg:
fields date, _, _, amount
date-format %d/%m/%Y
skip 1
A more complete example:
# hledger CSV rules for amazon.com order history
# sample:
# "Date","Type","To/From","Name","Status","Amount","Fees","Transaction ID"
# "Jul 29, 2012","Payment","To","Adapteva, Inc.","Completed","$25.00","$0.00","17LA58JSK6PRD4HDGLNJQPI1PB9N8DKPVHL"
# skip one header line
skip 1
# name the csv fields (and assign the transaction's date, amount and code)
fields date, _, toorfrom, name, amzstatus, amount, fees, code
# how to parse the date
date-format %b %-d, %Y
# combine two fields to make the description
description %toorfrom %name
# save these fields as tags
comment status:%amzstatus, fees:%fees
# set the base account for all transactions
account1 assets:amazon
# flip the sign on the amount
amount -%amount
For more examples, see Convert CSV files.
CSV RULES
The following seven kinds of rule can appear in the rules file, in any
order. Blank lines and lines beginning with # or ; are ignored.
skip
skipN
Skip this number of CSV records at the beginning. You’ll need this whenever your CSV data contains header lines. Eg:
# ignore the first CSV line
skip 1
date-format
date-formatDATEFMT
When your CSV date fields are not formatted like YYYY/MM/DD (or
YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY.MM.DD), you’ll need to specify the format.
DATEFMT is a strptime-like date parsing
pattern,
which must parse the date field values completely. Examples:
# for dates like "11/06/2013":
date-format %m/%d/%Y
# for dates like "6/11/2013" (note the - to make leading zeros optional):
date-format %-d/%-m/%Y
# for dates like "2013-Nov-06":
date-format %Y-%h-%d
# for dates like "11/6/2013 11:32 PM":
date-format %-m/%-d/%Y %l:%M %p
field list
fieldsFIELDNAME1, FIELDNAME2…
This (a) names the CSV fields, in order (names may not contain
whitespace; uninteresting names may be left blank), and (b) assigns them
to journal entry fields if you use any of these standard field names:
date, date2, status, code, description, comment, account1,
account2, amount, amount-in, amount-out, currency, balance.
Eg:
# use the 1st, 2nd and 4th CSV fields as the entry's date, description and amount,
# and give the 7th and 8th fields meaningful names for later reference:
#
# CSV field:
# 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
# entry field:
fields date, description, , amount, , , somefield, anotherfield
field assignment
ENTRYFIELDNAME FIELDVALUE
This sets a journal entry field (one of the standard names above) to the
given text value, which can include CSV field values interpolated by
name (%CSVFIELDNAME) or 1-based position (%N).
# set the amount to the 4th CSV field with "USD " prepended
amount USD %4
# combine three fields to make a comment (containing two tags)
comment note: %somefield - %anotherfield, date: %1
Field assignments can be used instead of or in addition to a field list.
conditional block
if PATTERN
FIELDASSIGNMENTS…
if
PATTERN
PATTERN…
FIELDASSIGNMENTS…
This applies one or more field assignments, only to those CSV records matched by one of the PATTERNs. The patterns are case-insensitive regular expressions which match anywhere within the whole CSV record (it’s not yet possible to match within a specific field). When there are multiple patterns they can be written on separate lines, unindented. The field assignments are on separate lines indented by at least one space. Examples:
# if the CSV record contains "groceries", set account2 to "expenses:groceries"
if groceries
account2 expenses:groceries
# if the CSV record contains any of these patterns, set account2 and comment as shown
if
monthly service fee
atm transaction fee
banking thru software
account2 expenses:business:banking
comment XXX deductible ? check it
include
includeRULESFILE
Include another rules file at this point. RULESFILE is either an
absolute file path or a path relative to the current file’s directory.
Eg:
# rules reused with several CSV files
include common.rules
newest-first
newest-first
Consider adding this rule if all of the following are true: you might be processing just one day of data, your CSV records are in reverse chronological order (newest first), and you care about preserving the order of same-day transactions. It usually isn’t needed, because hledger autodetects the CSV order, but when all CSV records have the same date it will assume they are oldest first.
CSV TIPS
CSV ordering
The generated journal entries will be
sorted by date. The order of same-day entries will be preserved (except
in the special case where you might need
newest-first, see above).
CSV accounts
Each journal entry will have two postings, to
account1 and account2 respectively. It’s not yet possible to
generate entries with more than two postings. It’s conventional and
recommended to use account1 for the account whose CSV we are reading.
CSV amounts
The amount field sets the amount of the
account1 posting.
If the CSV has debit/credit amounts in separate fields, assign to the
amount-in and amount-out pseudo fields instead. (Whichever one has a
value will be used, with appropriate sign. If both contain a value, it
may not work so well.)
If an amount value is parenthesised, it will be de-parenthesised and sign-flipped.
If an amount value begins with a double minus sign, those will cancel out and be removed.
If the CSV has the currency symbol in a separate field, assign that to
the currency pseudo field to have it prepended to the amount. Or, you
can use a field assignment to amount that
interpolates both CSV fields (giving more control, eg to put the
currency symbol on the right).
CSV balance assertions
If the CSV includes a running balance, you can assign that to the
balance pseudo field; whenever the running balance value is non-empty,
it will be asserted as the balance
after the account1 posting.
Reading multiple CSV files
You can read multiple CSV files at once using multiple -f arguments on
the command line, and hledger will look for a correspondingly-named
rules file for each. Note if you use the --rules-file option, this one
rules file will be used for all the CSV files being read.
timeclock format
This doc is for version 1.13. []{.docversions}
NAME
Timeclock - the time logging format of timeclock.el, as read by hledger
DESCRIPTION
hledger can read timeclock files. As with Ledger, these are (a subset of) timeclock.el’s format, containing clock-in and clock-out entries as in the example below. The date is a simple date. The time format is HH:MM[:SS][+-ZZZZ]. Seconds and timezone are optional. The timezone, if present, must be four digits and is ignored (currently the time is always interpreted as a local time).
i 2015/03/30 09:00:00 some:account name optional description after two spaces
o 2015/03/30 09:20:00
i 2015/03/31 22:21:45 another account
o 2015/04/01 02:00:34
hledger treats each clock-in/clock-out pair as a transaction posting
some number of hours to an account. Or if the session spans more than
one day, it is split into several transactions, one for each day. For
the above time log, hledger print generates these journal entries:
$ hledger -f t.timeclock print
2015/03/30 * optional description after two spaces
(some:account name) 0.33h
2015/03/31 * 22:21-23:59
(another account) 1.64h
2015/04/01 * 00:00-02:00
(another account) 2.01h
Here is a sample.timeclock to download and some queries to try:
$ hledger -f sample.timeclock balance # current time balances
$ hledger -f sample.timeclock register -p 2009/3 # sessions in march 2009
$ hledger -f sample.timeclock register -p weekly --depth 1 --empty # time summary by week
To generate time logs, ie to clock in and clock out, you could:
-
use emacs and the built-in timeclock.el, or the extended timeclock-x.el and perhaps the extras in ledgerutils.el
-
at the command line, use these bash aliases:
shell alias ti="echo i `date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'` \$* >>$TIMELOG" alias to="echo o `date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'` >>$TIMELOG" -
or use the old
tiandtoscripts in the ledger 2.x repository. These rely on a “timeclock” executable which I think is just the ledger 2 executable renamed.
timedot format
This doc is for version 1.13. []{.docversions}
NAME
Timedot - hledger’s human-friendly time logging format
DESCRIPTION
Timedot is a plain text format for logging dated, categorised quantities (of time, usually), supported by hledger. It is convenient for approximate and retroactive time logging, eg when the real-time clock-in/out required with a timeclock file is too precise or too interruptive. It can be formatted like a bar chart, making clear at a glance where time was spent.
Though called “timedot”, this format is read by hledger as commodityless quantities, so it could be used to represent dated quantities other than time. In the docs below we’ll assume it’s time.
FILE FORMAT
A timedot file contains a series of day entries. A day entry begins with a date, and is followed by category/quantity pairs, one per line. Dates are hledger-style simple dates (see hledger_journal(5)). Categories are hledger-style account names, optionally indented. As in a hledger journal, there must be at least two spaces between the category (account name) and the quantity.
Quantities can be written as:
-
a sequence of dots (.) representing quarter hours. Spaces may optionally be used for grouping and readability. Eg: …. ..
-
an integral or decimal number, representing hours. Eg: 1.5
-
an integral or decimal number immediately followed by a unit symbol
s,m,h,d,w,mo, ory, representing seconds, minutes, hours, days weeks, months or years respectively. Eg: 90m. The following equivalencies are assumed, currently: 1m = 60s, 1h = 60m, 1d = 24h, 1w = 7d, 1mo = 30d, 1y=365d.
Blank lines and lines beginning with #, ; or * are ignored. An example:
# on this day, 6h was spent on client work, 1.5h on haskell FOSS work, etc.
2016/2/1
inc:client1 .... .... .... .... .... ....
fos:haskell .... ..
biz:research .
2016/2/2
inc:client1 .... ....
biz:research .
Or with numbers:
2016/2/3
inc:client1 4
fos:hledger 3
biz:research 1
Reporting:
$ hledger -f t.timedot print date:2016/2/2
2016/02/02 *
(inc:client1) 2.00
2016/02/02 *
(biz:research) 0.25
$ hledger -f t.timedot bal --daily --tree
Balance changes in 2016/02/01-2016/02/03:
|| 2016/02/01d 2016/02/02d 2016/02/03d
============++========================================
biz || 0.25 0.25 1.00
research || 0.25 0.25 1.00
fos || 1.50 0 3.00
haskell || 1.50 0 0
hledger || 0 0 3.00
inc || 6.00 2.00 4.00
client1 || 6.00 2.00 4.00
------------++----------------------------------------
|| 7.75 2.25 8.00
I prefer to use period for separating account components. We can make this work with an account alias:
2016/2/4
fos.hledger.timedot 4
fos.ledger ..
$ hledger -f t.timedot --alias /\\./=: bal date:2016/2/4
4.50 fos
4.00 hledger:timedot
0.50 ledger
--------------------
4.50
Here is a sample.timedot.