hledger/ALIASES.md

title
hledger How to use account aliases

How to use account aliases

Here's an example of using account aliases.

Say a sole proprietor has a personal.journal:

1/1
    expenses:food  $1
    assets:cash

and a business.journal:

1/1
    expenses:office supplies  $1
    assets:business checking

Here each entity has a simple journal with its own simple chart of accounts. But at tax reporting time, we need to view these as a single entity. So in unified.journal we adjust the personal account names to fit within the business chart of accounts:

alias expenses    = equity:draw:personal
alias assets:cash = assets:personal cash
include personal.journal
end aliases
include business.journal

giving:

$ hledger -f unified.journal print
2011/01/01
    equity:draw:personal:food            $1
    assets:personal cash                $-1

2011/01/01
    expenses:office supplies            $1
    assets:business checking           $-1

You can also specify aliases on the command line. This could be useful to rewrite account names when sharing a report with someone else, such as your accountant:

$ hledger --alias 'my earning=income:business'

Command-line alias options are applied after any alias directives in the journal. At most one alias directive and one alias option will be applied to each account name.