HLEDGER(1)

NAME

hledger - robust, friendly plain text accounting (CLI version)

SYNOPSIS

hledger
hledger [-f FILE] COMMAND [OPTS] [ARGS]
hledger [-f FILE] ADDONCMD -- [OPTS] [ARGS]

INTRODUCTION

hledger is a robust, user-friendly, cross-platform set of programs 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), and largely interconvertible with beancount(1).

This manual is for hledger's command line interface, version 1.29.99. It also describes the common options, file formats and concepts used by all hledger programs. It might accidentally teach you some bookkeeping/accounting as well! You don't need to know everything in here to use hledger productively, but when you have a question about functionality, this doc should answer it. It is detailed, so do skip ahead or skim when needed. You can read it on hledger.org, or as an info manual or man page on your system. You can also get it from hledger itself with
hledger --man, hledger --info or hledger help [TOPIC].

The main function of the hledger CLI is to read plain text files describing financial transactions, crunch the numbers, and print a useful report on the terminal (or save it as HTML, CSV, JSON or SQL). Many reports are available, as subcommands. hledger will also detect other hledger-* executables as extra subcommands.

hledger reads data from one or more files in journal, timeclock, timedot, or CSV format. The default file is .hledger.journal in your home directory; this can be overridden with one or more -f FILE options, or the LEDGER_FILE environment variable. hledger CLI can also read from stdin with -f-; more on that below.

Here is a small but valid hledger journal file describing one transaction:

    2015-10-16 bought food
      expenses:food          $10
      assets:cash

Transactions are dated movements of money (etc.) between two or more accounts: bank accounts, your wallet, revenue/expense categories, people, etc. You can choose any account names you wish, using : to indicate subaccounts. There must be at least two spaces between account name and amount. Positive amounts are inflow to that account (debit), negatives are outflow from it (credit). (Some reports show revenue, liability and equity account balances as negative numbers as a result; this is normal.)

hledger’s add command can help you add transactions, or you can install other data entry UIs like hledger-web or hledger-iadd. For more extensive/efficient changes, use a text editor: Emacs + ledger-mode, VIM + vim-ledger, or VS Code + hledger-vscode are some good choices (see https://hledger.org/editors.html).

To get started, run hledger add and follow the prompts, or save some entries like the above in $HOME/.hledger.journal, then try commands like:
hledger print -x
hledger aregister assets
hledger balance
hledger balancesheet
hledger incomestatement.
Run hledger to list the commands. See also the "Starting a journal file" and "Setting opening balances" sections in PART 5: COMMON TASKS.

PART 1: USER INTERFACE

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 or COMMAND help

--man
    show general or COMMAND user manual with man

--info
    show general or COMMAND user manual with info

--version
    show general or ADDONCMD 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_FILE or $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
    disable balance assertion checks (note: does not disable balance assignments)

-s --strict
    do extra error checking (check that all posted accounts are declared)

General reporting options:

-b --begin=DATE
    include postings/txns on or after this date (will be adjusted to preceding subperiod start when using a report interval)

-e --end=DATE
    include postings/txns before this date (will be adjusted to following subperiod end when using a report interval)

-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

--date2
    match the secondary date instead (see command help for other effects)

--today=DATE
    override today's date (affects relative smart dates, for tests/examples)

-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/selling amount at transaction time

-V --market
    convert amounts to their market value in default valuation commodities

-X --exchange=COMM
    convert amounts to their market value in commodity COMM

--value
    convert amounts to cost or market value, more flexibly than -B/-V/-X

--infer-market-prices
    use transaction prices (recorded with @ or @@) as additional market prices, as if they were P directives

--auto
    apply automated posting rules to modify transactions.

--forecast
    generate future transactions from periodic transaction rules, for the next 6 months or till report end date. In hledger-ui, also make ordinary future transactions visible.

--commodity-style
    Override the commodity style in the output for the specified commodity. For example 'EUR1.000,00'.

--color=WHEN (or --colour=WHEN)
    Should color-supporting commands use ANSI color codes in text output. 'auto' (default): whenever stdout seems to be a color-supporting terminal. 'always' or 'yes': always, useful eg when piping output into 'less -R'. 'never' or 'no': never. A NO_COLOR environment variable overrides this.

--pretty[=WHEN]
    Show prettier output, e.g. using unicode box-drawing characters. Accepts 'yes' (the default) or 'no' ('y', 'n', 'always', 'never' also work). If you provide an argument you must use '=', e.g. '--pretty=yes'.

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 add-on, you may need to put its options after a double-hyphen, eg: hledger ui -- --watch. Or, you can run the add-on 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.

You can save a set of command line options/arguments in a file, and then reuse them by writing @FILENAME as a command line argument. Eg: hledger bal @foo.args. (To prevent this, eg if you have an argument that begins with a literal @, precede it with --, eg: hledger bal -- @ARG).

Inside the argument file, each line should contain just one option or argument. Avoid the use of spaces, except inside quotes (or you'll see a confusing error). Between a flag and its argument, use = (or nothing). Bad:

    assets depth:2
    -X USD

Good:

    assets
    depth:2
    -X=USD

For special characters (see below), use one less level of quoting than you would at the command prompt. Bad:

    -X"$"

Good:

    -X$

See also: Save frequently used options.

  Special characters

  Single escaping (shell metacharacters)

In shell command lines, characters significant to your shell - such as spaces, <, >, (, ), |, $ and \ - should be "shell-escaped" if you want hledger to see them. This is done by enclosing them in single or double quotes, or by writing a backslash before them. Eg to match an account name containing a space:

    $ hledger register 'credit card'

or:

    $ hledger register credit\ card

Windows users should keep in mind that cmd treats single quote as a regular character, so you should be using double quotes exclusively. PowerShell treats both single and double quotes as quotes.

  Double escaping (regular expression metacharacters)

Characters significant in regular expressions (described below) - such as ., ^, $, [, ], (, ), |, and \ - may need to be "regex-escaped" if you don't want them to be interpreted by hledger's regular expression engine. This is done by writing backslashes before them, but since backslash is typically also a shell metacharacter, both shell-escaping and regex-escaping will be needed. Eg to match a literal $ sign while using the bash shell:

    $ hledger balance cur:'\$'

or:

    $ hledger balance cur:\\$

  Triple escaping (for add-on commands)

When you use hledger to run an external add-on command (described below), one level of shell-escaping is lost from any options or arguments intended for by the add-on command, so those need an extra level of shell-escaping. Eg to match a literal $ sign while using the bash shell and running an add-on command (ui):

    $ hledger ui cur:'\\$'

or:

    $ hledger ui cur:\\\\$

If you wondered why four backslashes, perhaps this helps:

unescaped: | $
escaped: | \$
double-escaped: | \\$
triple-escaped: | \\\\$

Or, you can avoid the extra escaping by running the add-on executable directly:

    $ hledger-ui cur:\\$

  Less escaping

Options and arguments are sometimes used in places other than the shell command line, where shell-escaping is not needed, so there you should use one less level of escaping. Those places include:

•   an @argumentfile

•   hledger-ui's filter field

•   hledger-web's search form

•   GHCI's prompt (used by developers).

  Unicode characters

hledger is expected to handle non-ascii characters correctly:

•   they should be parsed correctly in input files and on the command line, by all hledger tools (add, iadd, hledger-web's search/add/edit forms, etc.)

•   they should be displayed correctly by all hledger tools, and on-screen alignment should be preserved.

This requires a well-configured environment. Here are some tips:

•   A system locale must be configured, and it must be one that can decode the characters being used. In bash, you can set a locale like this: export LANG=en_US.UTF-8. There are some more details in Troubleshooting. This step is essential - without it, hledger will quit on encountering a non-ascii character (as with all GHC-compiled programs).

•   your terminal software (eg Terminal.app, iTerm, CMD.exe, xterm..) must support unicode

•   the terminal must be using a font which includes the required unicode glyphs

•   the terminal should be configured to display wide characters as double width (for report alignment)

•   on Windows, for best results you should run hledger in the same kind of environment in which it was built. Eg hledger built in the standard CMD.EXE environment (like the binaries on our download page) might show display problems when run in a cygwin or msys terminal, and vice versa. (See eg #961).

  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 directive and --alias option: alias /REGEX/ = REPLACEMENT, --alias /REGEX/=REPLACEMENT

hledger's regular expressions come from the regex-tdfa library. If they're not doing what you expect, it's important to know exactly what they support:

1.  they are case insensitive

2.  they are infix matching (they do not need to match the entire thing being matched)

3.  they are POSIX ERE (extended regular expressions)

4.  they also support GNU word boundaries (\b, \B, \<, \>)

5.  they do not support backreferences; if you write \1, it will match the digit 1. Except when doing text replacement, eg in account aliases, where backreferences can be used in the replacement string to reference capturing groups in the search regexp.

6.  they do not support mode modifiers ((?s)), character classes (\w, \d), or anything else not mentioned above.

Some things to note:

•   In the alias directive and --alias option, 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, write cur:\$.

•   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.

Environment

LEDGER_FILE The journal file path when not specified with -f.

On unix computers, the default value is: ~/.hledger.journal.

A more typical value is something like ~/finance/YYYY.journal, where ~/finance is a version-controlled finance directory and YYYY is the current year. Or, ~/finance/current.journal, where current.journal is a symbolic link to YYYY.journal.

The usual way to set this permanently is to add a command to one of your shell's startup files (eg ~/.profile):

    export LEDGER_FILE=~/finance/current.journal`

On some Mac computers, there is a more thorough way to set environment variables, that will also affect applications started from the GUI (eg, Emacs started from a dock icon): In ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist, add an entry like:

    {
      "LEDGER_FILE" : "~/finance/current.journal"
    }

For this to take effect you might need to killall Dock, or reboot.

On Windows computers, the default value is probably C:\Users\YOURNAME\.hledger.journal. You can change this by running a command like this in a powershell window (let us know if you need to be an Administrator, and if this persists across a reboot):

    > setx LEDGER_FILE "C:\Users\MyUserName\finance\2021.journal"

Or, change it in settings: see https://www.java.com/en/download/help/path.html.

COLUMNS The screen width used by the register command. Default: the full terminal width.

NO_COLOR If this variable exists with any value, hledger will not use ANSI color codes in terminal output. This is overriden by the --color/--colour option.

Input

hledger reads transactions from one or more data files. The default data file is $HOME/.hledger.journal (or on Windows, something like C:\Users\YOURNAME\.hledger.journal).

You can override this with the $LEDGER_FILE environment variable:

    $ setenv LEDGER_FILE ~/finance/2016.journal
    $ hledger stats

or with one or more -f/--file options:

    $ hledger -f /some/file -f another_file stats

The file name - means standard input:

    $ cat some.journal | hledger -f-

  Data formats

Usually the data file is in hledger's journal format, but it can be in any of the supported file formats, which currently are:

Reader: | Reads: | Used for file extensions:
journal | hledger journal files and some Ledger journals, for transactions | .journal .j .hledger .ledger
timeclock | timeclock files, for precise time logging | .timeclock
timedot | timedot files, for approximate time logging | .timedot
csv | comma/semicolon/tab/other-separated values, for data import | .csv .ssv .tsv

These formats are described in more detail below.

hledger detects the format automatically based on the file extensions shown above. If it can't recognise the file extension, it assumes journal format. So for non-journal files, it's important to use a recognised file extension, so as to either read successfully or to show relevant error messages.

You can also force a specific reader/format by prefixing the file path with the format and a colon. Eg, to read a .dat file as csv format:

    $ hledger -f csv:/some/csv-file.dat stats

Or to read stdin (-) as timeclock format:

    $ echo 'i 2009/13/1 08:00:00' | hledger print -ftimeclock:-

  Multiple files

You can specify multiple -f options, to read multiple files as one big journal. There are some limitations with this:

•   most directives do not affect sibling files

•   balance assertions will not see any account balances from previous files

If you need either of those things, you can

•   use a single parent file which includes the others

•   or concatenate the files into one before reading, eg: cat a.journal b.journal | hledger -f- CMD.

  Strict mode

hledger checks input files for valid data. By default, the most important errors are detected, while still accepting easy journal files without a lot of declarations:

•   Are the input files parseable, with valid syntax ?

•   Are all transactions balanced ?

•   Do all balance assertions pass ?

With the -s/--strict flag, additional checks are performed:

•   Are all accounts posted to, declared with an account directive ? (Account error checking)

•   Are all commodities declared with a commodity directive ? (Commodity error checking)

•   Are all commodity conversions declared explicitly ?

You can use the check command to run individual checks -- the ones listed above and some more.

Commands

hledger provides a number of built-in subcommands (described below). Most of these read your data without changing it, and display a report. A few assist with data entry and management.

Run hledger with no arguments to list the commands available, and hledger CMD to run a command. CMD can be the full command name, or its standard abbreviation shown in the commands list, or any unambiguous prefix of the name. Eg: hledger bal.

  Add-on commands

Add-on commands are extra subcommands provided by programs or scripts in your PATH

•   whose name starts with hledger-

•   whose name ends with a recognised file extension: .bat,.com,.exe, .hs,.lhs,.pl,.py,.rb,.rkt,.sh or none

•   and (on unix, mac) which are executable by the current user.

Addons can be written in any language, but haskell scripts or programs have a big advantage: they can use hledger's library code, for command-line options, parsing and reporting.

Several add-on commands are installed by the hledger-install script. See https://hledger.org/scripts.html for more details.

Note in a hledger command line, add-on command flags must have a double dash (--) preceding them. Eg you must write:

    $ hledger web -- --serve

and not:

    $ hledger web --serve

(because the --serve flag belongs to hledger-web, not hledger).

The -h/--help and --version flags don't require --.

If you have any trouble with this, remember you can always run the add-on program directly, eg:

    $ hledger-web --serve

Output

  Output destination

hledger commands send their output to the terminal by default. You can of course redirect this, eg into a file, using standard shell syntax:

    $ hledger print > foo.txt

Some commands (print, register, stats, the balance commands) also provide the -o/--output-file option, which does the same thing without needing the shell. Eg:

    $ hledger print -o foo.txt
    $ hledger print -o -        # write to stdout (the default)

  Output format

Some commands offer other kinds of output, not just text on the terminal. Here are those commands and the formats currently supported:

- | txt | csv | html | json | sql
aregister | Y | Y | Y | Y |
balance | Y 1 | Y 1 | Y 1,2 | Y |
balancesheet | Y 1 | Y 1 | Y 1 | Y |
balancesheetequity | Y 1 | Y 1 | Y 1 | Y |
cashflow | Y 1 | Y 1 | Y 1 | Y |
incomestatement | Y 1 | Y 1 | Y 1 | Y |
print | Y | Y |  | Y | Y
register | Y | Y |  | Y |

•   1 Also affected by the balance commands' --layout option.

•   2 balance does not support html output without a report interval or with --budget.

The output format is selected by the -O/--output-format=FMT option:

    $ hledger print -O csv    # print CSV on stdout

or by the filename extension of an output file specified with the -o/--output-file=FILE.FMT option:

    $ hledger balancesheet -o foo.csv    # write CSV to foo.csv

The -O option can be combined with -o to override the file extension, if needed:

    $ hledger balancesheet -o foo.txt -O csv    # write CSV to foo.txt

Some notes about the various output formats:

  CSV output

•   In CSV output, digit group marks (such as thousands separators) are disabled automatically.

  HTML output

•   HTML output can be styled by an optional hledger.css file in the same directory.

  JSON output

•   This is not yet much used; real-world feedback is welcome.

•   Our JSON is rather large and verbose, since it is a faithful representation of hledger's internal data types. To understand the JSON, read the Haskell type definitions, which are mostly in https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/master/hledger-lib/Hledger/Data/Types.hs.

•   hledger represents quantities as Decimal values storing up to 255 significant digits, eg for repeating decimals. Such numbers can arise in practice (from automatically-calculated transaction prices), and would break most JSON consumers. So in JSON, we show quantities as simple Numbers with at most 10 decimal places. We don't limit the number of integer digits, but that part is under your control. We hope this approach will not cause problems in practice; if you find otherwise, please let us know. (Cf #1195)

  SQL output

•   This is not yet much used; real-world feedback is welcome.

•   SQL output is expected to work with sqlite, MySQL and PostgreSQL

•   SQL output is structured with the expectations that statements will be executed in the empty database. If you already have tables created via SQL output of hledger, you would probably want to either clear tables of existing data (via delete or truncate SQL statements) or drop tables completely as otherwise your postings will be duped.

  Commodity styles

When displaying amounts, hledger infers a standard display style for each commodity/currency, as described below in Commodity display style.

If needed, this can be overridden by a -c/--commodity-style option (except for cost amounts and amounts displayed by the print command, which are always displayed with all decimal digits). For example, the following will force dollar amounts to be displayed as shown:

    $ hledger print -c '$1.000,0'

This option can repeated to set the display style for multiple commodities/currencies. Its argument is as described in the commodity directive.

  Colour

In terminal output, some commands can produce colour when the terminal supports it:

•   if the --color/--colour option is given a value of yes or always (or no or never), colour will (or will not) be used;

•   otherwise, if the NO_COLOR environment variable is set, colour will not be used;

•   otherwise, colour will be used if the output (terminal or file) supports it.

  Box-drawing

In terminal output, you can enable unicode box-drawing characters to render prettier tables:

•   if the --pretty option is given a value of yes or always (or no or never), unicode characters will (or will not) be used;

•   otherwise, unicode characters will not be used.

  Debug output

We intend hledger to be relatively easy to troubleshoot, introspect and develop. You can add --debug[=N] to any hledger command line to see additional debug output. N ranges from 1 (least output, the default) to 9 (maximum output). Typically you would start with 1 and increase until you are seeing enough. Debug output goes to stderr, and is not affected by -o/--output-file (unless you redirect stderr to stdout, eg: 2>&1). It will be interleaved with normal output, which can help reveal when parts of the code are evaluated. To capture debug output in a log file instead, you can usually redirect stderr, eg:

    hledger bal --debug=3 2>hledger.log

Limitations

The need to precede add-on 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.

On Windows, non-ascii characters may not display correctly when running a hledger built in CMD in MSYS/CYGWIN, or vice-versa.

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 hledger and Ledger > Differences > journal format.

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.

Getting errors like "Illegal byte sequence" or "Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character" or "commitAndReleaseBuffer: invalid argument (invalid character)"
Programs compiled with GHC (hledger, haskell build tools, etc.) need to have a UTF-8-aware locale configured in the environment, otherwise they will fail with these kinds of errors when they encounter non-ascii characters.

To fix it, set the LANG environment variable to some locale which supports UTF-8. The locale you choose must be installed on your system.

Here's an example of setting LANG temporarily, on Ubuntu GNU/Linux:

    $ file my.journal
    my.journal: UTF-8 Unicode text         # the file is UTF8-encoded
    $ echo $LANG
    C                                      # LANG is set to the default locale, which does not support UTF8
    $ locale -a                            # which locales are installed ?
    C
    en_US.utf8                             # here's a UTF8-aware one we can use
    POSIX
    $ LANG=en_US.utf8 hledger -f my.journal print   # ensure it is used for this command

If available, C.UTF-8 will also work. If your preferred locale isn't listed by locale -a, you might need to install it. Eg on Ubuntu/Debian:

    $ 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

Here's how you could set it permanently, if you use a bash shell:

    $ echo "export LANG=en_US.utf8" >>~/.bash_profile
    $ bash --login

Exact spelling and capitalisation may be important. Note the difference on MacOS (UTF-8, not utf8). Some platforms (eg ubuntu) allow variant spellings, but others (eg macos) require it to be exact:

    $ locale -a | grep -iE en_us.*utf
    en_US.UTF-8
    $ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 hledger -f my.journal print

PART 2: DATA FORMATS

Journal

hledger's default file format, representing a General Journal. Here's a cheatsheet/mini-tutorial, or you can skip ahead to About journal format.

  Journal cheatsheet

    # Here is the main syntax of hledger's journal format
    # (omitting extra Ledger compatibility syntax).
    # hledger journals contain comments, directives, and transactions, in any order:
    ###############################################################################
    # 1. Comment lines are for notes or temporarily disabling things.
    # They begin with #, ;, or a line containing the word "comment".
    # hash comment line
    ; semicolon comment line
    comment
    These lines
    are commented.
    end comment
    # Some but not all hledger entries can have same-line comments attached to them,
    # from ; (semicolon) to end of line.
    ###############################################################################
    # 2. Directives modify parsing or reports in some way.
    # They begin with a word or letter (or symbol).
    account actifs     ; type:A, declare an account that is an Asset. 2+ spaces before ;.
    account passifs    ; type:L, declare an account that is a Liability, and so on.. (ALERX)
    alias chkg = assets:checking
    commodity $0.00
    decimal-mark .
    include /dev/null
    payee Whole Foods
    P 2022-01-01 AAAA $1.40
    ~ monthly    budget goals  ; <- 2+ spaces between period expression and description
        expenses:food       $400
        expenses:home      $1000
        budgeted
    ###############################################################################
    # 3. Transactions are what it's all about; they are dated events,
    # usually describing movements of money.
    # They begin with a date.
    # DATE DESCRIPTION           ; This is a transaction comment.
    #   ACCOUNT NAME 1  AMOUNT1  ; <- posting 1. This is a posting comment.
    #   ACCOUNT NAME 2  AMOUNT2  ; <- posting 2. Postings must be indented.
    #               ; ^^ At least 2 spaces between account and amount.
    #   ...  ; Any number of postings is allowed. The amounts must balance (sum to 0).
    2022-01-01 opening balances are declared this way
        assets:checking          $1000  ; Account names can be anything. lower case is easy to type.
        assets:savings           $1000  ; assets, liabilities, equity, revenues, expenses are common.
        assets:cash:wallet        $100  ; : indicates subaccounts.
        liabilities:credit card  $-200  ; liabilities, equity, revenues balances are usually negative.
        equity                          ; One amount can be left blank; $-1900 is inferred here.
    2022-04-15 * (#12345) pay taxes
        ; There can be a ! or * after the date meaning "pending" or "cleared".
        ; There can be a transaction code (text in parentheses) after the date/status.
        ; Amounts' sign represents direction of flow, or credit/debit:
        assets:checking          $-500  ; minus means removed from this account (credit)
        expenses:tax:us:2021      $500  ; plus  means added to this account (debit)
                                        ; revenue/expense categories are also "accounts"
    Kv
    2022-01-01                          ; The description is optional.
        ; Any currency/commodity symbols are allowed, on either side.
        assets:cash:wallet     GBP -10
        expenses:clothing       GBP 10
        assets:gringotts           -10 gold
        assets:pouch                10 gold
        revenues:gifts              -2 "Liquorice Wands"  ; Complex symbols
        assets:bag                   2 "Liquorice Wands"  ; must be double-quoted.
    2022-01-01 Cost in another commodity can be noted with @ or @@
        assets:investments           2.0 AAAA @ $1.50  ; @  means per-unit cost
        assets:investments           3.0 AAAA @@ $4    ; @@ means total cost
        assets:checking            $-7.00
    2022-01-02 assert balances
        ; Balances can be asserted for extra error checking, in any transaction.
        assets:investments           0 AAAA = 5.0 AAAA
        assets:pouch                 0 gold = 10 gold
        assets:savings              $0      = $1000
    1999-12-31 Ordering transactions by date is recommended but not required.
        ; Postings are not required.
    2022.01.01 These date
    2022/1/1   formats are
    12/31      also allowed (but consistent YYYY-MM-DD is recommended).

  About journal format

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 or import commands to create and update it.

Many users, though, edit the journal file with a text editor, and track changes with a version control system such as git. Editor addons such as ledger-mode or hledger-mode for Emacs, vim-ledger for Vim, and hledger-vscode for Visual Studio Code, make this easier, adding colour, formatting, tab completion, and useful commands. See Editor configuration at hledger.org for the full list.

Here's a description of each part of the file format (and hledger's data model).

A hledger journal file can contain three kinds of thing: file comments, transactions, and/or directives (counting periodic transaction rules and auto posting rules as directives).

  Comments

Lines in the journal will be ignored if they begin with a hash (#) or a semicolon (;). (See also Other syntax.) hledger will also ignore regions beginning with a comment line and ending with an end comment line (or file end). Here's a suggestion for choosing between them:

•   # for top-level notes

•   ; for commenting out things temporarily

•   comment for quickly commenting large regions (remember it's there, or you might get confused)

Eg:

    # a comment line
    ; another commentline
    comment
    A multi-line comment block,
    continuing until "end comment" directive
    or the end of the current file.
    end comment

Some hledger entries can have same-line comments attached to them, from ; (semicolon) to end of line. See Transaction comments, Posting comments, and Account comments below.

  Transactions

Transactions are the main unit of information in a journal file. They represent events, typically a movement of some quantity of commodities between two or more named accounts.

Each transaction is recorded as a journal entry, beginning with a simple date in column 0. This can be followed by any of the following optional fields, separated by spaces:

•   a status character (empty, !, or *)

•   a code (any short number or text, enclosed in parentheses)

•   a description (any remaining text until end of line or a semicolon)

•   a comment (any remaining text following a semicolon until end of line, and any following indented lines beginning with a semicolon)

•   0 or more indented posting lines, describing what was transferred and the accounts involved (indented comment lines are also allowed, but not blank lines or non-indented lines).

Here's a simple journal file containing one transaction:

    2008/01/01 income
      assets:bank:checking   $1
      income:salary         $-1

  Dates

  Simple dates

Dates in the journal file use simple dates format: YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY/MM/DD or YYYY.MM.DD, with leading zeros 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 Y directive, or the current date when the command is run. Some examples: 2010-01-31, 2010/01/31, 2010.1.31, 1/31.

(The UI also accepts simple dates, as well as the more flexible smart dates documented in the hledger manual.)

  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.
The date: tag must have a valid simple date value if it is present, eg a date: tag with no value is not allowed.

  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.

  Code

After the status mark, but before the description, you can optionally write a transaction "code", enclosed in parentheses. This is a good place to record a check number, or some other important transaction id or reference number.

  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 descriptions to subdivide the description into separate fields for payee/payer name on the left (up to the first |) and an additional note field on the right (after the first |). This may be worthwhile if you need to do more precise querying and pivoting by payee or by note.

  Transaction comments

Text following ;, after a transaction description, and/or on indented lines immediately below it, form comments for that transaction. They are reproduced by print but otherwise ignored, except they may contain tags, which are not ignored.

    2012-01-01 something  ; a transaction comment
        ; a second line of transaction comment
        expenses   1
        assets

  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.

  Account names

Accounts are the main way of categorising things in hledger. As in Double Entry Bookkeeping, they can represent real world accounts (such as a bank account), or more abstract categories such as "money borrowed from Frank" or "money spent on electricity".

You can use any account names you like, but we usually start with the traditional accounting categories, which in english are assets, liabilities, equity, revenues, expenses. (You might see these referred to as A, L, E, R, X for short.)

For more precise reporting, we usually divide the top level accounts into more detailed subaccounts, by writing a full colon between account name parts. For example, from the account names assets:bank:checking and expenses:food, hledger will infer this hierarchy of five accounts:

    assets
    assets:bank
    assets:bank:checking
    expenses
    expenses:food

Shown as an outline, the hierarchical tree structure is more clear:

    assets
     bank
      checking
    expenses
     food

hledger reports can summarise the account tree to any depth, so you can go as deep as you like with subcategories, but keeping your account names relatively simple may be best when starting out.

Account names may be capitalised or not; they may contain letters, numbers, symbols, or single spaces. Note, when an account name and an amount are written on the same line, they must be separated by two or more spaces (or tabs).

Parentheses or brackets enclosing the full account name indicate virtual postings, described below. Parentheses or brackets internal to the account name have no special meaning.

Account names can be altered temporarily or permanently by account aliases.

  Amounts

After the account name, there is usually an amount. (Important: between account name and amount, there must be two or more spaces.)

hledger's amount format is flexible, supporting several international formats. Here are some examples. Amounts have a number (the "quantity"):

    1

..and usually a currency symbol or commodity name (more on this below), to the left or right of the quantity, with or without a separating space:

    $1
    4000 AAPL
    3 "green apples"

Amounts can be preceded by a minus sign (or a plus sign, though plus is the default), The sign can be written before or after a left-side commodity symbol:

    -$1
    $-1

One or more spaces between the sign and the number are acceptable when parsing (but they won't be displayed in output):

    + $1
    $-      1

Scientific E notation is allowed:

    1E-6
    EUR 1E3

  Decimal marks, digit group marks

A decimal mark can be written as a period or a comma:

    1.23
    1,23456780000009

In the integer part of the quantity (left of the decimal mark), groups of digits can optionally be separated by a digit group mark - a space, comma, or period (different from the decimal mark):

         $1,000,000.00
      EUR 2.000.000,00
    INR 9,99,99,999.00
          1 000 000.9455

Note, a number containing a single digit group mark and no decimal mark is ambiguous. Are these digit group marks or decimal marks ?

    1,000
    1.000

If you don't tell it otherwise, hledger will assume both of the above are decimal marks, parsing both numbers as 1.

To prevent confusing parsing mistakes and undetected typos, especially if your data contains digit group marks (eg, thousands separators), we recommend explicitly declaring the decimal mark character in each journal file, using a directive at the top of the file. The decimal-mark directive is best, otherwise commodity directives will also work. These are described below.

  Commodity

Amounts in hledger have both a "quantity", which is a signed decimal number, and a "commodity", which is a currency symbol, stock ticker, or any word or phrase describing something you are tracking.

If the commodity name contains non-letters (spaces, numbers, or punctuation), you must always write it inside double quotes ("green apples", "ABC123").

If you write just a bare number, that too will have a commodity, with name ""; we call that the "no-symbol commodity".

Actually, hledger combines these single-commodity amounts into more powerful multi-commodity amounts, which are what it works with most of the time. A multi-commodity amount could be, eg: 1 USD, 2 EUR, 3.456 TSLA. In practice, you will only see multi-commodity amounts in hledger's output; you can't write them directly in the journal file.

(If you are writing scripts or working with hledger's internals, these are the Amount and MixedAmount types.)

  Directives influencing number parsing and display

You can add decimal-mark and commodity directives to the journal, to declare and control these things more explicitly and precisely. These are described below, but here's a quick example:

    # the decimal mark character used by all amounts in this file (all commodities)
    decimal-mark .
    # display styles for the $, EUR, INR and no-symbol commodities:
    commodity $1,000.00
    commodity EUR 1.000,00
    commodity INR 9,99,99,999.00
    commodity 1 000 000.9455

  Commodity display style

For the amounts in each commodity, hledger chooses a consistent display style to use in most reports. (Exceptions: price amounts, and all amounts displayed by the print command, are displayed with all of their decimal digits visible.)

A commodity's display style is inferred as follows.

First, if a default commodity is declared with D, this commodity and its style is applied to any no-symbol amounts in the journal.

Then each commodity's style is inferred from one of the following, in order of preference:

•   The commodity directive for that commodity (including the no-symbol commodity), if any.

•   The amounts in that commodity seen in the journal's transactions. (Posting amounts only; prices and periodic or auto rules are ignored, currently.)

•   The built-in fallback style, which looks like this: $1000.00. (Symbol on the left, period decimal mark, two decimal places.)

A style is inferred from journal amounts as follows:

•   Use the general style (decimal mark, symbol placement) of the first amount

•   Use the first-seen digit group style (digit group mark, digit group sizes), if any

•   Use the maximum number of decimal places of all.

Cost amounts don't affect the commodity display style directly, but occasionally they can do so indirectly (eg when a posting's amount is inferred using a cost). If you find this causing problems, use a commodity directive to fix the display style.

To summarise: each commodity's amounts will be normalised to (a) the style declared by a commodity directive, or (b) the style of the first posting amount in the journal, with the first-seen digit group style and the maximum-seen number of decimal places. So if your reports are showing amounts in a way you don't like, eg with too many decimal places, use a commodity directive. Some examples:

    # declare euro, dollar, bitcoin and no-symbol commodities and set their
    # input number formats and output display styles:
    commodity EUR 1.000,
    commodity $1000.00
    commodity 1000.00000000 BTC
    commodity 1 000.

The inferred commodity style can be overridden by supplying a command line option.

  Rounding

Amounts are stored internally as decimal numbers with up to 255 decimal places, and displayed with the number of decimal places specified by the commodity display style. Note, hledger uses banker's rounding: it rounds to the nearest even number, eg 0.5 displayed with zero decimal places is "0").

  Costs

After a posting amount, you can note its cost (when buying) or selling price (when selling) in another commodity, by writing either @ UNITPRICE or @@ TOTALPRICE after it. This indicates a conversion transaction, where one commodity is exchanged for another.

(You might also see this called "transaction price" in hledger docs, discussions, or code; that term was directionally neutral and reminded that it is a price specific to a transaction, but we now just call it "cost", with the understanding that the transaction could be a purchase or a sale.)

Costs are usually written explicitly with @ or @@, but can also be inferred automatically for simple multi-commodity transactions. Note, if costs are inferred, the order of postings is significant; the first posting will have a cost attached, in the commodity of the second.

As an example, here are several ways to record purchases of a foreign currency in hledger, using the cost notation either explicitly or implicitly:

1.  Write the price per unit, as @ UNITPRICE after 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

2.  Write the total price, as @@ TOTALPRICE after the amount:

        2009/1/1
          assets:euros     €100 @@ $135  ; one hundred euros purchased at $135 for the lot
          assets:dollars

3.  Specify amounts for all postings, using exactly two commodities, and let hledger infer the price that balances the transaction. Note the effect of posting order: the price is added to first posting, making it €100 @@ $135, as in example 2:

        2009/1/1
          assets:euros     €100          ; one hundred euros purchased
          assets:dollars  $-135          ; for $135

Amounts can be converted to cost at report time using the -B/--cost flag; this is discussed more in the ˜COST REPORTING section.

  Other cost/lot notations

A slight digression for Ledger and Beancount users. Ledger has a number of cost/lot-related notations:

•   @ UNITCOST and @@ TOTALCOST

    •   expresses a conversion rate, as in hledger

    •   when buying, also creates a lot than can be selected at selling time

•   (@) UNITCOST and (@@) TOTALCOST (virtual cost)

    •   like the above, but also means "this cost was exceptional, don't use it when inferring market prices".

Currently, hledger treats the above like @ and @@; the parentheses are ignored.

•   {=FIXEDUNITCOST} and {{=FIXEDTOTALCOST}} (fixed price)

    •   when buying, means "this cost is also the fixed price, don't let it fluctuate in value reports"

•   {UNITCOST} and {{TOTALCOST}} (lot price)

    •   can be used identically to @ UNITCOST and @@ TOTALCOST, also creates a lot

    •   when selling, combined with @ ..., specifies an investment lot by its cost basis; does not check if that lot is present

•   and related: [YYYY/MM/DD] (lot date)

    •   when buying, attaches this acquisition date to the lot

    •   when selling, selects a lot by its acquisition date

•   (SOME TEXT) (lot note)

    •   when buying, attaches this note to the lot

    •   when selling, selects a lot by its note

Currently, hledger accepts any or all of the above in any order after the posting amount, but ignores them. (This can break transaction balancing.)

For Beancount users, the notation and behaviour is different:

•   @ UNITCOST and @@ TOTALCOST

    •   expresses a cost without creating a lot, as in hledger

    •   when buying (augmenting) or selling (reducing) a lot, combined with {...}: documents the cost/selling price (not used for transaction balancing)

•   {UNITCOST} and {{TOTALCOST}}

    •   when buying (augmenting), expresses the cost for transaction balancing, and also creates a lot with this cost basis attached

    •   when selling (reducing),

        •   selects a lot by its cost basis

        •   raises an error if that lot is not present or can not be selected unambiguously (depending on booking method configured)

        •   expresses the selling price for transaction balancing

Currently, hledger accepts the {UNITCOST}/{{TOTALCOST}} notation but ignores it.

•   variations: {}, {YYYY-MM-DD}, {"LABEL"}, {UNITCOST, "LABEL"}, {UNITCOST, YYYY-MM-DD, "LABEL"} etc.

Currently, hledger rejects these.

  Balance assertions

hledger supports Ledger-style balance assertions in journal files. These look like, for example, = EXPECTEDBALANCE following a posting's amount. Eg here 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 -I/--ignore-assertions flag, which can be useful for troubleshooting or for reading Ledger files. (Note: this flag currently does not disable balance assignments, described below).

  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 multiple included files

Multiple files included with the include directive are processed as if concatenated into one file, preserving their order and the posting order within each file. It means that balance assertions in later files will see balance from earlier files.

And if you have multiple postings to an account on the same day, split across multiple files, and you want to assert the account's balance on that day, you'll need to put the assertion in the right file - the last one in the sequence, probably.

  Assertions and multiple -f files

Unlike include, when multiple files are specified on the command line with multiple -f/--file options, balance assertions will not see balance from earlier files. This can be useful when you do not want problems in earlier files to disrupt valid assertions in later files.

If you do want assertions to see balance from earlier files, use include, or concatenate the files temporarily.

  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 "total" balance assertion by writing a double equals sign (== EXPECTEDBALANCE). This asserts that there are no other commodities in the account besides the asserted one (or at least, that their balance is 0).

    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 costs, 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

The balance assertions above (= and ==) do not count the balance from subaccounts; they check the account's exclusive balance only. You can assert the balance including subaccounts by writing =* or ==*, eg:

    2019/1/1
      equity:opening balances
      checking:a       5
      checking:b       5
      checking         1  ==* 11

  Assertions and virtual postings

Balance assertions always consider both real and virtual postings; they are not affected by the --real/-R flag or real: query.

  Assertions and auto postings

Balance assertions are affected by the --auto flag, which generates auto postings, which can alter account balances. Because auto postings are optional in hledger, accounts affected by them effectively have two balances. But balance assertions can only test one or the other of these. So to avoid making fragile assertions, either:

•   assert the balance calculated with --auto, and always use --auto with that file

•   or assert the balance calculated without --auto, and never use --auto with that file

•   or avoid balance assertions on accounts affected by auto postings (or avoid auto postings entirely).

  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.

  Posting comments

Text following ;, at the end of a posting line, and/or on indented lines immediately below it, form comments for that posting. They are reproduced by print but otherwise ignored, except they may contain tags, which are not ignored.

    2012-01-01
        expenses   1  ; a comment for posting 1
        assets
        ; a comment for posting 2
        ; a second comment line for posting 2

  Tags

Tags are a way to add extra labels or labelled data to transactions, postings, or accounts, which you can then search or pivot on.

They are written as a word (optionally hyphenated) immediately followed by a full colon, in a transaction or posting or account directive's comment. (This is an exception to the usual rule that things in comments are ignored.) Eg, here four different tags are recorded: one on the checking account, two on the transaction, and one on the expenses posting:

    account assets:checking         ; accounttag:
    2017/1/16 bought groceries      ; transactiontag-1:
        ; transactiontag-2:
        assets:checking        $-1
        expenses:food           $1  ; postingtag:

Postings also inherit tags from their transaction and their account. And transactions also acquire tags from their postings (and postings' accounts). So in the example above, the expenses posting effectively has all four tags (by inheriting from account and transaction), and the transaction also has all four tags (by acquiring from the expenses posting).

You can list tag names with hledger tags [NAMEREGEX], or match by tag name with a tag:NAMEREGEX query.

  Tag values

Tags can have a value, which is any text after the colon up until a comma or end of line (with surrounding whitespace removed). Note this means that hledger tag values can not contain commas. Eg in the following posting, the three tags' values are "value 1", "value 2", and "" (empty) respectively:

        expenses:food   $10    ; foo, tag1: value 1 , tag2:value 2, bar tag3: , baz

Note that tags can be repeated, and are additive rather than overriding: when the same tag name is seen again with a new value, the new name:value pair is added to the tags. (It is not possible to override a tag's value or remove a tag.)

You can list a tag's values with hledger tags TAGNAME --values, or match by tag value with a tag:NAMEREGEX=VALUEREGEX query.

  Directives

A directive is a line in the journal beginning with a special keyword, that influences how the journal is processed, how things are displayed, and so on. hledger's directives are based on (a subset of) Ledger's, but there are many differences, and also some differences between hledger versions. Here are some more definitions:

•   subdirective - Some directives support subdirectives, written indented below the parent directive.

•   decimal mark - The character to interpret as a decimal mark (period or comma) when parsing amounts of a commodity.

•   display style - How to display amounts of a commodity in output: symbol side and spacing, digit groups, decimal mark, and number of decimal places.

Directives are not required when starting out with hledger, but you will probably want to add some as your needs grow. Here some key directives for particular needs:

purpose | directives
READING DATA: |
Declare file's decimal mark to help parse amounts accurately | decimal-mark
Rewrite account names | alias
Comment out sections of the data | comment
Include extra data files | include
GENERATING DATA: |
Generate recurring transactions or budget goals | ~
Generate extra postings on transactions |
CHECKING FOR ERRORS: |
Define valid entities to provide more error checking | account, commodity, payee
REPORTING: |
Declare accounts' type and display order | account
Declare commodity display styles | commodity
Declare market prices | P

  Directive effects

And here is what each directive does, and which files and journal entries (transactions) it affects:

directive | what it does | ends at file end?
account | Declares an account, for checking all entries in all files; and its display order and type. Subdirectives: any text, ignored. | N
alias | Rewrites account names, in following entries until end of current file or end aliases. Command line equivalent: --alias | Y
comment | Ignores part of the journal file, until end of current file or end comment. | Y
commodity | Declares up to four things: 1. a commodity symbol, for checking all amounts in all files 2. the decimal mark for parsing amounts of this commodity, in the following entries until end of current file (if there is no decimal-mark directive) 3. and the display style for amounts of this commodity 4. which is also the precision to use for balanced-transaction checking in this commodity. Takes precedence over D. Subdirectives: format (Ledger-compatible syntax). Command line equivalent: -c/--commodity-style | N,Y,N,N
decimal-mark | Declares the decimal mark, for parsing amounts of all commodities in following entries until next decimal-mark or end of current file. Included files can override. Takes precedence over commodity and D. | Y
include | Includes entries and directives from another file, as if they were written inline. Command line alternative: multiple -f/--file | N
payee | Declares a payee name, for checking all entries in all files. | N
P | Declares the market price of a commodity on some date, for value reports. | N
~ (tilde) | Declares a periodic transaction rule that generates future transactions with --forecast and budget goals with balance --budget. | N
Other syntax: |  |
apply account | Prepends a common parent account to all account names, in following entries until end of current file or end apply account. | Y
D | Sets a default commodity to use for no-symbol amounts;and, if there is no commodity directive for this commodity: its decimal mark, balancing precision, and display style, as above. | Y,Y,N,N
Y | Sets a default year to use for any yearless dates, in following entries until end of current file. | Y
= (equals) | Declares an auto posting rule that generates extra postings on matched transactions with --auto, in current, parent, and child files (but not sibling files, see #1212). | partly
Other Ledger directives | Other directives from Ledger's file format are accepted but ignored. |

  Directives and multiple files

If you use multiple -f/--file options, or the include directive, hledger will process multiple input files. But directives which affect input typically have effect only until the end of the file in which they occur (and on any included files in that region).

This may seem inconvenient, but it's intentional; it makes reports stable and deterministic, independent of the order of input. Otherwise you could see different numbers if you happened to write -f options in a different order, or if you moved includes around while cleaning up your files.

It can be surprising though; for example, it means that alias directives do not affect parent or sibling files (see below).

  account directive

account directives can be used to declare accounts (ie, the places that amounts are transferred from and to). Though not required, these declarations can provide several benefits:

•   They can document your intended chart of accounts, providing a reference.

•   In strict mode, they restrict which accounts may be posted to by transactions, which helps detect typos.

•   They control account display order in reports, allowing non-alphabetic sorting (eg Revenues to appear above Expenses).

•   They help with account name completion (in hledger add, hledger-web, hledger-iadd, ledger-mode, etc.)

•   They can store additional account information as comments, or as tags which can be used to filter or pivot reports.

•   They can help hledger know your accounts' types (asset, liability, equity, revenue, expense), affecting reports like balancesheet and incomestatement.

They are written as the word account followed by a hledger-style account name, eg:

    account assets:bank:checking

Note, however, that accounts declared in account directives are not allowed to have surrounding brackets and parentheses, unlike accounts used in postings. So the following journal will not parse:

    account (assets:bank:checking)

  Account comments

Text following two or more spaces and ; at the end of an account directive line, and/or following ; on indented lines immediately below it, form comments for that account. They are ignored except they may contain tags, which are not ignored.

The two-space requirement for same-line account comments is because ; is allowed in account names.

    account assets:bank:checking    ; same-line comment, at least 2 spaces before the semicolon
      ; next-line comment
      ; some tags - type:A, acctnum:12345

  Account subdirectives

Ledger-style indented subdirectives are also accepted, but currently ignored:

    account assets:bank:checking
      format subdirective is ignored

  Account error checking

By default, accounts need not be declared; they come into existence when a posting references them. This is convenient, but it means hledger can't warn you when you mis-spell an account name in the journal. Usually you'll find that error later, as an extra account in balance reports, or an incorrect balance when reconciling.

In strict mode, enabled with the -s/--strict flag, hledger will report an error if any transaction uses an account name that has not been declared by an account directive. Some notes:

•   The declaration is case-sensitive; transactions must use the correct account name capitalisation.

•   The account directive's scope is "whole file and below" (see directives). This means it affects all of the current file, and any files it includes, but not parent or sibling files. The position of account directives within the file does not matter, though it's usual to put them at the top.

•   Accounts can only be declared in journal files, but will affect included files of all types.

•   It's currently not possible to declare "all possible subaccounts" with a wildcard; every account posted to must be declared.

  Account display order

The order in which account directives are written influences the order in which accounts appear in reports, hledger-ui, hledger-web etc. By default accounts appear in alphabetical order, but if you add these account directives to the journal file:

    account assets
    account liabilities
    account equity
    account revenues
    account expenses

those accounts will be displayed in declaration order:

    $ hledger accounts -1
    assets
    liabilities
    equity
    revenues
    expenses

Any undeclared accounts are displayed last, in alphabetical order.

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:y in between a:b and a:c).

  Account types

hledger knows that accounts come in several types: assets, liabilities, expenses and so on. This enables easy reports like balancesheet and incomestatement, and filtering by account type with the type: query.

As a convenience, hledger will detect these account types automatically if you are using common english-language top-level account names (described below). But generally we recommend you declare types explicitly, by adding a type: tag to your top-level account directives. Subaccounts will inherit the type of their parent. The tag's value should be one of the five main account types:

•   A or Asset (things you own)

•   L or Liability (things you owe)

•   E or Equity (investment/ownership; balanced counterpart of assets & liabilities)

•   R or Revenue (what you received money from, AKA income; technically part of Equity)

•   X or Expense (what you spend money on; technically part of Equity)

or, it can be (these are used less often):

•   C or Cash (a subtype of Asset, indicating liquid assets for the cashflow report)

•   V or Conversion (a subtype of Equity, for conversions (see COST REPORTING).)

Here is a typical set of account type declarations:

    account assets             ; type: A
    account liabilities        ; type: L
    account equity             ; type: E
    account revenues           ; type: R
    account expenses           ; type: X
    account assets:bank        ; type: C
    account assets:cash        ; type: C
    account equity:conversion  ; type: V

Here are some tips for working with account types.

•   The rules for inferring types from account names are as follows. These are just a convenience that sometimes help new users get going; if they don't work for you, just ignore them and declare your account types. See also Regular expressions.

        If account's name contains this (CI) regular expression:            | its type is:
        --------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------
        ^assets?(:.+)?:(cash|bank|che(ck|que?)(ing)?|savings?|current)(:|$) | Cash
        ^assets?(:|$)                                                       | Asset
        ^(debts?|liabilit(y|ies))(:|$)                                      | Liability
        ^equity:(trad(e|ing)|conversion)s?(:|$)                             | Conversion
        ^equity(:|$)                                                        | Equity
        ^(income|revenue)s?(:|$)                                            | Revenue
        ^expenses?(:|$)                                                     | Expense

•   If you declare any account types, it's a good idea to declare an account for all of the account types, because a mixture of declared and name-inferred types can disrupt certain reports.

•   Certain uses of account aliases can disrupt account types. See Rewriting accounts > Aliases and account types.

•   As mentioned above, subaccounts will inherit a type from their parent account. More precisely, an account's type is decided by the first of these that exists:

    1.  A type: declaration for this account.

    2.  A type: declaration in the parent accounts above it, preferring the nearest.

    3.  An account type inferred from this account's name.

    4.  An account type inferred from a parent account's name, preferring the nearest parent.

    5.  Otherwise, it will have no type.

•   For troubleshooting, you can list accounts and their types with:

        $ hledger accounts --types [ACCTPAT] [-DEPTH] [type:TYPECODES]

  alias directive

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

•   combining two accounts into one, eg to see their sum or difference on one line

•   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.

Account aliases are very powerful. They are generally easy to use correctly, but you can also generate invalid account names with them; more on this below.

See also 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 (but note: not sibling or parent 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 wrapping the pattern in forward slashes. (This is the only place where hledger requires forward slashes around a regular expression.)

Eg:

    alias /REGEX/ = REPLACEMENT

or:

    $ hledger --alias '/REGEX/=REPLACEMENT' ...

Any part of an account name matched by REGEX will be replaced by REPLACEMENT. REGEX is case-insensitive as usual.

If you need to match a forward slash, escape it with a backslash, eg /\/=:.

If REGEX contains parenthesised match groups, these can be referenced by the usual backslash and number in REPLACEMENT:

    alias /^(.+):bank:([^:]+):(.*)/ = \1:\2 \3
    ; rewrites "assets:bank:wells fargo:checking" to  "assets:wells fargo checking"

REPLACEMENT continues to the end of line (or on command line, to end of option argument), so it can contain trailing whitespace.

  Combining aliases

You can define as many aliases as you like, using journal directives and/or command line options.

Recursive aliases - where an account name is rewritten by one alias, then by another alias, and so on - are allowed. Each alias sees the effect of previously applied aliases.

In such cases it can be important to understand which aliases will be applied and in which order. For (each account name in) each journal entry, we apply:

1.  alias directives preceding the journal entry, most recently parsed first (ie, reading upward from the journal entry, bottom to top)

2.  --alias options, in the order they appeared on the command line (left to right).

In other words, for (an account name in) a given journal entry:

•   the nearest alias declaration before/above the entry is applied first

•   the next alias before/above that will be be applied next, and so on

•   aliases defined after/below the entry do not affect it.

This gives nearby aliases precedence over distant ones, and helps provide semantic stability - aliases will keep working the same way independent of which files are being read and in which order.

In case of trouble, adding --debug=6 to the command line will show which aliases are being applied when.

  Aliases and multiple files

As explained at Directives and multiple files, alias directives do not affect parent or sibling files. Eg in this command,

    hledger -f a.aliases -f b.journal

account aliases defined in a.aliases will not affect b.journal. Including the aliases doesn't work either:

    include a.aliases
    2020-01-01  ; not affected by a.aliases
      foo  1
      bar

This means that account aliases should usually be declared at the start of your top-most file, like this:

    alias foo=Foo
    alias bar=Bar
    2020-01-01  ; affected by aliases above
      foo  1
      bar
    include c.journal  ; also affected

  end aliases directive

You can clear (forget) all currently defined aliases (seen in the journal so far, or defined on the command line) with this directive:

    end aliases

  Aliases can generate bad account names

Be aware that account aliases can produce malformed account names, which could cause confusing reports or invalid print output. For example, you could erase all account names:

    2021-01-01
      a:aa     1
      b

    $ hledger print --alias '/.*/='
    2021-01-01
                       1

The above print output is not a valid journal. Or you could insert an illegal double space, causing print output that would give a different journal when reparsed:

    2021-01-01
      old    1
      other

    $ hledger print --alias old="new  USD" | hledger -f- print
    2021-01-01
        new             USD 1
        other

  Aliases and account types

If an account with a type declaration (see Declaring accounts > Account types) is renamed by an alias, normally the account type remains in effect.

However, renaming in a way that reshapes the account tree (eg renaming parent accounts but not their children, or vice versa) could prevent child accounts from inheriting the account type of their parents.

Secondly, if an account's type is being inferred from its name, renaming it by an alias could prevent or alter that.

If you are using account aliases and the type: query is not matching accounts as you expect, try troubleshooting with the accounts command, eg something like:

    $ hledger accounts --alias assets=bassetts type:a

  commodity directive

You can use commodity directives to declare your commodities. In fact the commodity directive performs several functions at once:

1.  It declares commodities which may be used in the journal. This can optionally be enforced, providing useful error checking. (Cf Commodity error checking)

2.  It declares which decimal mark character (period or comma), to expect when parsing input - useful to disambiguate international number formats in your data. Without this, hledger will parse both 1,000 and 1.000 as 1. (Cf Amounts)

3.  It declares how to render the commodity's amounts when displaying output - the decimal mark, any digit group marks, the number of decimal places, symbol placement and so on. (Cf Commodity display style)

You will run into one of the problems solved by commodity directives sooner or later, so we recommend using them, for robust and predictable parsing and display.

Generally you should put them at the top of your journal file (since for function 2, they affect only following amounts, cf #793).

A commodity directive is just the word commodity followed by a sample amount, like this:

    ;commodity SAMPLEAMOUNT
    commodity $1000.00
    commodity 1,000.0000 AAAA  ; optional same-line comment

It may also be written on multiple lines, and use the format subdirective, as in Ledger. Note in this case the commodity symbol appears twice; it must be the same in both places:

    ;commodity SYMBOL
    ;  format SAMPLEAMOUNT
    ; 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 1,00,00,000.00

Other indented subdirectives are currently ignored.

Remember that if the commodity symbol contains spaces, numbers, or punctuation, it must be enclosed in double quotes (cf Commodity).

The amount's quantity does not matter; only the format is significant. It must include a decimal mark - either a period or a comma - followed by 0 or more decimal digits.

A few more examples:

    # number formats for $, EUR, INR and the no-symbol commodity:
    commodity $1,000.00
    commodity EUR 1.000,00
    commodity INR 9,99,99,999.0
    commodity 1 000 000.

Note hledger normally uses banker's rounding, so 0.5 displayed with zero decimal digits is "0". (More at Commodity display style.)

Even in the presence of commodity directives, the commodity display style can still be overridden by supplying a command line option.

  Commodity error checking

In strict mode, enabled with the -s/--strict flag, hledger will report an error if a commodity symbol is used that has not been declared by a commodity directive. This works similarly to account error checking, see the notes there for more details.

Note, this disallows amounts without a commodity symbol, because currently it's not possible (?) to declare the "no-symbol" commodity with a directive. This is one exception for convenience: zero amounts are always allowed to have no commodity symbol.

  decimal-mark directive

You can use a decimal-mark directive - usually one per file, at the top of the file - to declare which character represents a decimal mark when parsing amounts in this file. It can look like

    decimal-mark .

or

    decimal-mark ,

This prevents any ambiguity when parsing numbers in the file, so we recommend it, especially if the file contains digit group marks (eg thousands separators).

  include directive

You can pull in the content of additional files by writing an include directive, like this:

    include FILEPATH

Only journal files can include, and only journal, timeclock or timedot files can be included (not CSV files, currently).

If the file path does not begin with a slash, it is relative to the current file's folder.

A tilde means home directory, eg: include ~/main.journal.

The path may contain glob patterns to match multiple files, eg: include *.journal.

There is limited support for recursive wildcards: **/ (the slash is required) matches 0 or more subdirectories. It's not super convenient since you have to avoid include cycles and including directories, but this can be done, eg: include */**/*.journal.

The path may also be prefixed to force a specific file format, overriding the file extension (as described in hledger.1 -> Input files): include timedot:~/notes/2020*.md.

  P directive

The P directive declares a market price, which is a conversion rate between two commodities on a certain date. This allows value reports to convert amounts of one commodity to their value in another, on or after that date. These prices are often obtained from a stock exchange, cryptocurrency exchange, the or foreign exchange market.

The format is:

    P DATE COMMODITY1SYMBOL COMMODITY2AMOUNT

DATE is a simple date, COMMODITY1SYMBOL is the symbol of the commodity being priced, and COMMODITY2AMOUNT is the amount (symbol and quantity) of commodity 2 that one unit of commodity 1 is worth on this date. Examples:

    # one euro was worth $1.35 from 2009-01-01 onward:
    P 2009-01-01 € $1.35
    # and $1.40 from 2010-01-01 onward:
    P 2010-01-01 € $1.40

The -V, -X and --value flags use these market prices to show amount values in another commodity. See Valuation.

  payee directive

payee PAYEE NAME

This directive can be used to declare a limited set of payees which may appear in transaction descriptions. The "payees" check will report an error if any transaction refers to a payee that has not been declared. Eg:

    payee Whole Foods

Any indented subdirectives are currently ignored.

  tag directive

tag TAGNAME

This directive can be used to declare a limited set of tag names allowed in tags. TAGNAME should be a valid tag name (no spaces). Eg:

    tag  item-id

Any indented subdirectives are currently ignored.

The "tags" check will report an error if any undeclared tag name is used. It is quite easy to accidentally create a tag through normal use of colons in comments(#comments]; if you want to prevent this, you can declare and check your tags .

  Periodic transactions

The ~ directive declares recurring transactions. Such directives allow hledger to generate temporary future transactions (visible in reports, not in the journal file) to help with forecasting or budgeting.

Periodic transactions can be a little tricky, so before you use them, read this whole section, or at least these tips:

1.  Two spaces accidentally added or omitted will cause you trouble - read about this below.

2.  For troubleshooting, show the generated transactions with hledger print --forecast tag:generated or hledger register --forecast tag:generated.

3.  Forecasted transactions will begin only after the last non-forecasted transaction's date.

4.  Forecasted transactions will end 6 months from today, by default. See below for the exact start/end rules.

5.  period expressions can be tricky. Their documentation needs improvement, but is worth studying.

6.  Some period expressions with a repeating interval must begin on a natural boundary of that interval. Eg in weekly from DATE, DATE must be a monday. ~ weekly from 2019/10/1 (a tuesday) will give an error.

7.  Other period expressions with an interval are automatically expanded to cover a whole number of that interval. (This is done to improve reports, but it also affects periodic transactions. Yes, it's a bit inconsistent with the above.) Eg: ~ every 10th day of month from 2020/01, which is equivalent to ~ every 10th day of month from 2020/01/01, will be adjusted to start on 2019/12/10.

  Periodic rule syntax

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.):

    # every first of month
    ~ monthly
        expenses:rent          $2000
        assets:bank:checking
    # every 15th of month in 2023's first quarter:
    ~ monthly from 2023-04-15 to 2023-06-16
        expenses:utilities          $400
        assets:bank:checking

The period expression is the same syntax used for specifying multi-period reports, just interpreted differently; there, it specifies report periods; here it specifies recurrence dates (the periods' start dates).

  Periodic rules and relative dates

Partial or relative dates (like 12/31, 25, tomorrow, last week, next quarter) are usually not recommended in periodic rules, since the results will change as time passes. If used, they will be interpreted relative to, in order of preference:

1.  the first day of the default year specified by a recent Y directive

2.  or the date specified with --today

3.  or the date on which you are running the report.

They will not be affected at all by report period or forecast period dates.

  Two spaces between period expression and description!

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

So,

•   Do write two spaces between your period expression and your transaction description, if any.

•   Don't accidentally write two spaces in the middle of your period expression.

  Other syntax

hledger journal format supports quite a few other features, mainly to make interoperating with or converting from Ledger easier. Note some of the features below are powerful and can be useful in special cases, but in general, features in this section are considered less important or even not recommended for most users. Downsides are mentioned to help you decide if you want to use them.

  Auto postings

The = directive declares a rule for automatically adding temporary extra postings (visible in reports, not in the journal file) to all transactions matched by a certain query, when you use the --auto flag.

Downsides: depending on generated data for your reports makes your financial data less portable, less future-proof, and less trustworthy in an audit. Also, because the feature is optional, other features like balance assertions can break depending on whether it is on or off.

An auto posting rule looks a bit like a transaction:

    = QUERY
        ACCOUNT  AMOUNT
        ...
        ACCOUNT  [AMOUNT]

except the first line is an equals sign (mnemonic: = suggests matching), followed by a query (which matches existing postings), and each "posting" line describes a posting to be generated, and the posting amounts 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.

Any query term containing spaces must be enclosed in single or double quotes, as on the command line. Eg, note the quotes around the second query term below:

    = expenses:groceries 'expenses:dining out'
        (budget:funds:dining out)                 *-1

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 multiple files

An auto posting rule can affect any transaction in the current file, or in any parent file or child file. Note, currently it will not affect sibling files (when multiple -f/--file are used - see #1212).

  Auto postings and dates

A posting date (or secondary date) in the matched posting, or (taking precedence) a posting date in the auto posting rule itself, will also be used in the generated posting.

  Auto postings and transaction balancing / inferred amounts / balance assertions

Currently, 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.

This also means that you cannot have more than one auto-posting with a missing amount applied to a given transaction, as it will be unable to infer amounts.

  Auto posting tags

Automated postings will have some extra tags:

•   generated-posting:= QUERY - shows this was generated by an auto posting rule, and the query

•   _generated-posting:= QUERY - a hidden tag, which does not appear in hledger's output. This can be used to match postings generated "just now", rather than generated in the past and saved to the journal.

Also, any transaction that has been changed by auto posting rules will have these tags added:

•   modified: - this transaction was modified

•   _modified: - a hidden tag not appearing in the comment; this transaction was modified "just now".

  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).

Downsides: using balance assignments makes your journal less explicit; to know the exact amount posted, you have to run hledger or do the calculations yourself, instead of just reading it. Also balance assignments' forcing of balances can hide errors. These things make your financial data less portable, less future-proof, and less trustworthy in an audit.

  Balance assignments and prices

A cost 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

  Bracketed posting dates

For setting posting dates and secondary posting dates, Ledger's bracketed date syntax is also supported: [DATE], [DATE=DATE2] or [=DATE2] in posting comments. 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.

Downsides: another syntax to learn, redundant with hledger's date:/date2: tags, and confusingly similar to Ledger's lot date syntax.

  D directive

D AMOUNT

This directive sets a default commodity, to be used for any subsequent commodityless amounts (ie, plain numbers) seen while parsing the journal. This effect lasts until the next D directive, or the end of the journal.

For compatibility/historical reasons, D also acts like a commodity directive (setting the commodity's decimal mark for parsing and display style for output). So its argument is not just a commodity symbol, but a full amount demonstrating the style. The amount must include a decimal mark (either period or comma). Eg:

    ; commodity-less amounts should be treated as dollars
    ; (and displayed with the dollar sign on the left, thousands separators and two decimal places)
    D $1,000.00
    1/1
      a     5  ; <- commodity-less amount, parsed as $5 and displayed as $5.00
      b

Interactions with other directives:

For setting a commodity's display style, a commodity directive has highest priority, then a D directive.

For detecting a commodity's decimal mark during parsing, decimal-mark has highest priority, then commodity, then D.

For checking commodity symbols with the check command, a commodity directive is required (hledger check commodities ignores D directives).

Downsides: omitting commodity symbols makes your financial data less explicit, less portable, and less trustworthy in an audit. It is usually an unsustainable shortcut; sooner or later you will want to track multiple commodities. D is overloaded with functions redundant with commodity and decimal-mark. And it works differently from Ledger's D.

  apply account directive

This directive sets a default parent account, which will be prepended to all accounts in following entries, until an end apply account directive or end of current file. Eg:

    apply account home
    2010/1/1
        food    $10
        cash
    end apply account

is equivalent to:

    2010/01/01
        home:food           $10
        home:cash          $-10

account directives are also affected, and so is any included content.

Account names entered via hledger add or hledger-web are not affected.

Account aliases, if any, are applied after the parent account is prepended.

Downsides: this can make your financial data less explicit, less portable, and less trustworthy in an audit.

  Y directive

Y YEAR

or (deprecated backward-compatible forms):

year YEAR apply year YEAR

The space is optional. This sets a default year to be used for subsequent dates which don't specify a year. Eg:

    Y2009  ; set default year to 2009
    12/15  ; equivalent to 2009/12/15
      expenses  1
      assets
    year 2010  ; 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

Downsides: omitting the year (from primary transaction dates, at least) makes your financial data less explicit, less portable, and less trustworthy in an audit. Such dates can get separated from their corresponding Y directive, eg when evaluating a region of the journal in your editor. A missing Y directive makes reports dependent on today's date.

  Secondary dates

A secondary date is written after the primary date, following an equals sign. If the year is omitted, the primary date's year is assumed. When running reports, the primary (left) date is used by default, but with the --date2 flag (or --aux-date or --effective), the secondary (right) date will be used instead.

The meaning of secondary dates is up to you, but it's best to follow a consistent rule. Eg "primary = the bank's clearing date, secondary = date the transaction was initiated, if different".

Downsides: makes your financial data more complicated, less portable, and less trustworthy in an audit. Keeping the meaning of the two dates consistent requires discipline, and you have to remember which reporting mode is appropriate for a given report. Posting dates are simpler and better.

  Star comments

Lines beginning with * (star/asterisk) are also comment lines. This feature allows Emacs users to insert org headings in their journal, allowing them to fold/unfold/navigate it like an outline when viewed with org mode.

Downsides: another, unconventional comment syntax to learn. Decreases your journal's portability. And switching to Emacs org mode just for folding/unfolding meant losing the benefits of ledger mode; nowadays you can add outshine mode to ledger mode to get folding without losing ledger mode's features.

  Valuation expressions

Ledger allows a valuation function or value to be written in double parentheses after an amount. hledger ignores these.

  Virtual postings

A posting with parentheses around the account name is called a virtual posting or unbalanced posting, which means it is exempt from the usual rule that a transaction's postings must balance add up to zero.

This is not part of double entry bookkeeping, so you might choose to avoid this feature. Or you can use it sparingly for certain special cases where it can be convenient. Eg, you could set opening balances without using a balancing equity account:

    2022-01-01 opening balances
      (assets:checking)   $1000
      (assets:savings)    $2000

A posting with brackets around the account name is called a balanced virtual posting. The balanced virtual postings in a transaction must add up to zero (separately from other postings). Eg:

    2022-01-01 buy food with cash, update budget envelope subaccounts, & something else
      assets:cash                    $-10  ; <- these balance each other
      expenses:food                    $7  ; <-
      expenses:food                    $3  ; <-
      [assets:checking:budget:food]  $-10  ;   <- and these balance each other
      [assets:checking:available]     $10  ;   <-
      (something:else)                 $5  ;     <- this is not required to balance

Postings whose account names are neither parenthesised nor bracketed are called real postings. You can exclude virtual postings from reports with the -R/--real flag or a real:1 query.

Downsides: violates double entry bookkeeping, can be used to avoid figuring out correct entries, makes your financial data less portable and less trustworthy in an audit.

  Other Ledger directives

These other Ledger directives are currently accepted but ignored. This allows hledger to read more Ledger files, but be aware that hledger's reports may differ from Ledger's if you use these.

    apply fixed COMM AMT
    apply tag   TAG
    assert      EXPR
    bucket / A  ACCT
    capture     ACCT REGEX
    check       EXPR
    define      VAR=EXPR
    end apply fixed
    end apply tag
    end apply year
    end tag
    eval / expr EXPR
    python
      PYTHONCODE
    tag         NAME
    value       EXPR
    --command-line-flags

See also https://hledger.org/ledger.html for a detailed hledger/Ledger syntax comparison.

CSV

hledger can read CSV files (Character Separated Value - usually comma, semicolon, or tab) containing dated records, automatically converting each record into a transaction.

(To learn about writing CSV, see CSV output.)

For best error messages when reading CSV/TSV/SSV files, make sure they have a corresponding .csv, .tsv or .ssv file extension or use a hledger file prefix (see File Extension below).

Each CSV file must be described by a corresponding rules file.
This contains rules describing the CSV data (header line, fields layout, date format etc.), how to construct hledger transactions from it, and how to categorise transactions based on description or other attributes.

By default hledger looks for a rules file named like the CSV file with an extra .rules extension, in the same directory. Eg when asked to read foo/FILE.csv, hledger looks for foo/FILE.csv.rules. You can specify a different rules file with the --rules-file option. If no rules file is found, hledger will create a sample rules file, which you'll need to adjust.

At minimum, the rules file must identify the date and amount fields, and often it also specifies the date format and how many header lines there are. Here's a simple CSV file and a rules file for it:

    Date, Description, Id, Amount
    12/11/2019, Foo, 123, 10.23

    # basic.csv.rules
    skip         1
    fields       date, description, , amount
    date-format  %d/%m/%Y

    $ hledger print -f basic.csv
    2019-11-12 Foo
        expenses:unknown           10.23
        income:unknown            -10.23

There's an introductory Importing CSV data tutorial on hledger.org, and more CSV rules examples below, and a larger collection at https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/tree/master/examples/csv.

  CSV rules cheatsheet

The following kinds of rule can appear in the rules file, in any order. (Blank lines and lines beginning with # or ; or * are ignored.)

separator | declare the field separator, instead of relying on file extension
skip | skip one or more header lines at start of file
date-format | declare how to parse CSV dates/date-times
timezone | declare the time zone of ambiguous CSV date-times
newest-first | improve txn order when: there are multiple records, newest first, all with the same date
intra-day-reversed | improve txn order when: same-day txns are in opposite order to the overall file
decimal-mark | declare the decimal mark used in CSV amounts, when ambiguous
fields list | name CSV fields for easy reference, and optionally assign their values to hledger fields
Field assignment | assign a CSV value or interpolated text value to a hledger field
if block | conditionally assign values to hledger fields, or skip a record or end (skip rest of file)
if table | conditionally assign values to hledger fields, using compact syntax
balance-type | select which type of balance assertions/assignments to generate
include | inline another CSV rules file

Working with CSV tips can be found below, including How CSV rules are evaluated.

  separator

You can use the separator rule to read other kinds of character-separated data. The argument is any single separator character, or the words tab or space (case insensitive). Eg, for comma-separated values (CSV):

    separator ,

or for semicolon-separated values (SSV):

    separator ;

or for tab-separated values (TSV):

    separator TAB

If the input file has a .csv, .ssv or .tsv file extension (or a csv:, ssv:, tsv: prefix), the appropriate separator will be inferred automatically, and you won't need this rule.

  skip

    skip N

The word skip followed by a number (or no number, meaning 1) tells hledger to ignore this many non-empty lines at the start of the input data. (Empty/blank lines are skipped automatically, so you don't need to count those.) You'll need this whenever your CSV data contains header lines. Header lines skipped in this way are ignored, and not parsed as CSV.

skip can also be used inside if blocks (described below), to skip individual data records. Note records skipped in this way are still required to be valid CSV, even though otherwise ignored.

  date-format

    date-format DATEFMT

This is a helper for the date (and date2) fields. If your CSV dates are not formatted like YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY/MM/DD or YYYY.MM.DD, you'll need to add a date-format rule describing them with a strptime-style date parsing pattern - see https://hackage.haskell.org/package/time/docs/Data-Time-Format.html#v:formatTime. The pattern must parse the CSV date value completely. Some examples:

    # MM/DD/YY
    date-format %m/%d/%y

    # D/M/YYYY
    # The - makes leading zeros optional.
    date-format %-d/%-m/%Y

    # YYYY-Mmm-DD
    date-format %Y-%h-%d

    # M/D/YYYY HH:MM AM some other junk
    # Note the time and junk must be fully parsed, though only the date is used.
    date-format %-m/%-d/%Y %l:%M %p some other junk

  timezone

    timezone TIMEZONE

When CSV contains date-times that are implicitly in some time zone other than yours, but containing no explicit time zone information, you can use this rule to declare the CSV's native time zone, which helps prevent off-by-one dates.

When the CSV date-times do contain time zone information, you don't need this rule; instead, use %Z in date-format (or %z, %EZ, %Ez; see the formatTime link above).

In either of these cases, hledger will do a time-zone-aware conversion, localising the CSV date-times to your current system time zone. If you prefer to localise to some other time zone, eg for reproducibility, you can (on unix at least) set the output timezone with the TZ environment variable, eg:

    $ TZ=-1000 hledger print -f foo.csv  # or TZ=-1000 hledger import foo.csv

timezone currently does not understand timezone names, except "UTC", "GMT", "EST", "EDT", "CST", "CDT", "MST", "MDT", "PST", or "PDT". For others, use numeric format: +HHMM or -HHMM.

  newest-first

hledger tries to ensure that the generated transactions will be ordered chronologically, including intra-day transactions. Usually it can auto-detect how the CSV records are ordered. But if it encounters CSV where all records are on the same date, it assumes that the records are oldest first. If in fact the CSV's records are normally newest first, like:

    2022-10-01, txn 3...
    2022-10-01, txn 2...
    2022-10-01, txn 1...

you can add the newest-first rule to help hledger generate the transactions in correct order.

    # same-day CSV records are newest first
    newest-first

  intra-day-reversed

CSV records for each day are sometimes ordered in reverse compared to the overall date order. Eg, here dates are newest first, but the transactions on each date are oldest first:

    2022-10-02, txn 3...
    2022-10-02, txn 4...
    2022-10-01, txn 1...
    2022-10-01, txn 2...

In this situation, add the intra-day-reversed rule, and hledger will compensate, improving the order of transactions.

    # transactions within each day are reversed with respect to the overall date order
    intra-day-reversed

  decimal-mark

    decimal-mark .

or:

    decimal-mark ,

hledger automatically accepts either period or comma as a decimal mark when parsing numbers (cf Amounts). However if any numbers in the CSV contain digit group marks, such as thousand-separating commas, you should declare the decimal mark explicitly with this rule, to avoid misparsed numbers.

  fields list

    fields FIELDNAME1, FIELDNAME2, ...

A fields list (the word fields followed by comma-separated field names) is optional, but convenient. It does two things:

1.  It names the CSV field in each column. This can be convenient if you are referencing them in other rules, so you can say %SomeField instead of remembering %13.

2.  Whenever you use one of the special hledger field names (described below), it assigns the CSV value in this position to that hledger field. This is the quickest way to populate hledger's fields and build a transaction.

Here's an example that says "use the 1st, 2nd and 4th fields as the transaction's date, description and amount; name the last two fields for later reference; and ignore the others":

    fields date, description, , amount, , , somefield, anotherfield

In a fields list, the separator is always comma; it is unrelated to the CSV file's separator. Also:

•   There must be least two items in the list (at least one comma).

•   Field names may not contain spaces. Spaces before/after field names are optional.

•   Field names may contain _ (underscore) or - (hyphen).

•   Fields you don't care about can be given a dummy name or an empty name.

If the CSV contains column headings, it's convenient to use these for your field names, suitably modified (eg lower-cased with spaces replaced by underscores).

Sometimes you may want to alter a CSV field name to avoid assigning to a hledger field with the same name. Eg you could call the CSV's "balance" field balance_ to avoid directly setting hledger's balance field (and generating a balance assertion).

  Field assignment

    HLEDGERFIELD FIELDVALUE

Field assignments are the more flexible way to assign CSV values to hledger fields. They can be used instead of or in addition to a fields list (see above).

To assign a value to a hledger field, write the field name (any of the standard hledger field/pseudo-field names, defined below), a space, followed by a text value on the same line. This text value may interpolate CSV fields, referenced by their 1-based position in the CSV record (%N), or by the name they were given in the fields list (%CSVFIELD).

Some examples:

    # set the amount to the 4th CSV field, with " USD" appended
    amount %4 USD
    # combine three fields to make a comment, containing note: and date: tags
    comment note: %somefield - %anotherfield, date: %1

Tips:

•   Interpolation strips outer whitespace (so a CSV value like " 1 " becomes 1 when interpolated) (#1051).

•   Interpolations always refer to a CSV field - you can't interpolate a hledger field. (See Referencing other fields below).

  Field names

Note the two kinds of field names mentioned here, and used only in hledger CSV rules files:

1.  CSV field names (CSVFIELD in these docs): you can optionally name the CSV columns for easy reference (since hledger doesn't yet automatically recognise column headings in a CSV file), by writing arbitrary names in a fields list, eg:

        fields When, What, Some_Id, Net, Total, Foo, Bar

2.  Special hledger field names (HLEDGERFIELD in these docs): you must set at least some of these to generate the hledger transaction from a CSV record, by writing them as the left hand side of a field assignment, eg:

        date        %When
        code        %Some_Id
        description %What
        comment     %Foo %Bar
        amount1     $ %Total

    or directly in a fields list:

        fields date, description, code, , amount1, Foo, Bar
        currency $
        comment  %Foo %Bar

Here are all the special hledger field names available, and what happens when you assign values to them:

  date field

Assigning to date sets the transaction date.

  date2 field

date2 sets the transaction's secondary date, if any.

  status field

status sets the transaction's status, if any.

  code field

code sets the transaction's code, if any.

  description field

description sets the transaction's description, if any.

  comment field

comment sets the transaction's comment, if any.

commentN, where N is a number, sets the Nth posting's comment.

You can assign multi-line comments by writing literal \n in the code. A comment starting with \n will begin on a new line.

Comments can contain tags, as usual.

  account field

Assigning to accountN, where N is 1 to 99, sets the account name of the Nth posting, and causes that posting to be generated.

Most often there are two postings, so you'll want to set account1 and account2. Typically account1 is associated with the CSV file, and is set once with a top-level assignment, while account2 is set based on each transaction's description, in conditional rules.

If a posting's account name is left unset but its amount is set (see below), a default account name will be chosen (like "expenses:unknown" or "income:unknown").

  amount field

There are several "amount" field name variants, useful for different situations:

•   amountN sets the amount of the Nth posting, and causes that posting to be generated. By assigning to amount1, amount2, ... etc. you can generate up to 99 postings. Posting numbers don't have to be consecutive; in certain situations using a high number might be helpful to influence the layout of postings.

•   amountN-in and amountN-out should be used instead, as a pair, when and only when the amount must be obtained from two CSV fields. Eg when the CSV has separate Debit and Credit fields instead of a single Amount field. Note:

    •   Don't think "-in is for the first posting and -out is for the second posting" - that's not correct. Think: "amountN-in and amountN-out together detect the amount for posting N, by inspecting two CSV fields at once."

    •   hledger assumes both CSV fields are unsigned, and will automatically negate the -out value.

    •   It also expects that at least one of the values is empty or zero, so it knows which one to ignore. If that's not the case you'll need an if rule (see Setting amounts below).

•   amount, with no posting number (and similarly, amount-in and amount-out with no number) are an older syntax. We keep them for backwards compatibility, and because they have special behaviour that is sometimes convenient:

    •   They set the amount of posting 1 and (negated) the amount of posting 2.

    •   Posting 2's amount will be converted to cost if it has a cost price.

    •   Any of the newer rules for posting 1 or 2 (like amount1, or amount2-in and amount2-out) will take precedence. This allows incrementally migrating old rules files to the new syntax.

There's more to say about amount-setting that doesn't fit here; please see also "Setting amounts" below.

  currency field

currency sets a currency symbol, to be prepended to all postings' amounts. You can use this if the CSV amounts do not have a currency symbol, eg if it is in a separate column.

currencyN prepends a currency symbol to just the Nth posting's amount.

  balance field

balanceN sets a balance assertion amount (or if the posting amount is left empty, a balance assignment) on posting N.

balance is a compatibility spelling for hledger <1.17; it is equivalent to balance1.

You can adjust the type of assertion/assignment with the balance-type rule (see below).

See Tips below for more about setting amounts and currency.

  if block

Rules can be applied conditionally, depending on patterns in the CSV data. This allows flexibility; in particular, it is how you can categorise transactions, selecting an appropriate account name based on their description (for example). There are two ways to write conditional rules: "if blocks", described here, and "if tables", described below.

An if block is the word if and one or more "matcher" expressions (can be a word or phrase), one per line, starting either on the same or next line; followed by one or more indented rules. Eg,

    if MATCHER
     RULE

or

    if
    MATCHER
    MATCHER
    MATCHER
     RULE
     RULE

If any of the matchers succeeds, all of the indented rules will be applied. They are usually field assignments, but the following special rules may also be used within an if block:

•   skip - skips the matched CSV record (generating no transaction from it)

•   end - skips the rest of the current CSV file.

Some examples:

    # if the record contains "groceries", set account2 to "expenses:groceries"
    if groceries
     account2 expenses:groceries

    # if the record contains any of these phrases, set account2 and a transaction comment as shown
    if
    monthly service fee
    atm transaction fee
    banking thru software
     account2 expenses:business:banking
     comment  XXX deductible ? check it

    # if an empty record is seen (assuming five fields), ignore the rest of the CSV file
    if ,,,,
     end

  Matchers

There are two kinds:

1.  A record matcher is a word or single-line text fragment or regular expression (REGEX), which hledger will try to match case-insensitively anywhere within the CSV record.
Eg: whole foods

2.  A field matcher is preceded with a percent sign and CSV field name (%CSVFIELD REGEX). hledger will try to match these just within the named CSV field.
Eg: %date 2023

The regular expression is (as usual in hledger) a POSIX extended regular expression, that also supports GNU word boundaries (\b, \B, \<, \>), and nothing else. If you have trouble, see "Regular expressions" in the hledger manual (https://hledger.org/hledger.html#regular-expressions).

With record matchers, it's important to know that the record matched is not the original CSV record, but a modified one: separators will be converted to commas, and enclosing double quotes (but not enclosing whitespace) are removed. So for example, when reading an SSV file, if the original record was:

    2020-01-01; "Acme, Inc.";  1,000

the regex would see, and try to match, this modified record text:

    2020-01-01,Acme, Inc.,  1,000

When an if block has multiple matchers, they are combined as follows:

•   By default they are OR'd (any one of them can match)

•   When a matcher is preceded by ampersand (&) it will be AND'ed with the previous matcher (both of them must match).

There's not yet an easy syntax to negate a matcher.

  if table

"if tables" are an alternative to if blocks; they can express many matchers and field assignments in a more compact tabular format, like this:

    if,HLEDGERFIELD1,HLEDGERFIELD2,...
    MATCHERA,VALUE1,VALUE2,...
    MATCHERB,VALUE1,VALUE2,...
    MATCHERC,VALUE1,VALUE2,...
    <empty line>

The first character after if is taken to be the separator for the rest of the table. It should be a non-alphanumeric character like , or | that does not appear anywhere else in the table. (Note: it is unrelated to the CSV file's separator.) Whitespace can be used in the matcher lines for readability, but not in the if line currently. The table must be terminated by an empty line (or end of file). Each line must contain the same number of separators; empty values are allowed.

The above means: try all of the matchers; whenever a matcher succeeds, assign all of the values on that line to the corresponding hledger fields; later lines can overrider earlier ones. It is equivalent to this sequence of if blocks:

    if MATCHERA
      HLEDGERFIELD1 VALUE1
      HLEDGERFIELD2 VALUE2
      ...
    if MATCHERB
      HLEDGERFIELD1 VALUE1
      HLEDGERFIELD2 VALUE2
      ...
    if MATCHERC
      HLEDGERFIELD1 VALUE1
      HLEDGERFIELD2 VALUE2
      ...

Example:

    if,account2,comment
    atm transaction fee,expenses:business:banking,deductible? check it
    %description groceries,expenses:groceries,
    2020/01/12.*Plumbing LLC,expenses:house:upkeep,emergency plumbing call-out

  balance-type

Balance assertions generated by assigning to balanceN are of the simple = type by default, which is a single-commodity, subaccount-excluding assertion. You may find the subaccount-including variants more useful, eg if you have created some virtual subaccounts of checking to help with budgeting. You can select a different type of assertion with the balance-type rule:

    # balance assertions will consider all commodities and all subaccounts
    balance-type ==*

Here are the balance assertion types for quick reference:

    =    single commodity, exclude subaccounts
    =*   single commodity, include subaccounts
    ==   multi commodity,  exclude subaccounts
    ==*  multi commodity,  include subaccounts

  include

    include RULESFILE

This includes the contents of another CSV rules file at this point. RULESFILE is an absolute file path or a path relative to the current file's directory. This can be useful for sharing common rules between several rules files, eg:

    # someaccount.csv.rules
    ## someaccount-specific rules
    fields   date,description,amount
    account1 assets:someaccount
    account2 expenses:misc
    ## common rules
    include categorisation.rules

  Working with CSV

Some tips:

  Rapid feedback

It's a good idea to get rapid feedback while creating/troubleshooting CSV rules. Here's a good way, using entr from eradman.com/entrproject:

    $ ls foo.csv* | entr bash -c 'echo ----; hledger -f foo.csv print desc:SOMEDESC'

A desc: query (eg) is used to select just one, or a few, transactions of interest. "bash -c" is used to run multiple commands, so we can echo a separator each time the command re-runs, making it easier to read the output.

  Valid CSV

Note that hledger will only accept valid CSV conforming to RFC 4180, and equivalent SSV and TSV formats (like RFC 4180 but with semicolon or tab as separators). This means, eg:

•   Values may be enclosed in double quotes, or not. Enclosing in single quotes is not allowed. (Eg 'A','B' is rejected.)

•   When values are enclosed in double quotes, spaces outside the quotes are not allowed. (Eg "A", "B" is rejected.)

•   When values are not enclosed in quotes, they may not contain double quotes. (Eg A"A, B is rejected.)

If your CSV/SSV/TSV is not valid in this sense, you'll need to transform it before reading with hledger. Try using sed, or a more permissive CSV parser like python's csv lib.

  File Extension

To help hledger choose the CSV file reader and show the right error messages (and choose the right field separator character by default), it's best if CSV/SSV/TSV files are named with a .csv, .ssv or .tsv filename extension. (More about this at Data formats.)

When reading files with the "wrong" extension, you can ensure the CSV reader (and the default field separator) by prefixing the file path with csv:, ssv: or tsv:: Eg:

    $ hledger -f ssv:foo.dat print

You can also override the default field separator with a separator rule if needed.

  Reading CSV from standard input

You'll need the file format prefix when reading CSV from stdin also, since hledger assumes journal format by default. Eg:

    $ cat foo.dat | hledger -f ssv:- print

  Reading multiple CSV files

If you use multiple -f options to read multiple CSV files at once, hledger will look for a correspondingly-named rules file for each CSV file. But if you use the --rules-file option, that rules file will be used for all the CSV files.

  Valid transactions

After reading a CSV file, hledger post-processes and validates the generated journal entries as it would for a journal file - balancing them, applying balance assignments, and canonicalising amount styles. Any errors at this stage will be reported in the usual way, displaying the problem entry.

There is one exception: balance assertions, if you have generated them, will not be checked, since normally these will work only when the CSV data is part of the main journal. If you do need to check balance assertions generated from CSV right away, pipe into another hledger:

    $ hledger -f file.csv print | hledger -f- print

  Deduplicating, importing

When you download a CSV file periodically, eg to get your latest bank transactions, the new file may overlap with the old one, containing some of the same records.

The import command will (a) detect the new transactions, and (b) append just those transactions to your main journal. It is idempotent, so you don't have to remember how many times you ran it or with which version of the CSV. (It keeps state in a hidden .latest.FILE.csv file.) This is the easiest way to import CSV data. Eg:

    # download the latest CSV files, then run this command.
    # Note, no -f flags needed here.
    $ hledger import *.csv [--dry]

This method works for most CSV files. (Where records have a stable chronological order, and new records appear only at the new end.)

A number of other tools and workflows, hledger-specific and otherwise, exist for converting, deduplicating, classifying and managing CSV data. See:

•   https://hledger.org/cookbook.html#setups-and-workflows

•   https://plaintextaccounting.org -> data import/conversion

  Setting amounts

Continuing from amount field above, here are more tips on handling various amount-setting situations:

1.  If the amount is in a single CSV field:

    a.  If its sign indicates direction of flow:
    Assign it to amountN, to set the Nth posting's amount. N is usually 1 or 2 but can go up to 99.

    b.  If another field indicates direction of flow:
    Use one or more conditional rules to set the appropriate amount sign. Eg:

        # assume a withdrawal unless Type contains "deposit":
        amount1  -%Amount
        if %Type deposit
          amount1  %Amount

2.  If the amount is in one of two CSV fields (eg Debit and Credit):

    a.  If both fields are unsigned:
    Assign the fields to amountN-in and amountN-out. This sets posting N's amount to whichever of these has a non-zero value. If it's the -out value, the amount will be negated.

    b.  If either field is signed:
    Use a conditional rule to flip the sign when needed. Eg below, the -out value already has a minus sign so we undo hledger's automatic negating by negating once more (but only if the field is non-empty, so that we don't leave a minus sign by itself):

        fields date, description, amount1-in, amount1-out
        if %amount1-out [1-9]
         amount1-out -%amount1-out

    c.  If both fields can contain a non-zero value (or both can be empty):
    The -in/-out rules normally choose the value which is non-zero/non-empty. Some value pairs can be ambiguous, such as 1 and none. For such cases, use conditional rules to help select the amount. Eg, to handle the above you could select the value containing non-zero digits:

        fields date, description, in, out
        if %in [1-9]
         amount1 %in
        if %out [1-9]
         amount1 %out

3.  If you want posting 2's amount converted to cost:
Use the unnumbered amount (or amount-in and amount-out) syntax.

4.  If the CSV has only balance amounts, not transaction amounts:
Assign to balanceN, to set a balance assignment on the Nth posting, causing the posting's amount to be calculated automatically. balance with no number is equivalent to balance1. In this situation hledger is more likely to guess the wrong default account name, so you may need to set that explicitly.

  Amount signs

There is some special handling for amount signs, to simplify parsing and sign-flipping:

•   If an amount value begins with a plus sign:
that will be removed: +AMT becomes AMT

•   If an amount value is parenthesised:
it will be de-parenthesised and sign-flipped: (AMT) becomes -AMT

•   If an amount value has two minus signs (or two sets of parentheses, or a minus sign and parentheses):
they cancel out and will be removed: --AMT or -(AMT) becomes AMT

•   If an amount value contains just a sign (or just a set of parentheses):
that is removed, making it an empty value. "+" or "-" or "()" becomes "".

  Setting currency/commodity

If the currency/commodity symbol is included in the CSV's amount field(s):

    2020-01-01,foo,$123.00

you don't have to do anything special for the commodity symbol, it will be assigned as part of the amount. Eg:

    fields date,description,amount

    2020-01-01 foo
        expenses:unknown         $123.00
        income:unknown          $-123.00

If the currency is provided as a separate CSV field:

    2020-01-01,foo,USD,123.00

You can assign that to the currency pseudo-field, which has the special effect of prepending itself to every amount in the transaction (on the left, with no separating space):

    fields date,description,currency,amount

    2020-01-01 foo
        expenses:unknown       USD123.00
        income:unknown        USD-123.00

Or, you can use a field assignment to construct the amount yourself, with more control. Eg to put the symbol on the right, and separated by a space:

    fields date,description,cur,amt
    amount %amt %cur

    2020-01-01 foo
        expenses:unknown        123.00 USD
        income:unknown         -123.00 USD

Note we used a temporary field name (cur) that is not currency - that would trigger the prepending effect, which we don't want here.

  Amount decimal places

Like amounts in a journal file, the amounts generated by CSV rules like amount1 influence commodity display styles, such as the number of decimal places displayed in reports.

The original amounts as written in the CSV file do not affect display style (because we don't yet reliably know their commodity).

  Referencing other fields

In field assignments, you can interpolate only CSV fields, not hledger fields. In the example below, there's both a CSV field and a hledger field named amount1, but %amount1 always means the CSV field, not the hledger field:

    # Name the third CSV field "amount1"
    fields date,description,amount1
    # Set hledger's amount1 to the CSV amount1 field followed by USD
    amount1 %amount1 USD
    # Set comment to the CSV amount1 (not the amount1 assigned above)
    comment %amount1

Here, since there's no CSV amount1 field, %amount1 will produce a literal "amount1":

    fields date,description,csvamount
    amount1 %csvamount USD
    # Can't interpolate amount1 here
    comment %amount1

When there are multiple field assignments to the same hledger field, only the last one takes effect. Here, comment's value will be be B, or C if "something" is matched, but never A:

    comment A
    comment B
    if something
     comment C

  How CSV rules are evaluated

Here's how to think of CSV rules being evaluated (if you really need to). First,

•   include - all includes are inlined, from top to bottom, depth first. (At each include point the file is inlined and scanned for further includes, recursively, before proceeding.)

Then "global" rules are evaluated, top to bottom. If a rule is repeated, the last one wins:

•   skip (at top level)

•   date-format

•   newest-first

•   fields - names the CSV fields, optionally sets up initial assignments to hledger fields

Then for each CSV record in turn:

•   test all if blocks. If any of them contain a end rule, skip all remaining CSV records. Otherwise if any of them contain a skip rule, skip that many CSV records. If there are multiple matched skip rules, the first one wins.

•   collect all field assignments at top level and in matched if blocks. When there are multiple assignments for a field, keep only the last one.

•   compute a value for each hledger field - either the one that was assigned to it (and interpolate the %CSVFIELD references), or a default

•   generate a hledger transaction (journal entry) from these values.

This is all part of the CSV reader, one of several readers hledger can use to parse input files. When all files have been read successfully, the transactions are passed as input to whichever hledger command the user specified.

  Well factored rules

Some things than can help reduce duplication and complexity in rules files:

•   Extracting common rules usable with multiple CSV files into a common.rules, and adding include common.rules to each CSV's rules file.

•   Splitting if blocks into smaller if blocks, extracting the frequently used parts.

  CSV rules examples

  Bank of Ireland

Here's a CSV with two amount fields (Debit and Credit), and a balance field, which we can use to add balance assertions, which is not necessary but provides extra error checking:

    Date,Details,Debit,Credit,Balance
    07/12/2012,LODGMENT       529898,,10.0,131.21
    07/12/2012,PAYMENT,5,,126

    # bankofireland-checking.csv.rules
    # skip the header line
    skip
    # name the csv fields, and assign some of them as journal entry fields
    fields  date, description, amount-out, amount-in, balance
    # We generate balance assertions by assigning to "balance"
    # above, but you may sometimes need to remove these because:
    #
    # - the CSV balance differs from the true balance,
    #   by up to 0.0000000000005 in my experience
    #
    # - it is sometimes calculated based on non-chronological ordering,
    #   eg when multiple transactions clear on the same day
    # date is in UK/Ireland format
    date-format  %d/%m/%Y
    # set the currency
    currency  EUR
    # set the base account for all txns
    account1  assets:bank:boi:checking

    $ hledger -f bankofireland-checking.csv print
    2012-12-07 LODGMENT       529898
        assets:bank:boi:checking         EUR10.0 = EUR131.2
        income:unknown                  EUR-10.0
    2012-12-07 PAYMENT
        assets:bank:boi:checking         EUR-5.0 = EUR126.0
        expenses:unknown                  EUR5.0

The balance assertions don't raise an error above, because we're reading directly from CSV, but they will be checked if these entries are imported into a journal file.

  Coinbase

A simple example with some CSV from Coinbase. The spot price is recorded using cost notation. The legacy amount field name conveniently sets amount 2 (posting 2's amount) to the total cost.

    # Timestamp,Transaction Type,Asset,Quantity Transacted,Spot Price Currency,Spot Price at Transaction,Subtotal,Total (inclusive of fees and/or spread),Fees and/or Spread,Notes
    # 2021-12-30T06:57:59Z,Receive,USDC,100,GBP,0.740000,"","","","Received 100.00 USDC from an external account"

    # coinbase.csv.rules
    skip         1
    fields       Timestamp,Transaction_Type,Asset,Quantity_Transacted,Spot_Price_Currency,Spot_Price_at_Transaction,Subtotal,Total,Fees_Spread,Notes
    date         %Timestamp
    date-format  %Y-%m-%dT%T%Z
    description  %Notes
    account1     assets:coinbase:cc
    amount       %Quantity_Transacted %Asset @ %Spot_Price_at_Transaction %Spot_Price_Currency

    $ hledger print -f coinbase.csv
    2021-12-30 Received 100.00 USDC from an external account
        assets:coinbase:cc    100 USDC @ 0.740000 GBP
        income:unknown                 -74.000000 GBP

  Amazon

Here we convert amazon.com order history, and use an if block to generate a third posting if there's a fee. (In practice you'd probably get this data from your bank instead, but it's an example.)

    "Date","Type","To/From","Name","Status","Amount","Fees","Transaction ID"
    "Jul 29, 2012","Payment","To","Foo.","Completed","$20.00","$0.00","16000000000000DGLNJPI1P9B8DKPVHL"
    "Jul 30, 2012","Payment","To","Adapteva, Inc.","Completed","$25.00","$1.00","17LA58JSKRD4HDGLNJPI1P9B8DKPVHL"

    # amazon-orders.csv.rules
    # skip one header line
    skip 1
    # name the csv fields, and assign the transaction's date, amount and code.
    # Avoided the "status" and "amount" hledger field names to prevent confusion.
    fields date, _, toorfrom, name, amzstatus, amzamount, fees, code
    # how to parse the date
    date-format %b %-d, %Y
    # combine two fields to make the description
    description %toorfrom %name
    # save the status as a tag
    comment     status:%amzstatus
    # set the base account for all transactions
    account1    assets:amazon
    # leave amount1 blank so it can balance the other(s).
    # I'm assuming amzamount excludes the fees, don't remember
    # set a generic account2
    account2    expenses:misc
    amount2     %amzamount
    # and maybe refine it further:
    #include categorisation.rules
    # add a third posting for fees, but only if they are non-zero.
    if %fees [1-9]
     account3    expenses:fees
     amount3     %fees

    $ hledger -f amazon-orders.csv print
    2012-07-29 (16000000000000DGLNJPI1P9B8DKPVHL) To Foo.  ; status:Completed
        assets:amazon
        expenses:misc          $20.00
    2012-07-30 (17LA58JSKRD4HDGLNJPI1P9B8DKPVHL) To Adapteva, Inc.  ; status:Completed
        assets:amazon
        expenses:misc          $25.00
        expenses:fees           $1.00

  Paypal

Here's a real-world rules file for (customised) Paypal CSV, with some Paypal-specific rules, and a second rules file included:

    "Date","Time","TimeZone","Name","Type","Status","Currency","Gross","Fee","Net","From Email Address","To Email Address","Transaction ID","Item Title","Item ID","Reference Txn ID","Receipt ID","Balance","Note"
    "10/01/2019","03:46:20","PDT","Calm Radio","Subscription Payment","Completed","USD","-6.99","0.00","-6.99","simon@joyful.com","memberships@calmradio.com","60P57143A8206782E","MONTHLY - $1 for the first 2 Months: Me - Order 99309. Item total: $1.00 USD first 2 months, then $6.99 / Month","","I-R8YLY094FJYR","","-6.99",""
    "10/01/2019","03:46:20","PDT","","Bank Deposit to PP Account ","Pending","USD","6.99","0.00","6.99","","simon@joyful.com","0TU1544T080463733","","","60P57143A8206782E","","0.00",""
    "10/01/2019","08:57:01","PDT","Patreon","PreApproved Payment Bill User Payment","Completed","USD","-7.00","0.00","-7.00","simon@joyful.com","support@patreon.com","2722394R5F586712G","Patreon* Membership","","B-0PG93074E7M86381M","","-7.00",""
    "10/01/2019","08:57:01","PDT","","Bank Deposit to PP Account ","Pending","USD","7.00","0.00","7.00","","simon@joyful.com","71854087RG994194F","Patreon* Membership","","2722394R5F586712G","","0.00",""
    "10/19/2019","03:02:12","PDT","Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.","Subscription Payment","Completed","USD","-2.00","0.00","-2.00","simon@joyful.com","tle@wikimedia.org","K9U43044RY432050M","Monthly donation to the Wikimedia Foundation","","I-R5C3YUS3285L","","-2.00",""
    "10/19/2019","03:02:12","PDT","","Bank Deposit to PP Account ","Pending","USD","2.00","0.00","2.00","","simon@joyful.com","3XJ107139A851061F","","","K9U43044RY432050M","","0.00",""
    "10/22/2019","05:07:06","PDT","Noble Benefactor","Subscription Payment","Completed","USD","10.00","-0.59","9.41","noble@bene.fac.tor","simon@joyful.com","6L8L1662YP1334033","Joyful Systems","","I-KC9VBGY2GWDB","","9.41",""

    # paypal-custom.csv.rules
    # Tips:
    # Export from Activity -> Statements -> Custom -> Activity download
    # Suggested transaction type: "Balance affecting"
    # Paypal's default fields in 2018 were:
    # "Date","Time","TimeZone","Name","Type","Status","Currency","Gross","Fee","Net","From Email Address","To Email Address","Transaction ID","Shipping Address","Address Status","Item Title","Item ID","Shipping and Handling Amount","Insurance Amount","Sales Tax","Option 1 Name","Option 1 Value","Option 2 Name","Option 2 Value","Reference Txn ID","Invoice Number","Custom Number","Quantity","Receipt ID","Balance","Address Line 1","Address Line 2/District/Neighborhood","Town/City","State/Province/Region/County/Territory/Prefecture/Republic","Zip/Postal Code","Country","Contact Phone Number","Subject","Note","Country Code","Balance Impact"
    # This rules file assumes the following more detailed fields, configured in "Customize report fields":
    # "Date","Time","TimeZone","Name","Type","Status","Currency","Gross","Fee","Net","From Email Address","To Email Address","Transaction ID","Item Title","Item ID","Reference Txn ID","Receipt ID","Balance","Note"
    fields date, time, timezone, description_, type, status_, currency, grossamount, feeamount, netamount, fromemail, toemail, code, itemtitle, itemid, referencetxnid, receiptid, balance, note
    skip  1
    date-format  %-m/%-d/%Y
    # ignore some paypal events
    if
    In Progress
    Temporary Hold
    Update to
     skip
    # add more fields to the description
    description %description_ %itemtitle
    # save some other fields as tags
    comment  itemid:%itemid, fromemail:%fromemail, toemail:%toemail, time:%time, type:%type, status:%status_
    # convert to short currency symbols
    if %currency USD
     currency $
    if %currency EUR
     currency E
    if %currency GBP
     currency P
    # generate postings
    # the first posting will be the money leaving/entering my paypal account
    # (negative means leaving my account, in all amount fields)
    account1 assets:online:paypal
    amount1  %netamount
    # the second posting will be money sent to/received from other party
    # (account2 is set below)
    amount2  -%grossamount
    # if there's a fee, add a third posting for the money taken by paypal.
    if %feeamount [1-9]
     account3 expenses:banking:paypal
     amount3  -%feeamount
     comment3 business:
    # choose an account for the second posting
    # override the default account names:
    # if the amount is positive, it's income (a debit)
    if %grossamount ^[^-]
     account2 income:unknown
    # if negative, it's an expense (a credit)
    if %grossamount ^-
     account2 expenses:unknown
    # apply common rules for setting account2 & other tweaks
    include common.rules
    # apply some overrides specific to this csv
    # Transfers from/to bank. These are usually marked Pending,
    # which can be disregarded in this case.
    if
    Bank Account
    Bank Deposit to PP Account
     description %type for %referencetxnid %itemtitle
     account2 assets:bank:wf:pchecking
     account1 assets:online:paypal
    # Currency conversions
    if Currency Conversion
     account2 equity:currency conversion

    # common.rules
    if
    darcs
    noble benefactor
     account2 revenues:foss donations:darcshub
     comment2 business:
    if
    Calm Radio
     account2 expenses:online:apps
    if
    electronic frontier foundation
    Patreon
    wikimedia
    Advent of Code
     account2 expenses:dues
    if Google
     account2 expenses:online:apps
     description google | music

    $ hledger -f paypal-custom.csv  print
    2019-10-01 (60P57143A8206782E) Calm Radio MONTHLY - $1 for the first 2 Months: Me - Order 99309. Item total: $1.00 USD first 2 months, then $6.99 / Month  ; itemid:, fromemail:simon@joyful.com, toemail:memberships@calmradio.com, time:03:46:20, type:Subscription Payment, status:Completed
        assets:online:paypal          $-6.99 = $-6.99
        expenses:online:apps           $6.99
    2019-10-01 (0TU1544T080463733) Bank Deposit to PP Account for 60P57143A8206782E  ; itemid:, fromemail:, toemail:simon@joyful.com, time:03:46:20, type:Bank Deposit to PP Account, status:Pending
        assets:online:paypal               $6.99 = $0.00
        assets:bank:wf:pchecking          $-6.99
    2019-10-01 (2722394R5F586712G) Patreon Patreon* Membership  ; itemid:, fromemail:simon@joyful.com, toemail:support@patreon.com, time:08:57:01, type:PreApproved Payment Bill User Payment, status:Completed
        assets:online:paypal          $-7.00 = $-7.00
        expenses:dues                  $7.00
    2019-10-01 (71854087RG994194F) Bank Deposit to PP Account for 2722394R5F586712G Patreon* Membership  ; itemid:, fromemail:, toemail:simon@joyful.com, time:08:57:01, type:Bank Deposit to PP Account, status:Pending
        assets:online:paypal               $7.00 = $0.00
        assets:bank:wf:pchecking          $-7.00
    2019-10-19 (K9U43044RY432050M) Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Monthly donation to the Wikimedia Foundation  ; itemid:, fromemail:simon@joyful.com, toemail:tle@wikimedia.org, time:03:02:12, type:Subscription Payment, status:Completed
        assets:online:paypal             $-2.00 = $-2.00
        expenses:dues                     $2.00
        expenses:banking:paypal      ; business:
    2019-10-19 (3XJ107139A851061F) Bank Deposit to PP Account for K9U43044RY432050M  ; itemid:, fromemail:, toemail:simon@joyful.com, time:03:02:12, type:Bank Deposit to PP Account, status:Pending
        assets:online:paypal               $2.00 = $0.00
        assets:bank:wf:pchecking          $-2.00
    2019-10-22 (6L8L1662YP1334033) Noble Benefactor Joyful Systems  ; itemid:, fromemail:noble@bene.fac.tor, toemail:simon@joyful.com, time:05:07:06, type:Subscription Payment, status:Completed
        assets:online:paypal                       $9.41 = $9.41
        revenues:foss donations:darcshub         $-10.00  ; business:
        expenses:banking:paypal                    $0.59  ; business:

Timeclock

The time logging format of timeclock.el, as read by hledger.

hledger can read time logs in timeclock format. 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). Lines beginning with # or ; or *, and blank lines, are ignored.

    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 ti and to scripts in the ledger 2.x repository. These rely on a "timeclock" executable which I think is just the ledger 2 executable renamed.

Timedot

timedot format is hledger's human-friendly time logging format. Compared to timeclock format, it is

•   convenient for quick, approximate, and retroactive time logging

•   readable: you can see at a glance where time was spent.

A timedot file contains a series of day entries, which might look like this:

    2021-08-04
    hom:errands          .... ....
    fos:hledger:timedot  ..         ; docs
    per:admin:finance

hledger reads this as three time transactions on this day, with each dot representing a quarter-hour spent:

    $ hledger -f a.timedot print   # .timedot file extension activates the timedot reader
    2021-08-04 *
        (hom:errands)            2.00
    2021-08-04 *
        (fos:hledger:timedot)    0.50
    2021-08-04 *
        (per:admin:finance)      0

A day entry begins with a date line:

•   a non-indented simple date (Y-M-D, Y/M/D, or Y.M.D).

Optionally this can be followed on the same line by

•   a common transaction description for this day

•   a common transaction comment for this day, after a semicolon (;).

After the date line are zero or more optionally-indented time transaction lines, consisting of:

•   an account name - any word or phrase, usually a hledger-style account name.

•   two or more spaces - a field separator, required if there is an amount (as in journal format).

•   a timedot amount - dots representing quarter hours, or a number representing hours.

•   an optional comment beginning with semicolon. This is ignored.

In more detail, timedot amounts can be:

•   dots: zero or more period characters, each representing one quarter-hour. Spaces are ignored and can be used for grouping. Eg: .... ..

•   a number, representing hours. Eg: 1.5

•   a number immediately followed by a unit symbol s, m, h, d, w, mo, or y, representing seconds, minutes, hours, days weeks, months or years. Eg 1.5h or 90m. The following equivalencies are assumed:
60s = 1m, 60m = 1h, 24h = 1d, 7d = 1w, 30d = 1mo, 365d = 1y. (This unit will not be visible in the generated transaction amount, which is always in hours.)

There is some added flexibility to help with keeping time log data in the same file as your notes, todo lists, etc.:

•   Blank lines and lines beginning with # or ; are ignored.

•   Before the first date line, lines beginning with * are ignored. From the first date line onward, a sequence of *'s followed by a space at beginning of lines (ie, the headline prefix used by Emacs Org mode) is ignored. This means the time log can be kept under an Org headline, and date lines or time transaction lines can be Org headlines.

•   Lines not ending with a double-space and amount are parsed as transactions with zero amount. (Most hledger reports hide these by default; add -E to see them.)

More examples:

    # 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  .

    2016/2/3
    inc:client1   4
    fos:hledger   3
    biz:research  1

    * Time log
    ** 2020-01-01
    *** adm:time  .
    *** adm:finance  .

    * 2020 Work Diary
    ** Q1
    *** 2020-02-29
    **** DONE
    0700 yoga
    **** UNPLANNED
    **** BEGUN
    hom:chores
     cleaning  ...
     water plants
      outdoor - one full watering can
      indoor - light watering
    **** TODO
    adm:planning: trip
    *** LATER

Reporting:

    $ hledger -f a.timedot print date:2016/2/2
    2016-02-02 *
        (inc:client1)          2.00
    2016-02-02 *
        (biz:research)          0.25

    $ hledger -f a.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

Using period instead of colon as account name separator:

    2016/2/4
    fos.hledger.timedot  4
    fos.ledger           ..

    $ hledger -f a.timedot --alias /\\./=: bal --tree
                    4.50  fos
                    4.00    hledger:timedot
                    0.50    ledger
    --------------------
                    4.50

A sample.timedot file.

PART 3: REPORTING CONCEPTS

Time periods

  Report start & end date

By default, most hledger reports will show the full span of time represented by the journal. The report start date will be the earliest transaction or posting date, and the report end date will be the latest transaction, posting, or market price date.

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 (below).

Some notes:

•   End dates are exclusive, as in Ledger, so you should write the date after the last day you want to see in the report.

•   As noted in reporting options: among start/end dates specified with options, the last (i.e. right-most) option takes precedence.

•   The effective report start and end dates are the intersection of the start/end dates from options and that from date: queries. That is, date:2019-01 date:2019 -p'2000 to 2030' yields January 2019, the smallest common time span.

•   In some cases a report interval will adjust start/end dates to fall on interval boundaries (see below).

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 (.. can also be replaced with -)
date:..12/1 |
date:thismonth.. |
date:thismonth |

  Smart dates

hledger's user interfaces accept a "smart date" syntax for added convenience. Smart dates optionally can be relative to today's date, be written with english words, and have less-significant parts omitted (missing parts are inferred as 1). Some 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
in n days/weeks/months/quarters/years | n periods from the current period
n days/weeks/months/quarters/years ahead | n periods from the current period
n days/weeks/months/quarters/years ago | -n periods from the current period
20181201 | 8 digit YYYYMMDD with valid year month and day
201812 | 6 digit YYYYMM with valid year and month

Some 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

"Today's date" can be overridden with the --today option, in case it's needed for testing or for recreating old reports. (Except for periodic transaction rules, which are not affected by --today.)

  Report intervals

A report interval can be specified so that reports like register, balance or activity become multi-period, showing each subperiod as a separate row or column.

The following standard intervals can be enabled with command-line flags:

•   -D/--daily

•   -W/--weekly

•   -M/--monthly

•   -Q/--quarterly

•   -Y/--yearly

More complex intervals can be specified using -p/--period, described below.

  Date adjustment

With a report interval (other than daily), report start / end dates which have not been specified explicitly and in full (eg not -b 2023-01-01, but -b 2023-01 or -b 2023 or unspecified) are considered flexible:

•   A flexible start date will be automatically adjusted earlier if needed to fall on a natural interval boundary.

•   Similarly, a flexible end date will be adjusted later if needed to make the last period a whole interval (the same length as the others).

This is convenient for producing clean periodic reports (this is traditional hledger behaviour). By contrast, fully-specified exact dates will not be adjusted (this is new in hledger 1.29).

An example: with a journal whose first date is 2023-01-10 and last date is 2023-03-20:

•   hledger bal -M -b 2023/1/15 -e 2023/3/10
The report periods will begin on the 15th day of each month, starting from 2023-01-15, and the last period's last day will be 2023-03-09. (Exact start and end dates, neither is adjusted.)

•   hledger bal -M -b 2023-01 -e 2023-04 or hledger bal -M
The report periods will begin on the 1st of each month, starting from 2023-01-01, and the last period's last day will be 2023-03-31. (Flexible start and end dates, both are adjusted.)

  Period expressions

The -p/--period option specifies a period expression, which is a compact way of expressing a start date, end date, and/or report interval.

Here's a period expression with a start and end date (specifying the first quarter of 2009):

-p "from 2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1"

Several keywords like "from" and "to" are supported for readability; these are optional. "to" can also be written as ".." or "-". The spaces are also optional, as long as you don't run two dates together. So the following 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, these are also equivalent to the above:

-p "1/1 4/1"
-p "jan-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 date in the journal:

-p "from 2009/1/1" | everything after january 1, 2009
-p "since 2009/1" | the same, since is a synonym
-p "from 2009" | the same
-p "to 2009" | everything before january 1, 2009

You can also specify a period by writing a single partial or full date:

-p "2009" | the year 2009; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2010/1/1”
-p "2009/1" | the month of january 2009; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2009/2/1”
-p "2009/1/1" | the first day of 2009; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2009/1/2”

or by using the "Q" quarter-year syntax (case insensitive):

-p "2009Q1" | first quarter of 2009, equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1”
-p "q4" | fourth quarter of the current year

  Period expressions with a report interval

A period expression can also begin with a report interval, separated from the start/end dates (if any) by a space or the word in:

-p "weekly from 2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1"
-p "monthly in 2008"
-p "quarterly"

  More complex report intervals

Some more complex intervals can be specified within period expressions, such as:

•   biweekly (every two weeks)

•   fortnightly

•   bimonthly (every two months)

•   every day|week|month|quarter|year

•   every N days|weeks|months|quarters|years

Weekly on a custom day:

•   every Nth day of week (th, nd, rd, or st are all accepted after the number)

•   every WEEKDAYNAME (full or three-letter english weekday name, case insensitive)

Monthly on a custom day:

•   every Nth day [of month]

•   every Nth WEEKDAYNAME [of month]

Yearly on a custom day:

•   every MM/DD [of year] (month number and day of month number)

•   every MONTHNAME DDth [of year] (full or three-letter english month name, case insensitive, and day of month number)

•   every DDth MONTHNAME [of year] (equivalent to the above)

Examples:

-p "bimonthly from 2008" |
-p "every 2 weeks" |
-p "every 5 months from 2009/03" |
-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 November
-p "every 5th November" | same
-p "every Nov 5th" | same

Show historical balances at end of the 15th day of each month (N is an end date, exclusive as always):

    $ hledger balance -H -p "every 16th day"

Group postings from the start of wednesday to end of the following tuesday (N is both (inclusive) start date and (exclusive) end date):

    $ hledger register checking -p "every 3rd day of week"

  Multiple weekday intervals

This special form is also supported:

•   every WEEKDAYNAME,WEEKDAYNAME,... (full or three-letter english weekday names, case insensitive)

Also, weekday and weekendday are shorthand for mon,tue,wed,thu,fri and sat,sun.

This is mainly intended for use with --forecast, to generate periodic transactions on arbitrary days of the week. It may be less useful with -p, since it divides each week into subperiods of unequal length, which is unusual. (Related: #1632)

Examples:

-p "every mon,wed,fri" | dates will be Mon, Wed, Fri; periods will be Mon-Tue, Wed-Thu, Fri-Sun
-p "every weekday" | dates will be Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri; periods will be Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri-Sun
-p "every weekendday" | dates will be Sat, Sun; periods will be Sat, Sun-Fri

Depth

With the --depth NUM option (short form: -NUM), reports will show accounts only to the specified depth, hiding deeper subaccounts. Use this when you want a summary with less detail. This flag has the same effect as a depth: query argument: depth:2, --depth=2 or -2 are equivalent.

Queries

One of hledger's strengths is being able to quickly report on a precise subset of your data. Most hledger commands accept optional query arguments to restrict their scope. The syntax is as follows:

•   Zero or more space-separated query terms. These are most often account name substrings:

    utilities food:groceries

•   Terms with spaces or other special characters should be enclosed in quotes:

    "personal care"

•   Regular expressions are also supported:

    "^expenses\b" "accounts (payable|receivable)"

•   Add a query type prefix to match other parts of the data:

    date:202012- desc:amazon cur:USD amt:">100" status:

•   Add a not: prefix to negate a term:

    not:cur:USD

  Query types

Here are the types of query term available. Remember these can also be prefixed with not: to convert them into a negative match.

acct:REGEX, REGEX
Match account names containing this (case insensitive) regular expression. This is the default query type when there is no prefix, and regular expression syntax is typically not needed, so usually we just write an account name substring, like expenses or food.

amt:N, amt:<N, amt:<=N, amt:>N, amt:>=N
Match postings with a single-commodity amount equal to, less than, or greater than N. (Postings with 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 special characters which are regex-significant, you need to escape them with \. And for characters which are significant to your shell you may need one more level of escaping. So eg to match the dollar sign:
hledger print cur:\\$.

desc:REGEX
Match transaction descriptions.

date:PERIODEXPR
Match dates (or with the --date2 flag, secondary dates) within the specified period. PERIODEXPR is a period expression with no report interval. Examples:
date:2016, date:thismonth, date:2/1-2/15, date:2021-07-27..nextquarter.

date2:PERIODEXPR
Match secondary dates within the specified period (independent of the --date2 flag).

depth:N
Match (or display, depending on command) accounts at or above this depth.

note:REGEX
Match transaction notes (the part of the description right of |, or the whole description if there's no |).

payee:REGEX
Match transaction payee/payer names (the part of the description left of |, or the whole description if there's no |).

real:, real:0
Match real or virtual postings respectively.

status:, status:!, status:*
Match unmarked, pending, or cleared transactions respectively.

type:TYPECODES
Match by account type (see Declaring accounts > Account types). TYPECODES is one or more of the single-letter account type codes ALERXCV, case insensitive. Note type:A and type:E will also match their respective subtypes C (Cash) and V (Conversion). Certain kinds of account alias can disrupt account types, see Rewriting accounts > Aliases and account types.

tag:REGEX[=REGEX]
Match by tag name, and optionally also by tag value. (To match only by value, use tag:.=REGEX.)

When querying by tag, note that:

•   Accounts also inherit the tags of their parent accounts

•   Postings also inherit the tags of their account and their transaction

•   Transactions also acquire the tags of their postings.

(inacct:ACCTNAME
A special query term used automatically in hledger-web only: tells hledger-web to show the transaction register for an account.)

  Combining query terms

When given multiple query terms, most commands select things which 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 is a little different, showing 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.

Although these fixed rules are enough for many needs, we do not support full boolean expressions (#203), (and you should not write AND or OR in your queries). This makes certain queries hard to express, but here are some tricks that can help:

1.  Use a doubled not: prefix. Eg, to print only the food expenses paid with cash:

        $ hledger print food not:not:cash

2.  Or pre-filter the transactions with print, piping the result into a second hledger command (with balance assertions disabled):

        $ hledger print cash | hledger -f- -I balance food

  Queries and command options

Some queries can also be expressed as command-line options: depth:2 is equivalent to --depth 2, date:2020 is equivalent to -p 2020, etc. When you mix command options and query arguments, generally the resulting query is their intersection.

  Queries and valuation

When amounts are converted to other commodities in cost or value reports, cur: and amt: match the old commodity symbol and the old amount quantity, not the new ones (except in hledger 1.22.0 where it's reversed, see #1625).

  Querying with account aliases

When account names are rewritten with --alias or alias, note that acct: will match either the old or the new account name.

  Querying with cost or value

When amounts are converted to other commodities in cost or value reports, note that cur: matches the new commodity symbol, and not the old one, and amt: matches the new quantity, and not the old one. Note: this changed in hledger 1.22, previously it was the reverse, see the discussion at #1625.

Pivoting

Normally, hledger groups and sums amounts within each account. The --pivot FIELD option substitutes some other transaction field for account names, causing amounts to be grouped and summed by that field's value instead. FIELD can be any of the transaction fields status, code, description, payee, note, or a tag name. When pivoting on a tag and a posting has multiple values of that tag, only the first value is displayed. Values containing colon:separated:parts will be displayed hierarchically, like account names.

Some examples:

    2016/02/16 Yearly Dues Payment
        assets:bank account                 2 EUR
        income:dues                        -2 EUR  ; member: John Doe

Normal balance report showing account names:

    $ hledger balance
                   2 EUR  assets:bank account
                  -2 EUR  income:dues
    --------------------
                       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):

    $ 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

Generating data

Two features for generating transient data (visible only at report time) are built in to hledger's journal format:

•   Auto posting rules can generate extra postings on certain transactions. They are activated by the --auto flag.

•   Periodic transaction rules can generate repeating transactions, usually dated in the future, to help with forecasting or budgeting. They are activated by the --forecast or balance --budget options, described next.

Forecasting

The --forecast flag activates any periodic transaction rules in the journal. These will generate temporary additional transactions, usually recurring and in the future, which will appear in all reports. hledger print --forecast is a good way to see them.

This can be useful for estimating balances into the future, perhaps experimenting with different scenarios.

It could also be useful for scripted data entry: you could describe recurring transactions, and every so often copy the output of print --forecast into the journal.

The generated transactions will have an extra tag, like generated-transaction:~ PERIODICEXPR, indicating which periodic rule generated them. There is also a similar, hidden tag, named _generated-transaction:, which you can use to reliably match transactions generated "just now" (rather than printed in the past).

The forecast transactions are generated within a forecast period, which is independent of the report period. (Forecast period sets the bounds for generated transactions, report period controls which transactions are reported.) The forecast period begins on:

•   the start date provided within --forecast's argument, if any

•   otherwise, the later of

    •   the report start date, if specified (with -b/-p/date:)

    •   the day after the latest ordinary transaction in the journal, if any

•   otherwise today.

It ends on:

•   the end date provided within --forecast's argument, if any

•   otherwise, the report end date, if specified (with -e/-p/date:)

•   otherwise 180 days (6 months) from today.

Note, this means that ordinary transactions will suppress periodic transactions, by default; the periodic transactions will not start until after the last ordinary transaction. This is usually convenient, but you can get around it in two ways:

•   If you need to record some transactions in the future, make them periodic transactions (with a single occurrence, eg: ~ YYYY-MM-DD) rather than ordinary transactions. That way they won't suppress other periodic transactions.

•   Or give --forecast a period expression argument. A forecast period specified this way can overlap ordinary transactions, and need not be in the future. Some things to note:

    •   You must use = between flag and argument; a space won't work.

    •   The period expression can specify the forecast period's start date, end date, or both. See also Report start & end date.

    •   The period expression should not specify a report interval. (Each periodic transaction rule specifies its own interval.)

Some examples: --forecast=202001-202004, --forecast=jan-, --forecast=2021.

Budgeting

With the balance command's --budget report, each periodic transaction rule generates recurring budget goals in specified accounts, and goals and actual performance can be compared. See the balance command's doc below.

See also: Budgeting and Forecasting.

Cost reporting

This section is about recording the cost of things, in transactions where one commodity is exchanged for another. Eg an exchange of currency, or a stock purchase or sale. First, a quick glossary:

•   Conversion - an exchange of one currency or commodity for another. Eg a foreign currency exchange, or a purchase or sale of stock or cryptocurrency.

•   Conversion transaction - a transaction involving one or more conversions.

•   Conversion rate - the cost per unit of one commodity in the other, ie the exchange rate.

•   Cost - how much of one commodity was paid to acquire the other. And more generally, in hledger docs: the amount exchanged in the "secondary" commodity (usually your base currency), whether in a purchase or a sale, and whether expressed per unit or in total. Also, the "@/@@ PRICE" notation used to represent this.

  -B: Convert to cost

As discussed in JOURNAL > Costs, when recording a transaction you can also record the amount's cost in another commodity, by adding @ UNITPRICE or @@ TOTALPRICE.

Then you can see a report with amounts converted to cost, by adding the -B/--cost flag. (Mnemonic: "B" from "cost Basis", as in Ledger). Eg:

    2022-01-01
      assets:dollars  $-135          ; 135 dollars is exchanged for..
      assets:euros     €100 @ $1.35  ; one hundred euros purchased at $1.35 each

    $ hledger bal -N
                   $-135  assets:dollars
                    €100  assets:euros
    $ hledger bal -N -B
                   $-135  assets:dollars
                    $135  assets:euros    # <- the euros' cost

Notes:

-B is sensitive to the order of postings when a cost 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:

    2022-01-01
      assets:dollars  $-135              ; 135 dollars sold
      assets:euros     €100              ; for 100 euros

    $ hledger bal -N -B
                   €-100  assets:dollars  # <- the dollars' selling price
                    €100  assets:euros

The @/@@ cost notation is convenient, but has some drawbacks: it does not truly balance the transaction, so it disrupts the accounting equation and tends to causes a non-zero total in balance reports.

  Equity conversion postings

By contrast, conventional double entry bookkeeping (DEB) uses a different notation: an extra pair of equity postings to balance conversion transactions. In this style, the above entry might be written:

    2022-01-01 one hundred euros purchased at $1.35 each
        assets:dollars      $-135
        equity:conversion    $135
        equity:conversion   €-100
        assets:euros         €100

This style is more correct, but it's also more verbose and makes cost reporting more difficult for PTA tools.

Happily, current hledger can read either notation, or convert one to the other when needed, so you can use the one you prefer.

You can even use cost notation and equivalent conversion postings at the same time, for clarity. hledger will ignore the redundancy. But be sure the cost and conversion posting amounts match, or you'll see a not-so-clear transaction balancing error message.

  Inferring equity postings from cost

With --infer-equity, hledger detects transactions written with PTA cost notation and adds equity conversion postings to them:

    2022-01-01
      assets:dollars  -$135
      assets:euros     €100 @ $1.35

    $ hledger print --infer-equity
    2022-01-01
        assets:dollars                    $-135
        assets:euros               €100 @ $1.35
        equity:conversion:$-€:€           €-100  ; generated-posting:
        equity:conversion:$-€:$         $135.00  ; generated-posting:

The conversion account names can be changed with the conversion account type declaration.

--infer-equity is useful when when transactions have been recorded using cost notation, to help preserve the accounting equation and balance reports' zero total, or to produce more conventional journal entries for sharing with non-PTA-users.

  Inferring cost from equity postings

The reverse operation is possible using --infer-costs, which detects transactions written with equity conversion postings and adds cost notation to them:

    2022-01-01
        assets:dollars            $-135
        equity:conversion          $135
        equity:conversion         €-100
        assets:euros               €100

    $ hledger print --infer-costs
    2022-01-01
        assets:dollars       $-135 @@ €100
        equity:conversion             $135
        equity:conversion            €-100
        assets:euros                  €100

--infer-costs is useful when combined with -B/--cost, allowing cost reporting even when transactions have been recorded using equity postings:

    $ hledger print --infer-costs -B
    2009-01-01
        assets:dollars           €-100
        assets:euros              €100

Notes:

For --infer-costs to work, an exchange must consist of four postings:

1.  two non-equity postings

2.  two equity postings, next to one another

3.  the equity accounts must be declared, with account type V/Conversion (or if they are not declared, they must be named equity:conversion, equity:trade, equity:trading or subaccounts of these)

4.  the equity postings' amounts must exactly match the non-equity postings' amounts.

Multiple such exchanges can coexist within a single transaction.

When inferring cost, the order of postings matters: the cost is added to the first of the non-equity postings involved in the exchange, in the commodity of the last non-equity posting involved in the exchange. If you don't want to write your postings in the required order, you can use explicit cost notation instead.

--infer-equity and --infer-costs can be used together, if you have a mixture of both notations in your journal.

  When to infer cost/equity

Inferring equity postings or costs is still fairly new, so not enabled by default. We're not sure yet if that should change. Here are two suggestions to try, experience reports welcome:

1.  When you use -B, always use --infer-costs as well. Eg: hledger bal -B --infer-costs

2.  Always run hledger with both flags enabled. Eg: alias hl="hledger --infer-equity --infer-costs"

  How to record conversions

Essentially there are four ways to record a conversion transaction in hledger. Here are all of them, with pros and cons.

  Conversion with implicit cost

Let's assume 100 EUR is converted to 120 USD. You can just record the outflow (100 EUR) and inflow (120 USD) in the appropriate asset account:

    2021-01-01
        assets:cash    -100 EUR
        assets:cash     120 USD

hledger will assume this transaction is balanced, inferring that the conversion rate must be 1 EUR = 1.20 USD. You can see the inferred rate by using hledger print -x.

Pro:

•   Concise, easy

Con:

•   Less error checking - typos in amounts or commodity symbols may not be detected

•   Conversion rate is not clear

•   Disturbs the accounting equation, unless you add the --infer-equity flag

You can prevent accidental implicit conversions due to a mistyped commodity symbol, by using hledger check commodities.

You can prevent implicit conversions entirely, by using hledger check balancednoautoconversion, or -s/--strict.

  Conversion with explicit cost

You can add the conversion rate using @ notation:

    2021-01-01
        assets:cash        -100 EUR @ 1.20 USD
        assets:cash         120 USD

Now hledger will check that 100 * 1.20 = 120, and would report an error otherwise.

Pro:

•   Still concise

•   Makes the conversion rate clear

•   Provides more error checking

Con:

•   Disturbs the accounting equation, unless you add the --infer-equity flag

  Conversion with equity postings

In strict double entry bookkeeping, the above transaction is not balanced in EUR or in USD, since some EUR disappears, and some USD appears. This violates the accounting equation (A+L+E=0), and prevents reports like balancesheetequity from showing a zero total.

The proper way to make it balance is to add a balancing posting for each commodity, using an equity account:

    2021-01-01
        assets:cash        -100 EUR
        equity:conversion   100 EUR
        equity:conversion  -120 USD
        assets:cash         120 USD

Pro:

•   Preserves the accounting equation

•   Keeps track of conversions and related gains/losses in one place

•   Standard, works in any double entry accounting system

Con:

•   More verbose

•   Conversion rate is not obvious

•   Cost reporting requires adding the --infer-costs flag

  Conversion with equity postings and explicit cost

Here both equity postings and @ notation are used together.

    2021-01-01
        assets:cash        -100 EUR @ 1.20 USD
        equity:conversion   100 EUR
        equity:conversion  -120 USD
        assets:cash         120 USD

Pro:

•   Preserves the accounting equation

•   Keeps track of conversions and related gains/losses in one place

•   Makes the conversion rate clear

•   Provides more error checking

Con:

•   Most verbose

•   Not compatible with ledger

  Cost tips

•   Recording the cost/conversion rate explicitly is good because it makes that clear and helps detect errors.

•   Recording equity postings is good because it is correct bookkeeping and preserves the accounting equation.

•   Combining these is possible.

•   When you want to see the cost (or sale proceeds) of things, use -B (short form of --cost).

•   If you use conversion postings without cost notation, add --infer-costs also.

•   If you use cost notation without conversion postings, and you want to see a balanced balance sheet or print correct journal entries, use --infer-equity.

•   Conversion to cost is performed before valuation (described next).

Valuation

Instead of reporting amounts in their original commodity, hledger can convert them to cost/sale amount (using the conversion rate recorded in the transaction), and/or to market value (using some market price on a certain date). This is controlled by the --value=TYPE[,COMMODITY] option, which will be described below. We also provide the simpler -V and -X COMMODITY options, and often one of these is all you need:

  -V: Value

The -V/--market flag converts amounts to market value in their default valuation commodity, using the market prices in effect on the valuation date(s), if any. More on these in a minute.

  -X: Value in specified commodity

The -X/--exchange=COMM option is like -V, except you tell it which currency you want to convert to, and it tries to convert everything to that.

  Valuation date

Since market prices can change from day to day, market value reports have a valuation date (or more than one), which determines which market prices will be used.

For single period reports, if an explicit report end date is specified, that will be used as the valuation date; otherwise the valuation date is the journal's end date.

For multiperiod reports, each column/period is valued on the last day of the period, by default.

  Finding market price

To convert a commodity A to its market value in another commodity B, hledger looks for a suitable market price (exchange rate) as follows, in this order of preference :

1.  A declared market price or inferred market price: A's latest market price in B on or before the valuation date as declared by a P directive, or (with the --infer-market-prices flag) inferred from costs.

2.  A reverse market price: the inverse of a declared or inferred market price from B to A.

3.  A forward chain of market prices: a synthetic price formed by combining the shortest chain of "forward" (only 1 above) market prices, leading from A to B.

4.  Any chain of market prices: a chain of any market prices, including both forward and reverse prices (1 and 2 above), leading from A to B.

There is a limit to the length of these price chains; if hledger reaches that length without finding a complete chain or exhausting all possibilities, it will give up (with a "gave up" message visible in --debug=2 output). That limit is currently 1000.

Amounts for which no suitable market price can be found, are not converted.

  --infer-market-prices: market prices from transactions

Normally, market value in hledger is fully controlled by, and requires, P directives in your journal. Since adding and updating those can be a chore, and since transactions usually take place at close to market value, why not use the recorded costs as additional market prices (as Ledger does) ? Adding the --infer-market-prices flag to -V, -X or --value enables this.

So for example, hledger bs -V --infer-market-prices will get market prices both from P directives and from transactions. If both occur on the same day, the P directive takes precedence.

There is a downside: value reports can sometimes be affected in confusing/undesired ways by your journal entries. If this happens to you, read all of this Valuation section carefully, and try adding --debug or --debug=2 to troubleshoot.

--infer-market-prices can infer market prices from:

•   multicommodity transactions with explicit prices (@/@@)

•   multicommodity transactions with implicit prices (no @, two commodities, unbalanced). (With these, the order of postings matters. hledger print -x can be useful for troubleshooting.)

•   multicommodity transactions with equity postings, if cost is inferred with --infer-costs.

There is a limitation (bug) currently: when a valuation commodity is not specified, prices inferred with --infer-market-prices do not help select a default valuation commodity, as P prices would. So conversion might not happen because no valuation commodity was detected (--debug=2 will show this). To be safe, specify the valuation commmodity, eg:

•   -X EUR --infer-market-prices, not -V --infer-market-prices

•   --value=then,EUR --infer-market-prices, not --value=then --infer-market-prices

Signed costs and market prices can be confusing. For reference, here is the current behaviour, since hledger 1.25. (If you think it should work differently, see #1870.)

    2022-01-01 Positive Unit prices
        a        A 1
        b        B -1 @ A 1
    2022-01-01 Positive Total prices
        a        A 1
        b        B -1 @@ A 1
    2022-01-02 Negative unit prices
        a        A 1
        b        B 1 @ A -1
    2022-01-02 Negative total prices
        a        A 1
        b        B 1 @@ A -1
    2022-01-03 Double Negative unit prices
        a        A -1
        b        B -1 @ A -1
    2022-01-03 Double Negative total prices
        a        A -1
        b        B -1 @@ A -1

All of the transactions above are considered balanced (and on each day, the two transactions are considered equivalent). Here are the market prices inferred for B:

    $ hledger -f- --infer-market-prices prices
    P 2022-01-01 B A 1
    P 2022-01-01 B A 1.0
    P 2022-01-02 B A -1
    P 2022-01-02 B A -1.0
    P 2022-01-03 B A -1
    P 2022-01-03 B A -1.0

  Valuation commodity

When you specify a valuation commodity (-X COMM or --value TYPE,COMM):
hledger will convert all amounts to COMM, wherever it can find a suitable market price (including by reversing or chaining prices).

When you leave the valuation commodity unspecified (-V or --value TYPE):
For each commodity A, hledger picks a default valuation commodity as follows, in this order of preference:

1.  The price commodity from the latest P-declared market price for A on or before valuation date.

2.  The price commodity from the latest P-declared market price for A on any date. (Allows conversion to proceed when there are inferred prices before the valuation date.)

3.  If there are no P directives at all (any commodity or date) and the --infer-market-prices flag is used: the price commodity from the latest transaction-inferred price for A on or before valuation date.

This means:

•   If you have P directives, they determine which commodities -V will convert, and to what.

•   If you have no P directives, and use the --infer-market-prices flag, costs determine it.

Amounts for which no valuation commodity can be found are not converted.

  Simple valuation examples

Here are some quick examples of -V:

    ; 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

  --value: Flexible valuation

-V and -X are special cases of the more general --value option:

     --value=TYPE[,COMM]  TYPE is then, end, now or YYYY-MM-DD.
                          COMM is an optional commodity symbol.
                          Shows amounts converted to:
                          - default valuation commodity (or COMM) using market prices at posting dates
                          - default valuation commodity (or COMM) using market prices at period end(s)
                          - default valuation commodity (or COMM) using current market prices
                          - default valuation commodity (or COMM) using market prices at some date

The TYPE part selects cost or value and valuation date:

--value=then
    Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commodity, using market prices on each posting's date.

--value=end
    Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commodity, using market prices on the last day of the report period (or if unspecified, the journal's end date); or in multiperiod reports, market prices on the last day of each subperiod.

--value=now
    Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commodity using current market prices (as of when report is generated).

--value=YYYY-MM-DD
    Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commodity using market prices on this date.

To select a different valuation commodity, add the optional ,COMM part: a comma, then the target commodity's symbol. Eg: --value=now,EUR. hledger will do its best to convert amounts to this commodity, deducing market prices as described above.

  More valuation examples

Here are some examples showing the effect of --value, as seen with print:

    P 2000-01-01 A  1 B
    P 2000-02-01 A  2 B
    P 2000-03-01 A  3 B
    P 2000-04-01 A  4 B
    2000-01-01
      (a)      1 A @ 5 B
    2000-02-01
      (a)      1 A @ 6 B
    2000-03-01
      (a)      1 A @ 7 B

Show the cost of each posting:

    $ hledger -f- print --cost
    2000-01-01
        (a)             5 B
    2000-02-01
        (a)             6 B
    2000-03-01
        (a)             7 B

Show the value as of the last day of the report period (2000-02-29):

    $ hledger -f- print --value=end date:2000/01-2000/03
    2000-01-01
        (a)             2 B
    2000-02-01
        (a)             2 B

With no report period specified, that shows the value as of the last day of the journal (2000-03-01):

    $ hledger -f- print --value=end
    2000-01-01
        (a)             3 B
    2000-02-01
        (a)             3 B
    2000-03-01
        (a)             3 B

Show the current value (the 2000-04-01 price is still in effect today):

    $ hledger -f- print --value=now
    2000-01-01
        (a)             4 B
    2000-02-01
        (a)             4 B
    2000-03-01
        (a)             4 B

Show the value on 2000/01/15:

    $ hledger -f- print --value=2000-01-15
    2000-01-01
        (a)             1 B
    2000-02-01
        (a)             1 B
    2000-03-01
        (a)             1 B

You may need to explicitly set a commodity's display style, when reverse prices are used. Eg this output might be surprising:

    P 2000-01-01 A 2B
    2000-01-01
      a  1B
      b

    $ hledger print -x -X A
    2000-01-01
        a               0
        b               0

Explanation: because there's no amount or commodity directive specifying a display style for A, 0.5A gets the default style, which shows no decimal digits. Because the displayed amount looks like zero, the commodity symbol and minus sign are not displayed either. Adding a commodity directive sets a more useful display style for A:

    P 2000-01-01 A 2B
    commodity 0.00A
    2000-01-01
      a  1B
      b

    $ hledger print -X A
    2000-01-01
        a           0.50A
        b          -0.50A

  Interaction of valuation and queries

When matching postings based on queries in the presence of valuation, the following happens.

1.  The query is separated into two parts:

    1.  the currency (cur:) or amount (amt:).

    2.  all other parts.

2.  The postings are matched to the currency and amount queries based on pre-valued amounts.

3.  Valuation is applied to the postings.

4.  The postings are matched to the other parts of the query based on post-valued amounts.

See: 1625

  Effect of valuation on reports

Here is a reference for how valuation is supposed to affect each part of hledger's reports (and a glossary). (It's wide, you'll have to scroll sideways.) It may be useful when troubleshooting. If you find problems, please report them, ideally with a reproducible example. Related: #329, #1083.

Report type | -B, --cost | -V, -X | --value=then | --value=end | --value=DATE, --value=now
print |  |  |  |  |
posting amounts | cost | value at report end or today | value at posting date | value at report or journal end | value at DATE/today
balance assertions/assignments | unchanged | unchanged | unchanged | unchanged | unchanged
register |  |  |  |  |
starting balance (-H) | cost | value at report or journal end | valued at day each historical posting was made | value at report or journal end | value at DATE/today
starting balance (-H) with report interval | cost | value at day before report or journal start | valued at day each historical posting was made | value at day before report or journal start | value at DATE/today
posting amounts | cost | value at report or journal end | value at posting date | value at report or journal end | value at DATE/today
summary posting amounts with report interval | summarised cost | value at period ends | sum of postings in interval, valued at interval start | value at period ends | value at DATE/today
running total/average | sum/average of displayed values | sum/average of displayed values | sum/average of displayed values | sum/average of displayed values | sum/average of displayed values
balance (bs, bse, cf, is) |  |  |  |  |
balance changes | sums of costs | value at report end or today of sums of postings | value at posting date | value at report or journal end of sums of postings | value at DATE/today of sums of postings
budget amounts (--budget) | like balance changes | like balance changes | like balance changes | like balances | like balance changes
grand total | sum of displayed values | sum of displayed values | sum of displayed valued | sum of displayed values | sum of displayed values
balance (bs, bse, cf, is) with report interval |  |  |  |  |
starting balances (-H) | sums of costs of postings before report start | value at report start of sums of all postings before report start | sums of values of postings before report start at respective posting dates | value at report start of sums of all postings before report start | sums of postings before report start
balance changes (bal, is, bs --change, cf --change) | sums of costs of postings in period | same as --value=end | sums of values of postings in period at respective posting dates | balance change in each period, valued at period ends | value at DATE/today of sums of postings
end balances (bal -H, is --H, bs, cf) | sums of costs of postings from before report start to period end | same as --value=end | sums of values of postings from before period start to period end at respective posting dates | period end balances, valued at period ends | value at DATE/today of sums of postings
budget amounts (--budget) | like balance changes/end balances | like balance changes/end balances | like balance changes/end balances | like balances | like balance changes/end balances
row totals, row averages (-T, -A) | sums, averages of displayed values | sums, averages of displayed values | sums, averages of displayed values | sums, averages of displayed values | sums, averages of displayed values
column totals | sums of displayed values | sums of displayed values | sums of displayed values | sums of displayed values | sums of displayed values
grand total, grand average | sum, average of column totals | sum, average of column totals | sum, average of column totals | sum, average of column totals | sum, average of column totals

--cumulative is omitted to save space, it works like -H but with a zero starting balance.

Glossary:

cost
    calculated using price(s) recorded in the transaction(s).

value
    market value using available market price declarations, or the unchanged amount if no conversion rate can be found.

report start
    the first day of the report period specified with -b or -p or date:, otherwise today.

report or journal start
    the first day of the report period specified with -b or -p or date:, otherwise the earliest transaction date in the journal, otherwise today.

report end
    the last day of the report period specified with -e or -p or date:, otherwise today.

report or journal end
    the last day of the report period specified with -e or -p or date:, otherwise the latest transaction date in the journal, otherwise today.

report interval
    a flag (-D/-W/-M/-Q/-Y) or period expression that activates the report's multi-period mode (whether showing one or many subperiods).

PART 4: COMMANDS

  Commands overview

Here are the built-in commands:

  DATA ENTRY

These data entry commands are the only ones which can modify your journal file.

•   add - add transactions using terminal prompts

•   import - add new transactions from other files, eg CSV files

  DATA CREATION

•   close - generate balance-zeroing/restoring transactions

•   rewrite - generate auto postings, like print --auto

  DATA MANAGEMENT

•   check - check for various kinds of error in the data

•   diff - compare account transactions in two journal files

  REPORTS, FINANCIAL

•   aregister (areg) - show transactions in a particular account

•   balancesheet (bs) - show assets, liabilities and net worth

•   balancesheetequity (bse) - show assets, liabilities and equity

•   cashflow (cf) - show changes in liquid assets

•   incomestatement (is) - show revenues and expenses

  REPORTS, VERSATILE

•   balance (bal) - show balance changes, end balances, budgets, gains..

•   print - show transactions or export journal data

•   register (reg) - show postings in one or more accounts & running total

•   roi - show return on investments

  REPORTS, BASIC

•   accounts - show account names

•   activity - show bar charts of posting counts per period

•   codes - show transaction codes

•   commodities - show commodity/currency symbols

•   descriptions - show transaction descriptions

•   files - show input file paths

•   notes - show note parts of transaction descriptions

•   payees - show payee parts of transaction descriptions

•   prices - show market prices

•   stats - show journal statistics

•   tags - show tag names

•   test - run self tests

  HELP

•   help - show the hledger manual with info/man/pager

  ADD-ONS

And here are some typical add-on commands. Some of these are installed by the hledger-install script. If installed, they will appear in hledger's commands list:

•   ui - run hledger's terminal UI

•   web - run hledger's web UI

•   iadd - add transactions using a TUI (currently hard to build)

•   interest - generate interest transactions

•   stockquotes - download market prices from AlphaVantage

•   Scripts and add-ons - check-fancyassertions, edit, fifo, git, move, pijul, plot, and more..

Next, each command is described in detail, in alphabetical order.

  accounts

Show account names.

This command lists account names. By default it shows all known accounts, either used in transactions or declared with account directives.

With query arguments, only matched account names and account names referenced by matched postings are shown.

Or it can show just the used accounts (--used/-u), the declared accounts (--declared/-d), the accounts declared but not used (--unused), the accounts used but not declared (--undeclared), or the first account matched by an account name pattern, if any (--find).

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.

With --types, it also shows each account's type, if it's known. (See Declaring accounts > Account types.)

With --positions, it also shows the file and line number of each account's declaration, if any, and the account's overall declaration order; these may be useful when troubleshooting account display order.

With --directives, it adds the account keyword, showing valid account directives which can be pasted into a journal file. This is useful together with --undeclared when updating your account declarations to satisfy hledger check accounts.

The --find flag can be used to look up a single account name, in the same way that the aregister command does. It returns the alphanumerically-first matched account name, or if none can be found, it fails with a non-zero exit code.

Examples:

    $ hledger accounts
    assets:bank:checking
    assets:bank:saving
    assets:cash
    expenses:food
    expenses:supplies
    income:gifts
    income:salary
    liabilities:debts

    $ hledger accounts --undeclared --directives >> $LEDGER_FILE
    $ hledger check accounts

  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

Prompt for transactions and add them to the journal. Any arguments will be used as default inputs for the first N prompts.

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 main journal file (which should be in journal format). Existing transactions are not changed. This is one of the few hledger commands that writes to the journal file (see also import).

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, payees/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 go one step backward.

•   Input prompts are displayed in a different colour when the terminal supports it.

Example (see https://hledger.org/add.html for a detailed tutorial):

    $ 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 go one step backward.
    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> $

On Microsoft Windows, the add command makes sure that no part of the file path ends with a period, as that would cause problems (#1056).

  aregister

(areg)

Show the transactions and running historical balance of a single account, with each transaction displayed as one line.

aregister shows the overall transactions affecting a particular account (and any subaccounts). Each report line represents one transaction in this account. Transactions before the report start date are always included in the running balance (--historical mode is always on).

This is a more "real world", bank-like view than the register command (which shows individual postings, possibly from multiple accounts, not necessarily in historical mode). As a quick rule of thumb: - use aregister for reviewing and reconciling real-world asset/liability accounts - use register for reviewing detailed revenues/expenses.

aregister requires one argument: the account to report on. You can write either the full account name, or a case-insensitive regular expression which will select the alphabetically first matched account.

When there are multiple matches, the alphabetically-first choice can be surprising; eg if you have assets:per:checking 1 and assets:biz:checking 2 accounts, hledger areg checking would select assets:biz:checking 2. It's just a convenience to save typing, so if in doubt, write the full account name, or a distinctive substring that matches uniquely.

Transactions involving subaccounts of this account will also be shown. aregister ignores depth limits, so its final total will always match a balance report with similar arguments.

Any additional arguments form a query which will filter the transactions shown. Note some queries will disturb the running balance, causing it to be different from the account's real-world running balance.

An example: this shows the transactions and historical running balance during july, in the first account whose name contains "checking":

    $ hledger areg checking date:jul

Each aregister line item shows:

•   the transaction's date (or the relevant posting's date if different, see below)

•   the names of all the other account(s) involved in this transaction (probably abbreviated)

•   the total change to this account's balance from this transaction

•   the account's historical running balance after this transaction.

Transactions making a net change of zero are not shown by default; add the -E/--empty flag to show them.

For performance reasons, column widths are chosen based on the first 1000 lines; this means unusually wide values in later lines can cause visual discontinuities as column widths are adjusted. If you want to ensure perfect alignment, at the cost of more time and memory, use the --align-all flag.

This command also supports the output destination and output format options. The output formats supported are txt, csv, and json.

  aregister and custom posting dates

Transactions whose date is outside the report period can still be shown, if they have a posting to this account dated inside the report period. (And in this case it's the posting date that is shown.) This ensures that aregister can show an accurate historical running balance, matching the one shown by register -H with the same arguments.

To filter strictly by transaction date instead, add the --txn-dates flag. If you use this flag and some of your postings have custom dates, it's probably best to assume the running balance is wrong.

  balance

(bal)

Show accounts and their balances.

balance is one of hledger's oldest and most versatile commands, for listing account balances, balance changes, values, value changes and more, during one time period or many. Generally it shows a table, with rows representing accounts, and columns representing periods.

Note there are some higher-level variants of the balance command with convenient defaults, which can be simpler to use: balancesheet, balancesheetequity, cashflow and incomestatement. When you need more control, then use balance.

  balance features

Here's a quick overview of the balance command's features, followed by more detailed descriptions and examples. Many of these work with the higher-level commands as well.

balance can show..

•   accounts as a list (-l) or a tree (-t)

•   optionally depth-limited (-[1-9])

•   sorted by declaration order and name, or by amount

..and their..

•   balance changes (the default)

•   or actual and planned balance changes (--budget)

•   or value of balance changes (-V)

•   or change of balance values (--valuechange)

•   or unrealised capital gain/loss (--gain)

..in..

•   one time period (the whole journal period by default)

•   or multiple periods (-D, -W, -M, -Q, -Y, -p INTERVAL)

..either..

•   per period (the default)

•   or accumulated since report start date (--cumulative)

•   or accumulated since account creation (--historical/-H)

..possibly converted to..

•   cost (--value=cost[,COMM]/--cost/-B)

•   or market value, as of transaction dates (--value=then[,COMM])

•   or at period ends (--value=end[,COMM])

•   or now (--value=now)

•   or at some other date (--value=YYYY-MM-DD)

..with..

•   totals (-T), averages (-A), percentages (-%), inverted sign (--invert)

•   rows and columns swapped (--transpose)

•   another field used as account name (--pivot)

•   custom-formatted line items (single-period reports only) (--format)

•   commodities displayed on the same line or multiple lines (--layout)

This command supports the output destination and output format options, with output formats txt, csv, json, and (multi-period reports only:) html. In txt output in a colour-supporting terminal, negative amounts are shown in red.

The --related/-r flag shows the balance of the other postings in the transactions of the postings which would normally be shown.

  Simple balance report

With no arguments, balance shows a list of all accounts and their change of balance - ie, the sum of posting amounts, both inflows and outflows - during the entire period of the journal. ("Simple" here means just one column of numbers, covering a single period. You can also have multi-period reports, described later.)

For real-world accounts, these numbers will normally be their end balance at the end of the journal period; more on this below.

Accounts are sorted by declaration order if any, and then alphabetically by account name. For instance (using examples/sample.journal):

    $ hledger -f examples/sample.journal bal
                      $1  assets:bank:saving
                     $-2  assets:cash
                      $1  expenses:food
                      $1  expenses:supplies
                     $-1  income:gifts
                     $-1  income:salary
                      $1  liabilities:debts
    --------------------
                       0

Accounts with a zero balance (and no non-zero subaccounts, in tree mode - see below) are hidden by default. Use -E/--empty to show them (revealing assets:bank:checking here):

    $ hledger -f examples/sample.journal bal  -E
                       0  assets:bank:checking
                      $1  assets:bank:saving
                     $-2  assets:cash
                      $1  expenses:food
                      $1  expenses:supplies
                     $-1  income:gifts
                     $-1  income:salary
                      $1  liabilities:debts
    --------------------
                       0

The total of the amounts displayed is shown as the last line, unless -N/--no-total is used.

  Balance report line format

For single-period balance reports displayed in the terminal (only), you can use --format FMT to customise the format and content of each line. Eg:

    $ hledger -f examples/sample.journal 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 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 name

    •   total - 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

  Filtered balance report

You can show fewer accounts, a different time period, totals from cleared transactions only, etc. by using query arguments or options to limit the postings being matched. Eg:

    $ hledger -f examples/sample.journal bal --cleared assets date:200806
                     $-2  assets:cash
    --------------------
                     $-2

  List or tree mode

By default, or with -l/--flat, accounts are shown as a flat list with their full names visible, as in the examples above.

With -t/--tree, the account hierarchy is shown, with subaccounts' "leaf" names indented below their parent:

    $ hledger -f examples/sample.journal balance
                     $-1  assets
                      $1    bank:saving
                     $-2    cash
                      $2  expenses
                      $1    food
                      $1    supplies
                     $-2  income
                     $-1    gifts
                     $-1    salary
                      $1  liabilities:debts
    --------------------
                       0

Notes:

•   "Boring" accounts are combined with their subaccount for more compact output, unless --no-elide is used. Boring accounts have no balance of their own and just one subaccount (eg assets:bank and liabilities above).

•   All balances shown are "inclusive", ie including the balances from all subaccounts. Note this means some repetition in the output, which requires explanation when sharing reports with non-plaintextaccounting-users. A tree mode report's final total is the sum of the top-level balances shown, not of all the balances shown.

•   Each group of sibling accounts (ie, under a common parent) is sorted separately.

  Depth limiting

With a depth:NUM query, or --depth NUM option, or just -NUM (eg: -3) balance reports will show accounts only to the specified depth, hiding the deeper subaccounts. This can be useful for getting an overview without too much detail.

Account balances at the depth limit always include the balances from any deeper subaccounts (even in list mode). Eg, limiting to depth 1:

    $ hledger -f examples/sample.journal balance -1
                     $-1  assets
                      $2  expenses
                     $-2  income
                      $1  liabilities
    --------------------
                       0

  Dropping top-level accounts

You can also hide one or more top-level account name parts, using --drop NUM. This can be useful for hiding repetitive top-level account names:

    $ hledger -f examples/sample.journal bal expenses --drop 1
                      $1  food
                      $1  supplies
    --------------------
                      $2

  Showing declared accounts

With --declared, accounts which have been declared with an account directive will be included in the balance report, even if they have no transactions. (Since they will have a zero balance, you will also need -E/--empty to see them.)

More precisely, leaf declared accounts (with no subaccounts) will be included, since those are usually the more useful in reports.

The idea of this is to be able to see a useful "complete" balance report, even when you don't have transactions in all of your declared accounts yet.

  Sorting by amount

With -S/--sort-amount, accounts with the largest (most positive) balances are shown first. Eg: hledger bal expenses -MAS shows your biggest averaged monthly expenses first. When more than one commodity is present, they will be sorted by the alphabetically earliest commodity first, and then by subsequent commodities (if an amount is missing a commodity, it is treated as 0).

Revenues and liability balances are typically negative, however, so -S shows these in reverse order. To work around this, you can add --invert to flip the signs. (Or, use one of the higher-level reports, which flip the sign automatically. Eg: hledger incomestatement -MAS).

  Percentages

With -%/--percent, balance reports show each account's value expressed as a percentage of the (column) total.

Note it is not useful to calculate percentages if the amounts in a column have mixed signs. In this case, make a separate report for each sign, eg:

    $ hledger bal -% amt:`>0`
    $ hledger bal -% amt:`<0`

Similarly, if the amounts in a column have mixed commodities, convert them to one commodity with -B, -V, -X or --value, or make a separate report for each commodity:

    $ hledger bal -% cur:\\$
    $ hledger bal -% cur:€

  Multi-period balance report

With a report interval (set by the -D/--daily, -W/--weekly, -M/--monthly, -Q/--quarterly, -Y/--yearly, or -p/--period flag), balance shows a tabular report, with columns representing successive time periods (and a title):

    $ hledger -f examples/sample.journal bal --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

Notes:

•   The report's start/end dates will be expanded, if necessary, to fully encompass the displayed subperiods (so that the first and last subperiods have the same duration as the others).

•   Leading and trailing periods (columns) containing all zeroes are not shown, unless -E/--empty is used.

•   Accounts (rows) containing all zeroes are not shown, unless -E/--empty is used.

•   Amounts with many commodities are shown in abbreviated form, unless --no-elide is used. (experimental)

•   Average and/or total columns can be added with the -A/--average and -T/--row-total flags.

•   The --transpose flag can be used to exchange rows and columns.

•   The --pivot FIELD option causes a different transaction field to be used as "account name". See PIVOTING.

Multi-period reports with many periods can be too wide for easy viewing in the terminal. Here are some ways to handle that:

•   Hide the totals row with -N/--no-total

•   Convert to a single currency with -V

•   Maximize the terminal window

•   Reduce the terminal's font size

•   View with a pager like less, eg: hledger bal -D --color=yes | less -RS

•   Output as CSV and use a CSV viewer like visidata (hledger bal -D -O csv | vd -f csv), Emacs' csv-mode (M-x csv-mode, C-c C-a), or a spreadsheet (hledger bal -D -o a.csv && open a.csv)

•   Output as HTML and view with a browser: hledger bal -D -o a.html && open a.html

  Balance change, end balance

It's important to be clear on the meaning of the numbers shown in balance reports. Here is some terminology we use:

A balance change is the net amount added to, or removed from, an account during some period.

An end balance is the amount accumulated in an account as of some date (and some time, but hledger doesn't store that; assume end of day in your timezone). It is the sum of previous balance changes.

We call it a historical end balance if it includes all balance changes since the account was created. For a real world account, this means it will match the "historical record", eg the balances reported in your bank statements or bank web UI. (If they are correct!)

In general, balance changes are what you want to see when reviewing revenues and expenses, and historical end balances are what you want to see when reviewing or reconciling asset, liability and equity accounts.

balance shows balance changes by default. To see accurate historical end balances:

1.  Initialise account starting balances with an "opening balances" transaction (a transfer from equity to the account), unless the journal covers the account's full lifetime.

2.  Include all of of the account's prior postings in the report, by not specifying a report start date, or by using the -H/--historical flag. (-H causes report start date to be ignored when summing postings.)

  Balance report types

The balance command is quite flexible; here is the full detail on how to control what it reports. If the following seems complicated, don't worry - this is for advanced reporting, and it does typically take some time and experimentation to get clear on all these report modes.

There are three important option groups:

hledger balance [CALCULATIONTYPE] [ACCUMULATIONTYPE] [VALUATIONTYPE] ...

  Calculation type

The basic calculation to perform for each table cell. It is one of:

•   --sum : sum the posting amounts (default)

•   --budget : sum the amounts, but also show the budget goal amount (for each account/period)

•   --valuechange : show the change in period-end historical balance values (caused by deposits, withdrawals, and/or market price fluctuations)

•   --gain : show the unrealised capital gain/loss, (the current valued balance minus each amount's original cost)

  Accumulation type

How amounts should accumulate across report periods. Another way to say it: which time period's postings should contribute to each cell's calculation. It is one of:

•   --change : calculate with postings from column start to column end, ie "just this column". Typically used to see revenues/expenses. (default for balance, incomestatement)

•   --cumulative : calculate with postings from report start to column end, ie "previous columns plus this column". Typically used to show changes accumulated since the report's start date. Not often used.

•   --historical/-H : calculate with postings from journal start to column end, ie "all postings from before report start date until this column's end". Typically used to see historical end balances of assets/liabilities/equity. (default for balancesheet, balancesheetequity, cashflow)

  Valuation type

Which kind of value or cost conversion should be applied, if any, before displaying the report. It is one of:

•   no valuation type : don't convert to cost or value (default)

•   --value=cost[,COMM] : convert amounts to cost (then optionally to some other commodity)

•   --value=then[,COMM] : convert amounts to market value on transaction dates

•   --value=end[,COMM] : convert amounts to market value on period end date(s)
(default with --valuechange, --gain)

•   --value=now[,COMM] : convert amounts to market value on today's date

•   --value=YYYY-MM-DD[,COMM] : convert amounts to market value on another date

or one of the equivalent simpler flags:

•   -B/--cost : like --value=cost (though, note --cost and --value are independent options which can both be used at once)

•   -V/--market : like --value=end

•   -X COMM/--exchange COMM : like --value=end,COMM

See Cost reporting and Valuation for more about these.

  Combining balance report types

Most combinations of these options should produce reasonable reports, but if you find any that seem wrong or misleading, let us know. The following restrictions are applied:

•   --valuechange implies --value=end

•   --valuechange makes --change the default when used with the balancesheet/balancesheetequity commands

•   --cumulative or --historical disables --row-total/-T

For reference, here is what the combinations of accumulation and valuation show:

Valuation:> Accumulation:v | no valuation | --value= then | --value= end | --value= YYYY-MM-DD /now
--change | change in period | sum of posting-date market values in period | period-end value of change in period | DATE-value of change in period
--cumulative | change from report start to period end | sum of posting-date market values from report start to period end | period-end value of change from report start to period end | DATE-value of change from report start to period end
--historical /-H | change from journal start to period end (historical end balance) | sum of posting-date market values from journal start to period end | period-end value of change from journal start to period end | DATE-value of change from journal start to period end

  Budget report

The --budget report type activates extra columns showing any budget goals for each account and period. The budget goals are defined by periodic transactions. This is useful for comparing planned and actual income, expenses, time usage, etc.

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]

This is different from a normal balance report in several ways:

•   Only accounts with budget goals during the report period are shown, by default.

•   In each column, in square brackets after the actual amount, budget goal amounts are shown, and the actual/goal percentage. (Note: budget goals should be in the same commodity as the actual amount.)

•   All parent accounts are always shown, even in list mode. Eg assets, assets:bank, and expenses above.

•   Amounts always include all subaccounts, budgeted or unbudgeted, even in list mode.

This means that the numbers displayed will not always add up! Eg above, the expenses actual amount includes the gifts and supplies transactions, but the expenses:gifts and expenses:supplies accounts are not shown, as they have no budget amounts declared.

This can be confusing. When you need to make things clearer, use the -E/--empty flag, which will reveal all accounts including unbudgeted ones, giving the full picture. Eg:

    $ 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]

It's common to limit budgets/budget reports to just expenses

    hledger bal -M --budget expenses

or just revenues and expenses (eg, using account types):

    hledger bal -M --budget type:rx

It's also common to limit or convert them to a single currency (cur:COMM or -X COMM [--infer-market-prices]). If showing multiple currencies, --layout bare or --layout tall can help.

For more examples and notes, see Budgeting.

  Budget report start date

This might be a bug, but for now: when making budget reports, it's a good idea to explicitly set the report's start date to the first day of a reporting period, because a periodic rule like ~ monthly generates its transactions on the 1st of each month, and if your journal has no regular transactions on the 1st, the default report start date could exclude that budget goal, which can be a little surprising. Eg here the default report period is just the day of 2020-01-15:

    ~ monthly in 2020
      (expenses:food)  $500
    2020-01-15
      expenses:food    $400
      assets:checking

    $ hledger bal expenses --budget
    Budget performance in 2020-01-15:
                  || 2020-01-15
    ==============++============
     <unbudgeted> ||       $400
    --------------++------------
                  ||       $400

To avoid this, specify the budget report's period, or at least the start date, with -b/-e/-p/date:, to ensure it includes the budget goal transactions (periodic transactions) that you want. Eg, adding -b 2020/1/1 to the above:

    $ hledger bal expenses --budget -b 2020/1/1
    Budget performance in 2020-01-01..2020-01-15:
                   || 2020-01-01..2020-01-15
    ===============++========================
     expenses:food ||     $400 [80% of $500]
    ---------------++------------------------
                   ||     $400 [80% of $500]

  Budgets and subaccounts

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 implicitly 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]

  Selecting budget goals

The budget report evaluates periodic transaction rules to generate special "goal transactions", which generate the goal amounts for each account in each report subperiod. When troubleshooting, you can use print --forecast to show these as forecasted transactions:

    $ hledger print --forecast=BUDGETREPORTPERIOD tag:generated

By default, the budget report uses all available periodic transaction rules to generate goals. This includes rules with a different report interval from your report. Eg if you have daily, weekly and monthly periodic rules, all of these will contribute to the goals in a monthly budget report.

You can select a subset of periodic rules by providing an argument to the --budget flag. --budget=DESCPAT will match all periodic rules whose description contains DESCPAT, a case-insensitive substring (not a regular expression or query). This means you can give your periodic rules descriptions (remember that two spaces are needed), and then select from multiple budgets defined in your journal.

  Budget vs forecast

hledger --forecast ... and hledger balance --budget ... are separate features, though both of them use the periodic transaction rules defined in the journal, and both of them generate temporary transactions for reporting purposes ("forecast transactions" and "budget goal transactions", respectively). You can use both features at the same time if you want. Here are some differences between them, as of hledger 1.29:

CLI:

•   --forecast is a general hledger option, usable with any command

•   --budget is a balance command option, usable only with that command.

Visibility of generated transactions:

•   forecast transactions are visible in any report, like ordinary transactions

•   budget goal transactions are invisible except for the goal amounts they produce in --budget reports.

Periodic transaction rules:

•   --forecast uses all available periodic transaction rules

•   --budget uses all periodic rules (--budget) or a selected subset (--budget=DESCPAT)

Period of generated transactions:

•   --forecast generates forecast transactions

    •   from after the last regular transaction to the end of the report period (--forecast)

    •   or, during a specified period (--forecast=PERIODEXPR)

    •   possibly further restricted by a period specified in the periodic transaction rule

    •   and always restricted within the bounds of the report period

•   --budget generates budget goal transactions

    •   throughout the report period

    •   possibly restricted by a period specified in the periodic transaction rule.

  Data layout

The --layout option affects how balance reports show multi-commodity amounts and commodity symbols, which can improve readability. It can also normalise the data for easy consumption by other programs. It has four possible values:

•   --layout=wide[,WIDTH]: commodities are shown on a single line, optionally elided to WIDTH

•   --layout=tall: each commodity is shown on a separate line

•   --layout=bare: commodity symbols are in their own column, amounts are bare numbers

•   --layout=tidy: data is normalised to easily-consumed "tidy" form, with one row per data value

Here are the --layout modes supported by each output format; note only CSV output supports all of them:

- | txt | csv | html | json | sql
wide | Y | Y | Y |  |
tall | Y | Y | Y |  |
bare | Y | Y | Y |  |
tidy |  | Y |  |  |

Examples:

•   Wide layout. With many commodities, reports can be very wide:

        $ hledger -f examples/bcexample.hledger bal assets:us:etrade -3 -T -Y --layout=wide
        Balance changes in 2012-01-01..2014-12-31:
                          ||                                          2012                                                     2013                                             2014                                                      Total
        ==================++====================================================================================================================================================================================================================
         Assets:US:ETrade || 10.00 ITOT, 337.18 USD, 12.00 VEA, 106.00 VHT  70.00 GLD, 18.00 ITOT, -98.12 USD, 10.00 VEA, 18.00 VHT  -11.00 ITOT, 4881.44 USD, 14.00 VEA, 170.00 VHT  70.00 GLD, 17.00 ITOT, 5120.50 USD, 36.00 VEA, 294.00 VHT
        ------------------++--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                          || 10.00 ITOT, 337.18 USD, 12.00 VEA, 106.00 VHT  70.00 GLD, 18.00 ITOT, -98.12 USD, 10.00 VEA, 18.00 VHT  -11.00 ITOT, 4881.44 USD, 14.00 VEA, 170.00 VHT  70.00 GLD, 17.00 ITOT, 5120.50 USD, 36.00 VEA, 294.00 VHT

•   Limited wide layout. A width limit reduces the width, but some commodities will be hidden:

        $ hledger -f examples/bcexample.hledger bal assets:us:etrade -3 -T -Y --layout=wide,32
        Balance changes in 2012-01-01..2014-12-31:
                          ||                             2012                             2013                   2014                            Total
        ==================++===========================================================================================================================
         Assets:US:ETrade || 10.00 ITOT, 337.18 USD, 2 more..  70.00 GLD, 18.00 ITOT, 3 more..  -11.00 ITOT, 3 more..  70.00 GLD, 17.00 ITOT, 3 more..
        ------------------++---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                          || 10.00 ITOT, 337.18 USD, 2 more..  70.00 GLD, 18.00 ITOT, 3 more..  -11.00 ITOT, 3 more..  70.00 GLD, 17.00 ITOT, 3 more..

•   Tall layout. Each commodity gets a new line (may be different in each column), and account names are repeated:

        $ hledger -f examples/bcexample.hledger bal assets:us:etrade -3 -T -Y --layout=tall
        Balance changes in 2012-01-01..2014-12-31:
                          ||       2012        2013         2014        Total
        ==================++==================================================
         Assets:US:ETrade || 10.00 ITOT   70.00 GLD  -11.00 ITOT    70.00 GLD
         Assets:US:ETrade || 337.18 USD  18.00 ITOT  4881.44 USD   17.00 ITOT
         Assets:US:ETrade ||  12.00 VEA  -98.12 USD    14.00 VEA  5120.50 USD
         Assets:US:ETrade || 106.00 VHT   10.00 VEA   170.00 VHT    36.00 VEA
         Assets:US:ETrade ||              18.00 VHT                294.00 VHT
        ------------------++--------------------------------------------------
                          || 10.00 ITOT   70.00 GLD  -11.00 ITOT    70.00 GLD
                          || 337.18 USD  18.00 ITOT  4881.44 USD   17.00 ITOT
                          ||  12.00 VEA  -98.12 USD    14.00 VEA  5120.50 USD
                          || 106.00 VHT   10.00 VEA   170.00 VHT    36.00 VEA
                          ||              18.00 VHT                294.00 VHT

•   Bare layout. Commodity symbols are kept in one column, each commodity gets its own report row, account names are repeated:

        $ hledger -f examples/bcexample.hledger bal assets:us:etrade -3 -T -Y --layout=bare
        Balance changes in 2012-01-01..2014-12-31:
                          || Commodity    2012    2013     2014    Total
        ==================++=============================================
         Assets:US:ETrade || GLD             0   70.00        0    70.00
         Assets:US:ETrade || ITOT        10.00   18.00   -11.00    17.00
         Assets:US:ETrade || USD        337.18  -98.12  4881.44  5120.50
         Assets:US:ETrade || VEA         12.00   10.00    14.00    36.00
         Assets:US:ETrade || VHT        106.00   18.00   170.00   294.00
        ------------------++---------------------------------------------
                          || GLD             0   70.00        0    70.00
                          || ITOT        10.00   18.00   -11.00    17.00
                          || USD        337.18  -98.12  4881.44  5120.50
                          || VEA         12.00   10.00    14.00    36.00
                          || VHT        106.00   18.00   170.00   294.00

•   Bare layout also affects CSV output, which is useful for producing data that is easier to consume, eg for making charts:

        $ hledger -f examples/bcexample.hledger bal assets:us:etrade -3 -O csv --layout=bare
        "account","commodity","balance"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","GLD","70.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","ITOT","17.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","USD","5120.50"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","VEA","36.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","VHT","294.00"
        "total","GLD","70.00"
        "total","ITOT","17.00"
        "total","USD","5120.50"
        "total","VEA","36.00"
        "total","VHT","294.00"

•   Tidy layout produces normalised "tidy data", where every variable has its own column and each row represents a single data point. See https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tidyr/vignettes/tidy-data.html for more. This is the easiest kind of data for other software to consume. Here's how it looks:

        $ hledger -f examples/bcexample.hledger bal assets:us:etrade -3 -Y -O csv --layout=tidy
        "account","period","start_date","end_date","commodity","value"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2012","2012-01-01","2012-12-31","GLD","0"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2012","2012-01-01","2012-12-31","ITOT","10.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2012","2012-01-01","2012-12-31","USD","337.18"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2012","2012-01-01","2012-12-31","VEA","12.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2012","2012-01-01","2012-12-31","VHT","106.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2013","2013-01-01","2013-12-31","GLD","70.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2013","2013-01-01","2013-12-31","ITOT","18.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2013","2013-01-01","2013-12-31","USD","-98.12"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2013","2013-01-01","2013-12-31","VEA","10.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2013","2013-01-01","2013-12-31","VHT","18.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2014","2014-01-01","2014-12-31","GLD","0"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2014","2014-01-01","2014-12-31","ITOT","-11.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2014","2014-01-01","2014-12-31","USD","4881.44"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2014","2014-01-01","2014-12-31","VEA","14.00"
        "Assets:US:ETrade","2014","2014-01-01","2014-12-31","VHT","170.00"

  Useful balance reports

Some frequently used balance options/reports are:

•   bal -M revenues expenses
Show revenues/expenses in each month. Also available as the incomestatement command.

•   bal -M -H assets liabilities
Show historical asset/liability balances at each month end. Also available as the balancesheet command.

•   bal -M -H assets liabilities equity
Show historical asset/liability/equity balances at each month end. Also available as the balancesheetequity command.

•   bal -M assets not:receivable
Show changes to liquid assets in each month. Also available as the cashflow command.

Also:

•   bal -M expenses -2 -SA
Show monthly expenses summarised to depth 2 and sorted by average amount.

•   bal -M --budget expenses
Show monthly expenses and budget goals.

•   bal -M --valuechange investments
Show monthly change in market value of investment assets.

•   bal investments --valuechange -D date:lastweek amt:'>1000' -STA [--invert]
Show top gainers [or losers] last week

  balancesheet

(bs)

This command displays a balance sheet, showing historical ending balances of asset and liability accounts. (To see equity as well, use the balancesheetequity command.) Amounts are shown with normal positive sign, as in conventional financial statements.

This report shows accounts declared with the Asset, Cash or Liability type (see account types). Or if no such accounts are declared, it shows top-level accounts named asset or liability (case insensitive, plurals allowed) and their subaccounts.

Example:

    $ hledger balancesheet
    Balance Sheet
    Assets:
                     $-1  assets
                      $1    bank:saving
                     $-2    cash
    --------------------
                     $-1
    Liabilities:
                      $1  liabilities:debts
    --------------------
                      $1
    Total:
    --------------------
                       0

This command is a higher-level variant of the balance command, and supports many of that command's features, such as multi-period reports. It is similar to hledger balance -H assets liabilities, but with smarter account detection, and liabilities displayed with their sign flipped.

This command also supports the output destination and output format options The output formats supported are txt, csv, html, and (experimental) json.

  balancesheetequity

(bse)

This command displays a balance sheet, showing historical ending balances of asset, liability and equity accounts. Amounts are shown with normal positive sign, as in conventional financial statements.

This report shows accounts declared with the Asset, Cash, Liability or Equity type (see account types). Or if no such accounts are declared, it shows top-level accounts named asset, liability or equity (case insensitive, plurals allowed) and their subaccounts.

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

This command is a higher-level variant of the balance command, and supports many of that command's features, such as multi-period reports. It is similar to hledger balance -H assets liabilities equity, but with smarter account detection, and liabilities/equity displayed with their sign flipped.

This command also supports the output destination and output format options The output formats supported are txt, csv, html, and (experimental) json.

  cashflow

(cf)

This command displays a cashflow statement, showing the inflows and outflows affecting "cash" (ie, liquid, easily convertible) assets. Amounts are shown with normal positive sign, as in conventional financial statements.

This report shows accounts declared with the Cash type (see account types). Or if no such accounts are declared, it shows accounts

•   under a top-level account named asset (case insensitive, plural allowed)

•   whose name contains some variation of cash, bank, checking or saving.

More precisely: all accounts matching this case insensitive regular expression:

^assets?(:.+)?:(cash|bank|che(ck|que?)(ing)?|savings?|currentcash)(:|$)

and their subaccounts.

An example cashflow report:

    $ hledger cashflow
    Cashflow Statement
    Cash flows:
                     $-1  assets
                      $1    bank:saving
                     $-2    cash
    --------------------
                     $-1
    Total:
    --------------------
                     $-1

This command is a higher-level variant of the balance command, and supports many of that command's features, such as multi-period reports. It is similar to hledger balance assets not:fixed not:investment not:receivable, but with smarter account detection.

This command also supports the output destination and output format options The output formats supported are txt, csv, html, and (experimental) json.

  check

Check for various kinds of errors in your data.

hledger provides a number of built-in error checks to help prevent problems in your data. Some of these are run automatically; or, you can use this check command to run them on demand, with no output and a zero exit code if all is well. Specify their names (or a prefix) as argument(s).

Some examples:

    hledger check      # basic checks
    hledger check -s   # basic + strict checks
    hledger check ordereddates payees  # basic + two other checks

If you are an Emacs user, you can also configure flycheck-hledger to run these checks, providing instant feedback as you edit the journal.

Here are the checks currently available:

  Basic checks

These checks are always run automatically, by (almost) all hledger commands, including check:

•   parseable - data files are well-formed and can be successfully parsed

•   balancedwithautoconversion - all transactions are balanced, inferring missing amounts where necessary, and possibly converting commodities using costs or automatically-inferred costs

•   assertions - all balance assertions in the journal are passing. (This check can be disabled with -I/--ignore-assertions.)

  Strict checks

These additional checks are run when the -s/--strict (strict mode) flag is used. Or, they can be run by giving their names as arguments to check:

•   accounts - all account names used by transactions have been declared

•   commodities - all commodity symbols used have been declared

•   balancednoautoconversion - transactions are balanced, possibly using explicit costs but not inferred ones

  Other checks

These checks can be run only by giving their names as arguments to check. They are more specialised and not desirable for everyone, therefore optional:

•   ordereddates - transactions are ordered by date within each file

•   payees - all payees used by transactions have been declared

•   recentassertions - all accounts with balance assertions have a balance assertion no more than 7 days before their latest posting

•   tags - all tags used by transactions have been declared

•   uniqueleafnames - all account leaf names are unique

  Custom checks

A few more checks are are available as separate add-on commands, in https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/tree/master/bin:

•   hledger-check-tagfiles - all tag values containing / (a forward slash) exist as file paths

•   hledger-check-fancyassertions - more complex balance assertions are passing

You could make similar scripts to perform your own custom checks. See: Cookbook -> Scripting.

  More about specific checks

hledger check recentassertions will complain if any balance-asserted account does not have a balance assertion within 7 days before its latest posting. This aims to prevent the situation where you are regularly updating your journal, but forgetting to check your balances against the real world, then one day must dig back through months of data to find an error. It assumes that adding a balance assertion requires/reminds you to check the real-world balance. That may not be true if you auto-generate balance assertions from bank data; in that case, I recommend to import transactions uncleared, then use the manual-review-and-mark-cleared phase as a reminder to check the latest assertions against real-world balances.

  close

close [--retain | --migrate | --open] [QUERY]

By default: prints a transaction that zeroes out ("closes") all accounts, transferring their balances to an equity account. Query arguments can be added to override the accounts selection. Three other modes are supported:

--retain: prints a transaction closing revenue and expense balances. This is traditionally done by businesses at the end of each accounting period; it is less necessary in personal and computer-based accounting, but it can help balance the accounting equation A=L+E.

--migrate: prints a transaction to close asset, liability and most equity balances, and another transaction to re-open them. This can be useful when starting a new file (for performance or data protection). Adding the closing transaction to the old file allows old and new files to be combined.

--open: as above, but prints just the opening transaction. This can be useful for starting a new file, leaving the old file unchanged. Similar to Ledger's equity command.

You can change the equity account name with --close-acct ACCT. It defaults to equity:retained earnings with --retain, or equity:opening/closing balances otherwise.

You can change the transaction description(s) with --close-desc 'DESC' and --open-desc 'DESC'. It defaults to retain earnings with --retain, or closing balances and opening balances otherwise.

Just one posting to the equity account will be used by default, with an implicit amount.

With --x/--explicit the amount will be shown explicitly, and if it involves multiple commodities, a separate posting will be generated for each commodity.

With --interleaved, each equity posting is shown next to the corresponding source/destination posting.

The default closing date is yesterday, or the journal's end date, whichever is later. You can change this by specifying a report end date; (The report start date does not matter.) The last day of the report period will be the closing date; eg -e 2022 means "close on 2022-12-31". The opening date is always the day after the closing date.

  close and costs

With --show-costs, any amount costs are shown, with separate postings for each cost. (This currently the best way to view investment assets, showing lots and cost bases.) If you have many currency conversion or investment transactions, it can generate very large journal entries.

  close and balance assertions

Balance assertions will be generated, verifying that the accounts have been reset to zero (and then restored to their previous balances, if there is an opening transaction).

These provide useful error checking, but you can ignore them temporarily with -I, or remove them if you prefer.

You probably should avoid filtering transactions by status or realness (-C, -R, status:), or generating postings (--auto), with this command, since the balance assertions would depend on these.

Note custom posting dates spanning the file boundary will disrupt the balance assertions:

    2023-12-30 a purchase made in december, cleared in january
        expenses:food          5
        assets:bank:checking  -5  ; date: 2023-01-02

To solve that you can transfer the money to and from a temporary account, in effect splitting the multi-day transaction into two single-day transactions:

    ; in 2022.journal:
    2022-12-30 a purchase made in december, cleared in january
        expenses:food          5
        equity:pending        -5
    ; in 2023.journal:
    2023-01-02 last year's transaction cleared
        equity:pending         5 = 0
        assets:bank:checking  -5

  Example: retain earnings

Record 2022's revenues/expenses as retained earnings on 2022-12-31, appending the generated transaction to the journal:

    $ hledger close --retain -f 2022.journal -p 2022 >> 2022.journal

Now 2022's income statement will show only zeroes. To see it again, exclude the retain transaction. Eg:

    $ hledger -f 2022.journal is not:desc:'retain earnings'

  Example: migrate balances to a new file

Close assets/liabilities/equity on 2022-12-31 and re-open them on 2023-01-01:

    $ hledger close --migrate -f 2022.journal -p 2022
    # copy/paste the closing transaction to the end of 2022.journal
    # copy/paste the opening transaction to the start of 2023.journal

Now 2022's balance sheet will show only zeroes, indicating a balanced accounting equation. (Unless you are using @/@@ notation - in that case, try adding --infer-equity.) To see it again, exclude the closing transaction. Eg:

    $ hledger -f 2022.journal bs not:desc:'closing balances'

  Example: excluding closing/opening transactions

When combining many files for multi-year reports, the closing/opening transactions cause some noise in reports like print and register. You can exclude them as shown above, but not:desc:... could be fragile, and also you will need to avoid excluding the very first opening transaction, which can be awkward. Here is a way to do it, using tags: add clopen: tags to all opening/closing balances transactions except the first, like this:

    ; 2021.journal
    2021-06-01 first opening balances
    ...
    2021-12-31 closing balances  ; clopen:2022
    ...

    ; 2022.journal
    2022-01-01 opening balances  ; clopen:2022
    ...
    2022-12-31 closing balances  ; clopen:2023
    ...

    ; 2023.journal
    2023-01-01 opening balances  ; clopen:2023
    ...

Now, assuming a combined journal like:

    ; all.journal
    include 2021.journal
    include 2022.journal
    include 2023.journal

The clopen: tag can exclude all but the first opening transaction. To show a clean multi-year checking register:

    $ hledger -f all.journal areg checking not:tag:clopen

And the year values allow more precision. To show 2022's year-end balance sheet:

    $ hledger -f all.journal bs -e2023 not:tag:clopen=2023

  codes

List the codes seen in transactions, in the order parsed.

This command prints the value of each transaction's code field, in the order transactions were parsed. The transaction code is an optional value written in parentheses between the date and description, often used to store a cheque number, order number or similar.

Transactions aren't required to have a code, and missing or empty codes will not be shown by default. With the -E/--empty flag, they will be printed as blank lines.

You can add a query to select a subset of transactions.

Examples:

    2022/1/1 (123) Supermarket
     Food       $5.00
     Checking
    2022/1/2 (124) Post Office
     Postage    $8.32
     Checking
    2022/1/3 Supermarket
     Food      $11.23
     Checking
    2022/1/4 (126) Post Office
     Postage    $3.21
     Checking

    $ hledger codes
    123
    124
    126

    $ hledger codes -E
    123
    124
    126

  commodities

List all commodity/currency symbols used or declared in the journal.

  descriptions

List the unique descriptions that appear in transactions.

This command lists the unique descriptions that appear in transactions, in alphabetic order. You can add a query to select a subset of transactions.

Example:

    $ hledger descriptions
    Store Name
    Gas Station | Petrol
    Person A

  diff

Compares a particular account's transactions in two input files. It shows any transactions to this account which are in one file but not in the other.

More precisely, for each posting affecting this account in either file, it looks for a corresponding posting in the other file which posts the same amount to the same account (ignoring date, description, etc.) Since postings not transactions are compared, this also works when multiple bank transactions have been combined into a single journal entry.

This is useful eg if you have downloaded an account's transactions from your bank (eg as CSV data). When hledger and your bank disagree about the account balance, you can compare the bank data with your journal to find out the cause.

Examples:

    $ hledger diff -f $LEDGER_FILE -f bank.csv assets:bank:giro
    These transactions are in the first file only:
    2014/01/01 Opening Balances
        assets:bank:giro              EUR ...
        ...
        equity:opening balances       EUR -...
    These transactions are in the second file only:

  files

List all files included in the journal. With a REGEX argument, only file names matching the regular expression (case sensitive) are shown.

  help

Show the hledger user manual in the terminal, with info, man, or a pager. With a TOPIC argument, open it at that topic if possible. TOPIC can be any heading in the manual, or a heading prefix, case insensitive. Eg: commands, print, forecast, journal, amount, "auto postings".

This command shows the hledger manual built in to your hledger version. It can be useful when offline, or when you prefer the terminal to a web browser, or when the appropriate hledger manual or viewing tools are not installed on your system.

By default it chooses the best viewer found in $PATH (preferring info since the hledger manual is large). You can select a particular viewer with the -i, -m, or -p flags.

Examples

    $ hledger help --help    # show how the help command works
    $ hledger help           # show the hledger manual with info, man or $PAGER
    $ hledger help journal   # show the journal topic in the hledger manual

  import

Read new transactions added to each FILE since last run, and add them to the journal. Or with --dry-run, just print the transactions that would be added. Or with --catchup, just mark all of the FILEs' transactions as imported, without actually importing any.

This command may append new transactions to the main journal file (which should be in journal format). Existing transactions are not changed. This is one of the few hledger commands that writes to the journal file (see also add).

Unlike other hledger commands, with import the journal file is an output file, and will be modified, though only by appending (existing data will not be changed). The input files are specified as arguments, so to import one or more CSV files to your main journal, you will run hledger import bank.csv or perhaps hledger import *.csv.

Note you can import from any file format, though CSV files are the most common import source, and these docs focus on that case.

  Deduplication

As a convenience import does deduplication while reading transactions. This does not mean "ignore transactions that look the same", but rather "ignore transactions that have been seen before". This is intended for when you are periodically importing foreign data which may contain already-imported transactions. So eg, if every day you download bank CSV files containing redundant data, you can safely run hledger import bank.csv and only new transactions will be imported. (import is idempotent.)

Since the items being read (CSV records, eg) often do not come with unique identifiers, hledger detects new transactions by date, assuming that:

1.  new items always have the newest dates

2.  item dates do not change across reads

3.  and items with the same date remain in the same relative order across reads.

These are often true of CSV files representing transactions, or true enough so that it works pretty well in practice. 1 is important, but violations of 2 and 3 amongst the old transactions won't matter (and if you import often, the new transactions will be few, so less likely to be the ones affected).

hledger remembers the latest date processed in each input file by saving a hidden ".latest" state file in the same directory. Eg when reading finance/bank.csv, it will look for and update the finance/.latest.bank.csv state file. The format is simple: one or more lines containing the same ISO-format date (YYYY-MM-DD), meaning "I have processed transactions up to this date, and this many of them on that date." Normally you won't see or manipulate these state files yourself. But if needed, you can delete them to reset the state (making all transactions "new"), or you can construct them to "catch up" to a certain date.

Note deduplication (and updating of state files) can also be done by print --new, but this is less often used.

  Import testing

With --dry-run, the transactions that will be imported are printed to the terminal, without updating your journal or state files. The output is valid journal format, like the print command, so you can re-parse it. Eg, to see any importable transactions which CSV rules have not categorised:

    $ hledger import --dry bank.csv | hledger -f- -I print unknown

or (live updating):

    $ ls bank.csv* | entr bash -c 'echo ====; hledger import --dry bank.csv | hledger -f- -I print unknown'

Note: when importing from multiple files at once, it's currently possible for some .latest files to be updated successfully, while the actual import fails because of a problem in one of the files, leaving them out of sync (and causing some transactions to be missed). To prevent this, do a --dry-run first and fix any problems before the real import.

  Importing balance assignments

Entries added by import will have their posting amounts made explicit (like hledger print -x). This means that any balance assignments in imported files must be evaluated; but, imported files don't get to see the main file's account balances. As a result, importing entries with balance assignments (eg from an institution that provides only balances and not posting amounts) will probably generate incorrect posting amounts. To avoid this problem, use print instead of import:

    $ hledger print IMPORTFILE [--new] >> $LEDGER_FILE

(If you think import should leave amounts implicit like print does, please test it and send a pull request.)

  Commodity display styles

Imported amounts will be formatted according to the canonical commodity styles (declared or inferred) in the main journal file.

  incomestatement

(is)

This command displays an income statement, showing revenues and expenses during one or more periods. Amounts are shown with normal positive sign, as in conventional financial statements.

This report shows accounts declared with the Revenue or Expense type (see account types). Or if no such accounts are declared, it shows top-level accounts named revenue or income or expense (case insensitive, plurals allowed) and their subaccounts.

Example:

    $ hledger incomestatement
    Income Statement
    Revenues:
                     $-2  income
                     $-1    gifts
                     $-1    salary
    --------------------
                     $-2
    Expenses:
                      $2  expenses
                      $1    food
                      $1    supplies
    --------------------
                      $2
    Total:
    --------------------
                       0

This command is a higher-level variant of the balance command, and supports many of that command's features, such as multi-period reports. It is similar to hledger balance '(revenues|income)' expenses, but with smarter account detection, and revenues/income displayed with their sign flipped.

This command also supports the output destination and output format options The output formats supported are txt, csv, html, and (experimental) json.

  notes

List the unique notes that appear in transactions.

This command lists the unique notes that appear in transactions, in alphabetic order. You can add a query to select a subset of transactions. The note is the part of the transaction description after a | character (or if there is no |, the whole description).

Example:

    $ hledger notes
    Petrol
    Snacks

  payees

List the unique payee/payer names that appear in transactions.

This command lists unique payee/payer names which have been declared with payee directives (--declared), used in transaction descriptions (--used), or both (the default).

The payee/payer is the part of the transaction description before a | character (or if there is no |, the whole description).

You can add query arguments to select a subset of transactions. This implies --used.

Example:

    $ hledger payees
    Store Name
    Gas Station
    Person A

  prices

Print market price directives from the journal. With --infer-market-prices, generate additional market prices from costs. With --infer-reverse-prices, also generate market prices by inverting known prices. Prices can be filtered by a query. Price amounts are displayed with their full precision.

  print

Show transaction journal entries, sorted by date.

The print command displays full journal entries (transactions) from the journal file, sorted by date (or with --date2, by secondary date).

Amounts are shown mostly normalised to commodity display style, eg the placement of commodity symbols will be consistent. All of their decimal places are shown, as in the original journal entry (with one alteration: in some cases trailing zeroes are added.)

Amounts are shown right-aligned within each transaction (but not across all transactions).

Directives and inter-transaction comments are not shown, currently. This means the print command is somewhat lossy, and if you are using it to reformat your journal you should take care to also copy over the directives and file-level comments.

Eg:

    $ 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

print's output is usually a valid hledger journal, and you can process it again with a second hledger command. This can be useful for certain kinds of search, eg:

    # Show running total of food expenses paid from cash.
    # -f- reads from stdin. -I/--ignore-assertions is sometimes needed.
    $ hledger print assets:cash | hledger -f- -I reg expenses:food

There are some situations where print's output can become unparseable:

•   Valuation affects posting amounts but not balance assertion or balance assignment amounts, potentially causing those to fail.

•   Auto postings can generate postings with too many missing amounts.

•   Account aliases can generate bad account names.

Normally, the journal entry's explicit or implicit amount style is preserved. For example, when an amount is omitted in the journal, it will not appear in the output. Similarly, when a cost is implied but not written, it will not appear in the output. You can use the -x/--explicit flag to make all amounts and costs explicit, which can be useful for troubleshooting or for making your journal more readable and robust against data entry errors. -x is also implied by using any of -B,-V,-X,--value.

Note, -x/--explicit will cause postings with a multi-commodity amount (these can arise when a multi-commodity transaction has an implicit amount) to be split into multiple single-commodity postings, keeping the output parseable.

With -B/--cost, amounts with costs are converted to cost using that price. This can be used for troubleshooting.

With -m DESC/--match=DESC, print does a fuzzy search for one recent transaction whose description is most similar to DESC. DESC should contain at least two characters. If there is no similar-enough match, no transaction will be shown and the program exit code will be non-zero.

With --new, hledger prints only transactions it has not seen on a previous run. This uses the same deduplication system as the import command. (See import's docs for details.)

This command also supports the output destination and output format options The output formats supported are txt, csv, and (experimental) json and sql.

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.)

  register

(reg)

Show postings and their running total.

The register command displays matched postings, across all accounts, in date order, with their running total or running historical balance. (See also the aregister command, which shows matched transactions in a specific account.)

register normally shows line per posting, but note that multi-commodity amounts will occupy multiple lines (one line per commodity).

It 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.

For performance reasons, column widths are chosen based on the first 1000 lines; this means unusually wide values in later lines can cause visual discontinuities as column widths are adjusted. If you want to ensure perfect alignment, at the cost of more time and memory, use the --align-all flag.

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.

The --invert flag negates all amounts. For example, it can be used on an income account where amounts are normally displayed as negative numbers. It's also useful to show postings on the checking account together with the related account:

    $ hledger register --related --invert assets:checking

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.

With -m DESC/--match=DESC, register does a fuzzy search for one recent posting whose description is most similar to DESC. DESC should contain at least two characters. If there is no similar-enough match, no posting will be shown and the program exit code will be non-zero.

  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 the output destination and output format options The output formats supported are txt, csv, and (experimental) json.

  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

Shows the time-weighted (TWR) and money-weighted (IRR) rate of return on your investments.

At a minimum, you need to supply a query (which could be just an account name) to select your investment(s) with --inv, and another query to identify your profit and loss transactions with --pnl.

If you do not record changes in the value of your investment manually, or do not require computation of time-weighted return (TWR), --pnl could be an empty query (--pnl "" or --pnl STR where STR does not match any of your accounts).

This command 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.

Price directives will be taken into account if you supply appropriate --cost or --value flags (see VALUATION).

Note, in some cases this report can fail, for these reasons:

•   Error (NotBracketed): No solution for Internal Rate of Return (IRR). Possible causes: IRR is huge (>1000000%), balance of investment becomes negative at some point in time.

•   Error (SearchFailed): Failed to find solution for Internal Rate of Return (IRR). Either search does not converge to a solution, or converges too slowly.

Examples:

•   Using roi to compute total return of investment in stocks: https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/master/examples/investing/roi-unrealised.ledger

•   Cookbook > Return on Investment: https://hledger.org/roi.html

  Spaces and special characters in --inv and --pnl

Note that --inv and --pnl's argument is a query, and queries could have several space-separated terms (see QUERIES).

To indicate that all search terms form single command-line argument, you will need to put them in quotes (see Special characters):

    $ hledger roi --inv 'term1 term2 term3 ...'

If any query terms contain spaces themselves, you will need an extra level of nested quoting, eg:

    $ hledger roi --inv="'Assets:Test 1'" --pnl="'Equity:Unrealized Profit and Loss'"

  Semantics of --inv and --pnl

Query supplied to --inv has to match all transactions that are related to your investment. Transactions not matching --inv will be ignored.

In these transactions, ROI will conside postings that match --inv to be "investment postings" and other postings (not matching --inv) will be sorted into two categories: "cash flow" and "profit and loss", as ROI needs to know which part of the investment value is your contributions and which is due to the return on investment.

•   "Cash flow" is depositing or withdrawing money, buying or selling assets, or otherwise converting between your investment commodity and any other commodity. Example:

        2019-01-01 Investing in Snake Oil
          assets:cash          -$100
          investment:snake oil
        2020-01-01 Selling my Snake Oil
          assets:cash           $10
          investment:snake oil  = 0

•   "Profit and loss" is change in the value of your investment:

        2019-06-01 Snake Oil falls in value
          investment:snake oil  = $57
          equity:unrealized profit or loss

All non-investment postings are assumed to be "cash flow", unless they match --pnl query. Changes in value of your investment due to "profit and loss" postings will be considered as part of your investment return.

Example: if you use --inv snake --pnl equity:unrealized, then postings in the example below would be classifed as:

    2019-01-01 Snake Oil #1
      assets:cash          -$100   ; cash flow posting
      investment:snake oil         ; investment posting
    2019-03-01 Snake Oil #2
      equity:unrealized pnl  -$100 ; profit and loss posting
      snake oil                    ; investment posting
    2019-07-01 Snake Oil #3
      equity:unrealized pnl        ; profit and loss posting
      cash          -$100          ; cash flow posting
      snake oil     $50            ; investment posting

  IRR and TWR explained

"ROI" stands for "return on investment". Traditionally this was computed as a difference between current value of investment and its initial value, expressed in percentage of the initial value.

However, this approach is only practical in simple cases, where investments receives no in-flows or out-flows of money, and where rate of growth is fixed over time. For more complex scenarios you need different ways to compute rate of return, and this command implements two of them: IRR and TWR.

Internal rate of return, or "IRR" (also called "money-weighted rate of return") takes into account effects of in-flows and out-flows. Naively, if you are withdrawing from your investment, your future gains would be smaller (in absolute numbers), and will be a smaller percentage of your initial investment, and if you are adding to your investment, you will receive bigger absolute gains (but probably at the same rate of return). IRR is a way to compute rate of return for each period between in-flow or out-flow of money, and then combine them in a way that gives you a compound annual rate of return that investment is expected to generate.

As mentioned before, in-flows and out-flows would be any cash that you personally put in or withdraw, and for the "roi" command, these are the postings that match the query in the--inv argument and NOT match the query in the--pnl argument.

If you manually record changes in the value of your investment as transactions that balance them against "profit and loss" (or "unrealized gains") account or use price directives, then in order for IRR to compute the precise effect of your in-flows and out-flows on the rate of return, you will need to record the value of your investement on or close to the days when in- or out-flows occur.

In technical terms, IRR uses the same approach as computation of net present value, and tries to find a discount rate that makes net present value of all the cash flows of your investment to add up to zero. This could be hard to wrap your head around, especially if you haven't done discounted cash flow analysis before. Implementation of IRR in hledger should produce results that match the XIRR formula in Excel.

Second way to compute rate of return that roi command implements is called "time-weighted rate of return" or "TWR". Like IRR, it will also break the history of your investment into periods between in-flows, out-flows and value changes, to compute rate of return per each period and then a compound rate of return. However, internal workings of TWR are quite different.

TWR represents your investment as an imaginary "unit fund" where in-flows/ out-flows lead to buying or selling "units" of your investment and changes in its value change the value of "investment unit". Change in "unit price" over the reporting period gives you rate of return of your investment.

References:

•   Explanation of rate of return

•   Explanation of IRR

•   Explanation of TWR

•   Examples of computing IRR and TWR and discussion of the limitations of both metrics

  stats

Show journal and performance 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.

At the end, it shows (in the terminal) the overall run time and number of transactions processed per second. Note these are approximate and will vary based on machine, current load, data size, hledger version, haskell lib versions, GHC version.. but they may be of interest. The stats command's run time is similar to that of a single-column balance report.

Example:

    $ hledger stats -f examples/1000x1000x10.journal
    Main file                : /Users/simon/src/hledger/examples/1000x1000x10.journal
    Included files           :
    Transactions span        : 2000-01-01 to 2002-09-27 (1000 days)
    Last transaction         : 2002-09-26 (6995 days ago)
    Transactions             : 1000 (1.0 per day)
    Transactions last 30 days: 0 (0.0 per day)
    Transactions last 7 days : 0 (0.0 per day)
    Payees/descriptions      : 1000
    Accounts                 : 1000 (depth 10)
    Commodities              : 26 (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z)
    Market prices            : 1000 (A)
    Run time                 : 0.12 s
    Throughput               : 8342 txns/s

This command supports the -o/--output-file option (but not -O/--output-format selection).

  tags

List the tags used in the journal, or their values.

This command lists the tag names used in the journal, whether on transactions, postings, or account declarations.

With a TAGREGEX argument, only tag names matching this regular expression (case insensitive, infix matched) are shown.

With QUERY arguments, only transactions and accounts matching this query are considered. If the query involves transaction fields (date:, desc:, amt:, ...), the search is restricted to the matched transactions and their accounts.

With the --values flag, the tags' unique non-empty values are listed instead. With -E/--empty, blank/empty values are also shown.

With --parsed, tags or values are shown in the order they were parsed, with duplicates included. (Except, tags from account declarations are always shown first.)

Tip: remember, accounts also acquire tags from their parents, postings also acquire tags from their account and transaction, transactions also acquire tags from their postings.

  test

Run built-in unit tests.

This command runs the unit tests built in to hledger and hledger-lib, printing the results on stdout. If any test fails, the exit code will be non-zero.

This is mainly used by hledger developers, but you can also use it to sanity-check the installed hledger executable on your platform. All tests are expected to pass - if you ever see a failure, please report as a bug!

This command also accepts tasty test runner options, written after a -- (double hyphen). Eg to run only the tests in Hledger.Data.Amount, with ANSI colour codes disabled:

    $ hledger test -- -pData.Amount --color=never

For help on these, see https://github.com/feuerbach/tasty#options (-- --help currently doesn't show them).

PART 5: COMMON TASKS

Here are some quick examples of how to do some basic tasks with hledger.

  Getting help

Here's how to list commands and view options and command docs:

    $ hledger                # show available commands
    $ hledger --help         # show common options
    $ hledger CMD --help     # show CMD's options, common options and CMD's documentation

You can also view your hledger version's manual in several formats by using the help command. Eg:

    $ hledger help           # show the hledger manual with info, man or $PAGER (best available)
    $ hledger help journal   # show the journal topic in the hledger manual
    $ hledger help --help    # find out more about the help command

To view manuals and introductory docs on the web, visit https://hledger.org. Chat and mail list support and discussion archives can be found at https://hledger.org/support.

  Constructing command lines

hledger has a flexible command line interface. We strive to keep it simple and ergonomic, but if you run into one of the sharp edges described in OPTIONS, here are some tips that might help:

•   command-specific options must go after the command (it's fine to put common options there too: hledger CMD OPTS ARGS)

•   running add-on executables directly simplifies command line parsing (hledger-ui OPTS ARGS)

•   enclose "problematic" args in single quotes

•   if needed, also add a backslash to hide regular expression metacharacters from the shell

•   to see how a misbehaving command line is being parsed, add --debug=2.

  Starting a journal file

hledger looks for your accounting data in a journal file, $HOME/.hledger.journal by default:

    $ hledger stats
    The hledger journal file "/Users/simon/.hledger.journal" was not found.
    Please create it first, eg with "hledger add" or a text editor.
    Or, specify an existing journal file with -f or LEDGER_FILE.

You can override this by setting the LEDGER_FILE environment variable. It's a good practice to keep this important file under version control, and to start a new file each year. So you could do something like this:

    $ mkdir ~/finance
    $ cd ~/finance
    $ git init
    Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/simon/finance/.git/
    $ touch 2020.journal
    $ echo "export LEDGER_FILE=$HOME/finance/2020.journal" >> ~/.bashrc
    $ source ~/.bashrc
    $ hledger stats
    Main file                : /Users/simon/finance/2020.journal
    Included files           :
    Transactions span        :  to  (0 days)
    Last transaction         : none
    Transactions             : 0 (0.0 per day)
    Transactions last 30 days: 0 (0.0 per day)
    Transactions last 7 days : 0 (0.0 per day)
    Payees/descriptions      : 0
    Accounts                 : 0 (depth 0)
    Commodities              : 0 ()
    Market prices            : 0 ()

  Setting opening balances

Pick a starting date for which you can look up the balances of some real-world assets (bank accounts, wallet..) and liabilities (credit cards..).

To avoid a lot of data entry, you may want to start with just one or two accounts, like your checking account or cash wallet; and pick a recent starting date, like today or the start of the week. You can always come back later and add more accounts and older transactions, eg going back to january 1st.

Add an opening balances transaction to the journal, declaring the balances on this date. Here are two ways to do it:

•   The first way: open the journal in any text editor and save an entry like this:

        2020-01-01 * opening balances
            assets:bank:checking                $1000   = $1000
            assets:bank:savings                 $2000   = $2000
            assets:cash                          $100   = $100
            liabilities:creditcard               $-50   = $-50
            equity:opening/closing balances

    These are start-of-day balances, ie whatever was in the account at the end of the previous day.

    The * after the date is an optional status flag. Here it means "cleared & confirmed".

    The currency symbols are optional, but usually a good idea as you'll be dealing with multiple currencies sooner or later.

    The = amounts are optional balance assertions, providing extra error checking.

•   The second way: run hledger add and follow the prompts to record a similar transaction:

        $ hledger add
        Adding transactions to journal file /Users/simon/finance/2020.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 go one step backward.
        To end a transaction, enter . when prompted.
        To quit, enter . at a date prompt or press control-d or control-c.
        Date [2020-02-07]: 2020-01-01
        Description: * opening balances
        Account 1: assets:bank:checking
        Amount  1: $1000
        Account 2: assets:bank:savings
        Amount  2 [$-1000]: $2000
        Account 3: assets:cash
        Amount  3 [$-3000]: $100
        Account 4: liabilities:creditcard
        Amount  4 [$-3100]: $-50
        Account 5: equity:opening/closing balances
        Amount  5 [$-3050]:
        Account 6 (or . or enter to finish this transaction): .
        2020-01-01 * opening balances
            assets:bank:checking                      $1000
            assets:bank:savings                       $2000
            assets:cash                                $100
            liabilities:creditcard                     $-50
            equity:opening/closing balances          $-3050
        Save this transaction to the journal ? [y]:
        Saved.
        Starting the next transaction (. or ctrl-D/ctrl-C to quit)
        Date [2020-01-01]: .

If you're using version control, this could be a good time to commit the journal. Eg:

    $ git commit -m 'initial balances' 2020.journal

  Recording transactions

As you spend or receive money, you can record these transactions using one of the methods above (text editor, hledger add) or by using the hledger-iadd or hledger-web add-ons, or by using the import command to convert CSV data downloaded from your bank.

Here are some simple transactions, see the hledger_journal(5) manual and hledger.org for more ideas:

    2020/1/10 * gift received
      assets:cash   $20
      income:gifts
    2020.1.12 * farmers market
      expenses:food    $13
      assets:cash
    2020-01-15 paycheck
      income:salary
      assets:bank:checking    $1000

  Reconciling

Periodically you should reconcile - compare your hledger-reported balances against external sources of truth, like bank statements or your bank's website - to be sure that your ledger accurately represents the real-world balances (and, that the real-world institutions have not made a mistake!). This gets easy and fast with (1) practice and (2) frequency. If you do it daily, it can take 2-10 minutes. If you let it pile up, expect it to take longer as you hunt down errors and discrepancies.

A typical workflow:

1.  Reconcile cash. Count what's in your wallet. Compare with what hledger reports (hledger bal cash). If they are different, try to remember the missing transaction, or look for the error in the already-recorded transactions. A register report can be helpful (hledger reg cash). If you can't find the error, add an adjustment transaction. Eg if you have $105 after the above, and can't explain the missing $2, it could be:

        2020-01-16 * adjust cash
            assets:cash    $-2 = $105
            expenses:misc

2.  Reconcile checking. Log in to your bank's website. Compare today's (cleared) balance with hledger's cleared balance (hledger bal checking -C). If they are different, track down the error or record the missing transaction(s) or add an adjustment transaction, similar to the above. Unlike the cash case, you can usually compare the transaction history and running balance from your bank with the one reported by hledger reg checking -C. This will be easier if you generally record transaction dates quite similar to your bank's clearing dates.

3.  Repeat for other asset/liability accounts.

Tip: instead of the register command, use hledger-ui to see a live-updating register while you edit the journal: hledger-ui --watch --register checking -C

After reconciling, it could be a good time to mark the reconciled transactions' status as "cleared and confirmed", if you want to track that, by adding the * marker. Eg in the paycheck transaction above, insert * between 2020-01-15 and paycheck

If you're using version control, this can be another good time to commit:

    $ git commit -m 'txns' 2020.journal

  Reporting

Here are some basic reports.

Show all transactions:

    $ hledger print
    2020-01-01 * opening balances
        assets:bank:checking                      $1000
        assets:bank:savings                       $2000
        assets:cash                                $100
        liabilities:creditcard                     $-50
        equity:opening/closing balances          $-3050
    2020-01-10 * gift received
        assets:cash              $20
        income:gifts
    2020-01-12 * farmers market
        expenses:food             $13
        assets:cash
    2020-01-15 * paycheck
        income:salary
        assets:bank:checking           $1000
    2020-01-16 * adjust cash
        assets:cash               $-2 = $105
        expenses:misc

Show account names, and their hierarchy:

    $ hledger accounts --tree
    assets
      bank
        checking
        savings
      cash
    equity
      opening/closing balances
    expenses
      food
      misc
    income
      gifts
      salary
    liabilities
      creditcard

Show all account totals:

    $ hledger balance
                   $4105  assets
                   $4000    bank
                   $2000      checking
                   $2000      savings
                    $105    cash
                  $-3050  equity:opening/closing balances
                     $15  expenses
                     $13    food
                      $2    misc
                  $-1020  income
                    $-20    gifts
                  $-1000    salary
                    $-50  liabilities:creditcard
    --------------------
                       0

Show only asset and liability balances, as a flat list, limited to depth 2:

    $ hledger bal assets liabilities -2
                   $4000  assets:bank
                    $105  assets:cash
                    $-50  liabilities:creditcard
    --------------------
                   $4055

Show the same thing without negative numbers, formatted as a simple balance sheet:

    $ hledger bs -2
    Balance Sheet 2020-01-16
                            || 2020-01-16
    ========================++============
     Assets                 ||
    ------------------------++------------
     assets:bank            ||      $4000
     assets:cash            ||       $105
    ------------------------++------------
                            ||      $4105
    ========================++============
     Liabilities            ||
    ------------------------++------------
     liabilities:creditcard ||        $50
    ------------------------++------------
                            ||        $50
    ========================++============
     Net:                   ||      $4055

The final total is your "net worth" on the end date. (Or use bse for a full balance sheet with equity.)

Show income and expense totals, formatted as an income statement:

    hledger is
    Income Statement 2020-01-01-2020-01-16
                   || 2020-01-01-2020-01-16
    ===============++=======================
     Revenues      ||
    ---------------++-----------------------
     income:gifts  ||                   $20
     income:salary ||                 $1000
    ---------------++-----------------------
                   ||                 $1020
    ===============++=======================
     Expenses      ||
    ---------------++-----------------------
     expenses:food ||                   $13
     expenses:misc ||                    $2
    ---------------++-----------------------
                   ||                   $15
    ===============++=======================
     Net:          ||                 $1005

The final total is your net income during this period.

Show transactions affecting your wallet, with running total:

    $ hledger register cash
    2020-01-01 opening balances     assets:cash                   $100          $100
    2020-01-10 gift received        assets:cash                    $20          $120
    2020-01-12 farmers market       assets:cash                   $-13          $107
    2020-01-16 adjust cash          assets:cash                    $-2          $105

Show weekly posting counts as a bar chart:

    $ hledger activity -W
    2019-12-30 *****
    2020-01-06 ****
    2020-01-13 ****

  Migrating to a new file

At the end of the year, you may want to continue your journal in a new file, so that old transactions don't slow down or clutter your reports, and to help ensure the integrity of your accounting history. See the close command.

If using version control, don't forget to git add the new file.

REPORTING BUGS
Report bugs at http://bugs.hledger.org (or on the #hledger chat or hledger mail list)

AUTHORS
Simon Michael <simon@joyful.com> and contributors.
See http://hledger.org/CREDITS.html

COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2007-2023 Simon Michael and contributors.

LICENSE
Released under GNU GPL v3 or later.

SEE ALSO
hledger(1), hledger-ui(1), hledger-web(1), ledger(1)