check

Check for various kinds of errors in your data.

_FLAGS

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.
