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hledger(1)

m4_dnl Lines beginning with m4_dnl are comments. See help at end of file. m4_dnl The macro below includes the content only in the web format: notinfo({{ # NAME }})

hledger - a robust, friendly plain text accounting app (command line version).

notinfo({{ # SYNOPSIS }})

hledger
or
hledger COMMAND [OPTS] [ARGS]

notinfo({{ # DESCRIPTION }})

hledgerdescription

This manual is for hledger’s command line interface, version version. 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 open a built-in copy, at a point of interest, by running
hledger --man [CMD], hledger --info [CMD] or hledger help [TOPIC].

(And for shorter help, try hledger --tldr [CMD].)

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 usually inputfiles

Here is a small 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

Input

hledger reads one or more data files, each time you run it. You can specify a file with -f, like so

$ hledger -f FILE [-f FILE2 ...] print

Files are most often in hledger’s journal format, with the .journal file extension (.hledger or .j also work); these files describe transactions, like an accounting general journal.

When no file is specified, hledger looks for .hledger.journal in your home directory.

But most people prefer to keep financial files in a dedicated folder, perhaps with version control. Also, starting a new journal file each year is common (it’s not required, but helps keep things fast and organised). So we usually configure a different journal file, by setting the LEDGER_FILE environment variable, to something like ~/finance/2023.journal. For more about how to do that on your system, see Common tasks > Setting LEDGER_FILE.

Text encoding

hledger expects non-ascii input to be decodable with the system locale’s text encoding. (For CSV/SSV/TSV files, this can be overridden by the encoding CSV rule.)

So, trying to read non-ascii files which have the wrong text encoding, or when no system locale is configured, will fail. To fix this, configure your system locale appropriately, and/or convert the files to your system’s text encoding (using iconv on unix, or powershell or notepad on Windows). See Install: Text encoding for more tips.

hledger’s output will use the system locale’s encoding.

hledger’s docs and example files mostly use UTF-8 encoding.

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:	Automatically used for files with 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- or other delimiter-separated values, for data import	`.csv`
`ssv`	Semicolon separated values	`.ssv`
`tsv`	Tab separated values	`.tsv`
`rules`	CSV/SSV/TSV/other separated values, alternate way	`.rules`

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 containing tab separated values:

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

Standard input

The file name - means standard input:

$ cat FILE | hledger -f- print

If reading non-journal data in this way, you’ll need to write the format as a prefix, like timeclock: here:

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

Multiple files

You can specify multiple -f options, to read multiple files as one big journal. When doing this, note that certain features (described below) will be affected:

Balance assertions will not see the effect of transactions in previous files. (Usually this doesn’t matter as each file will set the corresponding opening balances.)
Some directives will not affect previous or subsequent files.

If needed, you can work around these by using a single parent file which includes the others, or concatenating the files into one, 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 various subcommands for getting things done. Most of these commands do not change the journal file; they just read it and output a report. A few commands assist with adding data and file management. Some often-used commands are add, print, register, balancesheet and incomestatement.

To show a summary of commands, run hledger with no arguments. You can see the same commands summary at the start of PART 4: COMMANDS below.

To use a particular command, run hledger CMD [CMDOPTS] [CMDARGS],

CMD is the full command name, or its standard abbreviation shown in the commands list, or any unambiguous prefix of the name.
CMDOPTS are command-specific options, if any. Command-specific options must be written after the command name. Eg: hledger print -x.
CMDARGS are additional arguments to the command, if any. Most hledger commands accept arguments representing a query, to limit the data in some way. Eg: hledger reg assets:checking.

To list a command’s options, arguments, and documentation in the terminal, run hledger CMD -h. Eg: hledger bal -h.

Add-on commands

In addition to the built-in commands, you can install add-on commands, which will also appear in hledger’s commands list. Some of these can be installed as separate packages; others can be found in hledger’s bin/ directory, documented at https://hledger.org/scripts.html.

Add-on commands are programs or scripts in your shell’s PATH, whose name starts with “hledger-” and ends with no extension or a recognised extension (“.bat”, “.com”, “.exe”, “.hs”, “.js”, “.lhs”, “.lua”, “.php”, “.pl”, “.py”, “.rb”, “.rkt”, or “.sh”), and (on unix and mac) which has executable permission for the current user.

m4_dnl Add-ons can be written in any language, but Haskell scripts or programs can m4_dnl call hledger’s code directly, which means they can do anything built-in commands can. m4_dnl Scripts/programs in other languages can’t do this, but they can use hledger’s m4_dnl command-line interface, or output formats like CSV or JSON.

You can run add-on commands directly: hledger-ui --watch.

Or you can run them with hledger, like built-in commands: hledger ui --watch. In this case hledger’s config file will be used, so you can set custom options for the addon there. (Before hledger 1.50, an -- argument was needed before addon options, but not any more.)

Options

Run hledger -h to see general command line help. Options can be written either before or after the command name. These options are specific to the hledger CLI:

Flags:
     --conf=CONFFILE        Use extra options defined in this config file. If
                            not specified, searches upward and in XDG config
                            dir for hledger.conf (or .hledger.conf in $HOME).
  -n --no-conf              ignore any config file

And the following general options are common to most hledger commands:

generaloptions

Usually hledger accepts any unambiguous flag prefix, eg you can write --tl instead of --tldr or --dry instead of --dry-run.

You can combine short flags which don’t take arguments, eg you can write -MAST instead of -M -A -S -T. Flags requiring an argument can’t be combined in this way (-If FILE won’t work).

If the same option appears more than once in a command line, usually the last (right-most) wins. Similarly, if mutually exclusive flags are used together, the right-most wins. (When flags are mutually exclusive, they’ll usually have a group prefix in –help.)

With most commands, arguments are interpreted as a hledger query which filter the data. Some queries can be expressed either with options or with arguments.

Below are more tips for using the command line interface - feel free to skip these until you need them.

Special characters

In commands you type at the command line, certain characters have special meaning and sometimes need to be “escaped” or “quoted”, by prefixing backslashes or enclosing in quotes.

If you are able to minimise the use of special characters in your data, you won’t have to deal with this as much. For example, you could use hyphen - or underscore _ instead of spaces in account names, and you could use the USD currency code instead of the $ currency symbol in amounts.

But if you prefer to use spaced account names and $, it’s fine. Just be aware of this topic so you can check this doc when needed. (These examples are mostly tested on unix; some details might need to be adapted if you’re on Windows.)

Escaping shell special characters

These are some characters which may have special meaning to your shell (the program which interprets command lines):

SPACE, <, >, (, ), |, \, %
$ if followed by a word character

So for example, to match an account name containing spaces, like “credit card”, don’t write:

$ hledger register credit card

Instead, enclose the name in single quotes:

$ hledger register 'credit card'

On unix or in Windows powershell, if you use double quotes your shell will silently treat $ as variable interpolation. So you should probably avoid double quotes, unless you want that behaviour, eg in a script:

$ hledger register "assets:$SOMEACCT"

But in an older Windows CMD.EXE window, you must use double quotes:

C:\Users\Me> hledger register "credit card"

On unix or in Windows powershell, as an alternative to quotes you can write a backslash before each special character:

$ hledger register credit\ card

Finally, since hledger’s query arguments are regular expressions (described below), you could also fill that gap with . which matches any character:

$ hledger register credit.card

Escaping regular expression special characters

Some characters also have special meaning in regular expressions, which hledger’s arguments often are. Those include:

., ^, $, [, ], (, ), |, \

To escape one of these, write \ before it. But note this is in addition to the shell escaping above. So for characters which are special to both shell and regular expressions, like \ and $, you will sometimes need two levels of escaping.

For example, a balance report that uses a cur: query restricting it to just the $ currency, should be written like this:

$ hledger balance cur:\\$

Explanation:

Add a backslash \ before the dollar sign $ to protect it from regular expressions (so it will be matched literally with no special meaning).
Add another backslash before that backslash, to protect it from the shell (so the shell won’t consume it).
$ doesn’t need to be protected from the shell in this case, because it’s not followed by a word character; but it would be harmless to do so.

But here’s another way to write that, which tends to be easier: add backslashes to escape from regular expressions, then enclose with quotes to escape from the shell:

$ hledger balance cur:'\$'

Escaping in other situations

hledger options and arguments are sometimes used in places other than the command line, where the escaping/quoting rules are different. For example, backslash-quoting may not be available. Here’s a quick reference:

In unix shell	Use single quotes and/or backslash (or double quotes for variable interpolation)
In Windows `powershell`	Use single quotes (or double quotes for variable interpolation)
In Windows `cmd`	Use double quotes
In hledger-ui’s filter prompt	Use single or double quotes
In hledger-web’s search form	Use single or double quotes
In an argument file	Don’t use spaces, don’t shell-escape, do regex-escape, write one argument/option per line
In a config file	Use single or double quotes, and enclose the whole argument (`'desc:a b'` not `desc:'a b'`)
In `ghci` (the Haskell REPL)	Use double quotes, and enclose the whole argument

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, which can decode the characters being used. This is essential - see Text encoding and Install: Text encoding.
Your terminal software (eg Terminal.app, iTerm, CMD.exe, xterm..) must support unicode. On Windows, you may need to use Windows Terminal.
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

A regular expression (regexp) is a small piece of text where certain characters (like ., ^, $, +, *, (), |, [], \) have special meanings, forming a tiny language for matching text precisely - very useful in hledger and elsewhere. To learn all about them, visit regular-expressions.info.

hledger supports regexps whenever you are entering a pattern to match something, eg in query arguments, account aliases, CSV if rules, hledger-web’s search form, hledger-ui’s / search, etc. You may need to wrap them in quotes, especially at the command line (see Special characters above). Here are some examples:

Account name queries (quoted for command line use):

Regular expression:  Matches:
-------------------  ------------------------------------------------------------
bank                 assets:bank, assets:bank:savings, expenses:art:banksy, ...
:bank                assets:bank:savings, expenses:art:banksy
:bank:               assets:bank:savings
'^bank'              none of those ( ^ matches beginning of text )
'bank$'              assets:bank   ( $ matches end of text )
'big \$ bank'        big $ bank    ( \ disables following character's special meaning )
'\bbank\b'           assets:bank, assets:bank:savings  ( \b matches word boundaries )
'(sav|check)ing'     saving or checking  ( (|) matches either alternative )
'saving|checking'    saving or checking  ( outer parentheses are not needed )
'savings?'           saving or savings   ( ? matches 0 or 1 of the preceding thing )
'my +bank'           my bank, my  bank, ... ( + matches 1 or more of the preceding thing )
'my *bank'           mybank, my bank, my  bank, ... ( * matches 0 or more of the preceding thing )
'b.nk'               bank, bonk, b nk, ... ( . matches any character )

Some other queries:

desc:'amazon|amzn|audible'  Amazon transactions
cur:EUR              amounts with commodity symbol containing EUR
cur:'\$'             amounts with commodity symbol containing $
cur:'^\$$'           only $ amounts, not eg AU$ or CA$
cur:....?            amounts with 4-or-more-character symbols
tag:.=202[1-3]       things with any tag whose value contains 2021, 2022 or 2023

Account name aliases: accept . instead of : as account separator:

alias /\./=:         replaces all periods in account names with colons

Show multiple top-level accounts combined as one:

--alias='/^[^:]+/=combined'  ( [^:] matches any character other than : )

Show accounts with the second-level part removed:

--alias '/^([^:]+):[^:]+/ = \1'
                     match a top-level account and a second-level account
                     and replace those with just the top-level account
                     ( \1 in the replacement text means "whatever was matched
                     by the first parenthesised part of the regexp"

CSV rules: match CSV records containing dining-related MCC codes:

if \?MCC581[124]

Match CSV records with a specific amount around the end/start of month:

if %amount \b3\.99
&  %date   (29|30|31|01|02|03)$

hledger’s regular expressions

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:

they are case insensitive
they are infix matching (they do not need to match the entire thing being matched)
they are POSIX ERE (extended regular expressions)
they also support GNU word boundaries (\b, \B, \<, \>)
backreferences are supported when doing text replacement in account aliases or CSV rules, where backreferences can be used in the replacement string to reference capturing groups in the search regexp. Otherwise, if you write \1, it will match the digit 1.
they do not support mode modifiers ((?s)), character classes (\w, \d), or anything else not mentioned above.
they may not (I’m guessing not) properly support right-to-left or bidirectional text.

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.

Argument files

You can save a set of command line options and arguments in a file, and then use them by writing @FILE.args as a hledger command argument. The .args file extension is conventional, but not required. In an argument file,

Each line can contain one argument, flag, or option.
Blank lines or lines beginning with # are ignored.
An option’s flag and value should be joined by =.
An option value or an argument may contain spaces. Don’t use single or double quotes.
And generally, use one less level of quoting/escaping than at the command line. Eg cur:\$, not cur:\\$ as on the command line.

For example:

# cash.args

assets:cash
assets:charles schwab:sweep
cur:\$
-c=$1.

$ hledger bal @cash.args

Config files

With hledger 1.40+, you can save extra command line options and arguments in a more featureful hledger config file. Here’s a small example:

# General options are listed first, and used with hledger commands that support them.
--pretty

# Options following a `[COMMAND]` heading are used with that hledger command only.
[print]
--explicit --infer-costs

To use a config file, specify it with the --conf option. Its options will be inserted near the start of your command line, so you can override them with command line options if needed.

Or, you can set up an automatic config file that is used whenever you run hledger, by creating hledger.conf in the current directory or above, or .hledger.conf in your home directory (~/.hledger.conf), or hledger.conf in your XDG config directory (~/.config/hledger/hledger.conf).

Here is another example config you could start with: https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/master/hledger.conf.sample

You can put not only options, but also arguments in a config file. If the first word in a config file’s top (general) section does not begin with a dash (eg: print), it is treated as the command argument (overriding any argument on the command line).

On unix machines, you can add a shebang line at the top of a config file, set executable permission on the file, and use it like a script. Eg (the -S is needed on some operating systems):

#!/usr/bin/env -S hledger --conf

You can ignore config files by adding the -n/--no-conf flag to the command line. This is useful when using hledger in scripts, or when troubleshooting. When both --conf and --no-conf options are used, the right-most wins.

To inspect the processing of config files, use --debug or --debug=8. Or, run the setup command, which will display any active config files. (setup is not affected by config files itself, unlike other commands.)

Warning!

There aren’t many hledger features that need a warning, but this is one!

Automatic config files, while convenient, also make hledger less predictable and dependable. It’s easy to make a config file that changes a report’s behaviour, or breaks your hledger-using scripts/applications, in ways that will surprise you later.

If you don’t want this,

Just don’t create a hledger.conf file on your machine.
Also be alert to downloaded directories which may contain a hledger.conf file.
Also if you are sharing scripts or examples or support, consider that others may have a hledger.conf file.

Conversely, once you decide to use this feature, try to remember:

Whenever a hledger command does not work as expected, try it again with -n (--no-conf) to see if a config file was to blame.
Whenever you call hledger from a script, consider whether that call should use -n or not.
Be conservative about what you put in your config file; try to consider the effect on all your reports.
To troubleshoot the effect of config files, run with --debug or --debug 8.

The config file feature was added in hledger 1.40.

Shell completions

If you use the bash or zsh shells, you can optionally set up context-sensitive autocompletion for hledger command lines. Try pressing hledger<SPACE><TAB><TAB> (should list all hledger commands) or hledger reg acct:<TAB><TAB> (should list your top-level account names). If completions aren’t working, or for more details, see Install > Shell completions.

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:

command	txt	html	csv/tsv	fods	beancount	sql	json
aregister	Y	Y	Y	Y			Y
balance	Y	Y	Y	Y			Y
balancesheet	Y	Y	Y	Y			Y
balancesheetequity	Y	Y	Y	Y			Y
cashflow	Y	Y	Y	Y			Y
incomestatement	Y	Y	Y	Y			Y
print	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
register	Y	Y	Y	Y			Y

You can also see which output formats a command supports by running hledger CMD -h and looking for the -O/--output-format=FMT option,

You can select the output format by using that option:

$ hledger print -O csv    # print CSV to standard output

or by choosing a suitable filename extension 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

Here are some notes about the various output formats.

Text output

This is the default: human readable, plain text report output, suitable for viewing with a monospace font in a terminal. If your data contains unicode or wide characters, you’ll need a terminal and font that render those correctly. (This can be challenging on MS Windows.)

Some reports (register, aregister) will normally use the full window width. If this isn’t working or you want to override it, you can use the -w/--width option.

Balance reports (balance, balancesheet, incomestatement…) use whatever width they need. Multi-period multi-currency reports can often be wider than the window. Besides using a pager, helpful techniques for this situation include --layout=bare, -X COMM, cur:, --transpose, --tree, --depth, --drop, switching to html output, etc.

Box-drawing characters

hledger draws simple table borders by default, to minimise the risk of display problems caused by a terminal/font not supporting box-drawing characters.

But your terminal and font probably do support them, so we recommend using the --pretty flag to show prettier tables in the terminal. This is a good flag to add to your hledger config file.

Colour

hledger tries to automatically detect ANSI colour and text styling support and use it when appropriate. (Currently, it is used rather minimally: some reports show negative numbers in red, and help output uses bold text for emphasis.)

You can override this by setting the NO_COLOR environment variable to disable it, or by using the --color/--colour option, perhaps in your config file, with a y/yes or n/no value to force it on or off.

Paging

In unix-like environments, when displaying large output (in any output format) in the terminal, hledger tries to use a pager when appropriate. (You can disable this with the --pager=no option, perhaps in your config file.)

The pager shows one page of text at a time, and lets you scroll around to see more. While it is active, usually SPACE shows the next page, h shows help, and q quits. The home/end/page up/page down/cursor keys, and mouse scrolling, may also work.

hledger will use the pager specified by the PAGER environment variable, otherwise less if available, otherwise more if available. (With one exception: hledger help -p TOPIC will always use less, so that it can scroll to the topic.)

The pager is expected to display hledger’s ANSI colour and text styling. If you see junk characters, you might need to configure your pager to handle ANSI codes. Or you could disable colour as described above.

If you are using the less pager, hledger automatically appends a number of options to the LESS variable to enable ANSI colour and a number of other conveniences. (At the time of writing: –chop-long-lines –hilite-unread –ignore-case –no-init –quit-at-eof –quit-if-one-screen –RAW-CONTROL-CHARS –shift=8 –squeeze-blank-lines –use-backslash ). If these don’t work well, you can set your preferred options in the HLEDGER_LESS variable, which will be used instead.

HTML output

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

HTML output will be a HTML fragment, not a complete HTML document. Like other hledger output, for non-ascii characters it will use the system locale’s text encoding (see Text encoding).

CSV / TSV output

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

FODS output

FODS is the OpenDocument Spreadsheet format as plain XML, as accepted by LibreOffice and OpenOffice. If you use their spreadsheet applications, this is better than CSV because it works across locales (decimal point vs. decimal comma, character encoding stored in XML header, thus no problems with umlauts), it supports fixed header rows and columns, cell types (string vs. number vs. date), separation of number and currency (currency is displayed but the cell type is still a number accessible for computation), styles (bold), borders. Btw. you can still extract CSV from FODS/ODS using various utilities like libreoffice --headless or ods2csv.

Beancount output

This is Beancount’s journal format. You can use this to export your hledger data to Beancount, eg to use the Fava web app.

hledger will try to adjust your data to suit Beancount, automatically. Be cautious and check the conversion until you are confident it is good. If you plan to export to Beancount often, you may want to follow its conventions, for a cleaner conversion:

use Beancount-friendly account names
use currency codes instead of currency symbols
use cost notation instead of equity conversion postings
avoid virtual postings, balance assignments, and secondary dates.

There is one big adjustment you must handle yourself: for Beancount, the top level account names must be Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Income, and/or Expenses. You can use account aliases to rewrite your account names temporarily, if needed, as in this hledger2beancount.conf config file.

2024-12-20: Some more things not yet handled for you:

P directives are not converted automatically - convert those yourself.
Balance assignments are not converted (Beancount doesn’t support them) - replace those with explicit amounts.

Beancount account names

Aside from the top-level names, hledger will adjust your account names to make valid Beancount account names, by capitalising each part, replacing spaces with -, replacing other unsupported characters with C<HEXBYTES>, prepending A to account name parts which don’t begin with a letter or digit, and appending :A to account names which have only one part.

Beancount commodity names

hledger will adjust your commodity names to make valid Beancount commodity/currency names, which must be 2-24 uppercase letters, digits, or ', ., _, -, beginning with a letter and ending with a letter or digit. hledger will convert known currency symbols to ISO 4217 currency codes, capitalise letters, replace spaces with -, replace other unsupported characters with C<HEXBYTES>, and prepend or append C if needed.

Beancount virtual postings

Beancount doesn’t allow virtual postings; if you have any, they will be omitted from beancount output.

Beancount metadata

hledger tags will be converted to Beancount metadata (except for tags whose name begins with _). Metadata names will be adjusted to be Beancount-compatible: beginning with a lowercase letter, at least two characters long, and with unsupported characters encoded. Metadata values will use Beancount’s string type.

In hledger, objects can have the same tag repeated with multiple values. Eg an assets:cash account might have both type:Asset and type:Cash tags. For Beancount these will be combined into one, with the values combined, comma separated. Eg: type: "Asset, Cash".

Beancount costs

Beancount doesn’t allow redundant costs and conversion postings as hledger does. If you have any of these, the conversion postings will be omitted. Currently we support at most one cost + conversion postings group per transaction.

Beancount operating currency

Declaring an operating currency (or several) improves Beancount and Fava reports. Currently hledger will declare each currency used in cost amounts as an operating currency. If needed, replace these with your own declaration, like

option "operating_currency" "USD"

SQL output

SQL output is expected to work at least with SQLite, MySQL and Postgres.

The SQL statements are expected to be executed in the empty database. If you already have tables created via SQL output of hledger, you would probably want to either clear data from these (via delete or truncate SQL statements) or drop the tables completely before import; otherwise your postings would be duplicated.

For SQLite, it is more useful if you modify the generated id field to be a PRIMARY KEY. Eg:

$ hledger print -O sql | sed 's/id serial/id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT NOT NULL/g' | ...

This is not yet much used; feedback is welcome.

JSON output

Our JSON is rather large and verbose, since it is a faithful representation of hledger’s internal data types. To understand its structure, read the Haskell type definitions, which are mostly in https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/master/hledger-lib/Hledger/Data/Types.hs. hledger-web’s OpenAPI specification may also be relevant.

hledger stores numbers with sometimes up to 255 significant digits. This is too many digits for most JSON consumers, so in JSON output we round numbers to at most 10 decimal places. (We don’t limit the number of integer digits.) If you find this causing problems, please let us know. Related: #1195

This is not yet much used; feedback is welcome.

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 be repeated to set the display style for multiple commodities/currencies. Its argument is as described in the commodity directive. Note that omitting the commodity symbol will set the display style for just the no-symbol commodity, not all commodities.

In some cases hledger will adjust number formatting to improve their parseability (such as adding trailing decimal marks when needed).

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

(This option doesn’t work in a config file yet.)

Environment

These environment variables affect hledger:

HLEDGER_LESS If less is your pager, this variable specifies the less options hledger should use. (Otherwise, LESS + custom options are used.)

LEDGER_FILE The default journal file, to be used when no -f/--file option is provided. For example, it could be ~/finance/main.journal. This can also be a glob pattern, eg ./2???.journal. (If the glob matches multiple files, only the alphanumerically first one is used.) If LEDGER_FILE points to a non-existent file, an error will be raised. If the value is the empty string, it is ignored.

If LEDGER_FILE is not set and -f is not provided, the default journal file is $HOME/.hledger.journal (or if a home directory can’t be detected, ./.hledger.journal).

NO_COLOR If this environment variable exists (with any value, including empty), hledger will not use ANSI color codes in terminal output, unless overridden by an explicit --color=y or --colour=y option.

PART 2: DATA FORMATS

Journal

hledger’s usual data source is a plain text file containing journal entries in hledger journal format. If you’re looking for a quick reference, jump ahead to the journal cheatsheet (or use the table of contents at https://hledger.org/hledger.html).

This file represents an accounting General Journal. The .journal file extension is most often used, though not strictly 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 compatible with most of Ledger’s journal format, but not all of it. The differences and interoperation tips are described at hledger and Ledger. With some care, and by avoiding incompatible features, you can keep your hledger journal readable by Ledger and vice versa. This can useful eg for comparing the behaviour of one app against the other.

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 add-ons 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 Editors at hledger.org for the full list.

A hledger journal file can contain three kinds of thing: comment lines, transactions, and/or directives (including periodic transaction rules and auto posting rules). Understanding the journal file format will also give you a good understanding of hledger’s data model. Here’s a quick cheatsheet/overview, followed by detailed descriptions of each part.

Journal cheatsheet

# Here is the main syntax of hledger's journal format
# (omitting extra Ledger compatibility syntax).

###############################################################################

# 1. These are comment lines, for notes or temporarily disabling things.
; They begin with # or ;

comment
Or, lines can be enclosed within "comment" / "end comment".
This is a block of 
commented lines.
end comment

# Some journal entries can have semicolon comments at end of line  ; like this
# Some of them require 2 or more spaces before the semicolon.

###############################################################################

# 2. Directives customise processing or output in some way.
# You don't need any directives to get started.
# But they can add more error checking, or change how things are displayed.
# They begin with a word, letter, or symbol. 
# They are most often placed at the top, before transactions.

account assets             ; Declare valid account names and display order.
account assets:savings     ; A subaccount. This one represents a bank account.
account assets:checking    ; Another. Note, 2+ spaces after the account name.
account assets:receivable  ; Accounting type is inferred from english names,
account passifs            ; or declared with a "type" tag, type:L
account expenses           ; type:X
                           ; A follow-on comment line, indented.
account expenses:rent      ; Expense and revenue categories are also accounts.
                           ; Subaccounts inherit their parent's type.

commodity $0.00         ; Declare valid commodities and their display styles.
commodity 1.000,00 EUR

decimal-mark .          ; The decimal mark used in this file (if ambiguous).

payee Whole Foods       ; Declare a valid payee name.

tag trip                ; Declare a valid tag name.

P 2024-03-01 AAPL $179  ; Declare a market price for AAPL in $ on this date.

include other.journal   ; Include another journal file here.

# Declare a recurring "periodic transaction", for budget/forecast reports
~ monthly  set budget goals  ; <- Note, 2+ spaces before the description.
    (expenses:rent)      $1000
    (expenses:food)       $500

# Declare an auto posting rule, to modify existing transactions in reports
= revenues:consulting
    liabilities:tax:2024:us          *0.25  ; Add a tax liability & expense
    expenses:tax:2024:us            *-0.25  ; for 25% of the revenue.

###############################################################################

# 3. Transactions are what it's all about.
# They are dated events, usually movements of money between 2 or more accounts.
# They begin with a numeric date.
# Here is their basic shape:
#
# DATE DESCRIPTION    ; The transaction's date and optional description.
#   ACCOUNT1  AMOUNT  ; A posting of an amount to/from this account, indented.
#   ACCOUNT2  AMOUNT  ; A second posting, balancing the first.
#   ...               ; More if needed. Amounts must sum to zero.
#                     ; Note, 2+ spaces between account names and amounts.

2024-01-01 opening balances         ; At the start, declare pre-existing balances this way.
    assets:savings          $10000  ; Account names can be anything. lower case is easy to type.
    assets:checking          $1000  ; assets, liabilities, equity, revenues, expenses are common.
    liabilities:credit card  $-500  ; liabilities, equity, revenues balances are usually negative.
    equity:start                    ; One amount can be left blank. $-10500 is inferred here.
                                    ; Some of these accounts we didn't declare above,
                                    ; so -s/--strict would complain.

2024-01-03 ! (12345) pay rent
    ; Additional transaction comment lines, indented.
    ; There can be a ! or * after the date meaning "pending" or "cleared".
    ; There can be a parenthesised (code) after the date/status.
                                    ; Amounts' sign shows direction of flow.
    assets:checking          $-500  ; Minus means removed from this account (credit).
    expenses:rent             $500  ; Plus means added to this account (debit).

; Keeping transactions in date order is optional (but helps error checking).

2024-01-02 Gringott's Bank | withdrawal  ; Description can be PAYEE | NOTE
    assets:bank:gold       -10 gold
    assets:pouch            10 gold

2024-01-02 shopping
    expenses:clothing        1 gold
    expenses:wands           5 gold
    assets:pouch            -6 gold

2024-01-02 receive gift
    revenues:gifts          -3 "Chocolate Frogs"  ; Complex commodity symbols
    assets:pouch             3 "Chocolate Frogs"  ; must be in double quotes.

2024-01-15 buy some shares, in two lots                 ; Cost can be noted.
    assets:investments:2024-01-15     2.0 AAAA @ $1.50  ; @  means per-unit cost
    assets:investments:2024-01-15-02  3.0 AAAA @@ $4    ; @@ means total cost
                      ; ^ Per-lot subaccounts are sometimes useful.
    assets:checking                 $-7

2024-01-15 assert some account balances on this date
    ; Balances can be asserted in any transaction, with =, for extra error checking.
    ; Assertion txns like this one can be made with hledger close --assert --show-costs
    ;
    assets:savings                    $0                   = $10000
    assets:checking                   $0                   =   $493
    assets:bank:gold                   0 gold              =    -10 gold
    assets:pouch                       0 gold              =      4 gold
    assets:pouch                       0 "Chocolate Frogs" =      3 "Chocolate Frogs"
    assets:investments:2024-01-15      0.0 AAAA            =      2.0 AAAA @  $1.50
    assets:investments:2024-01-15-02   0.0 AAAA            =      3.0 AAAA @@ $4
    liabilities:credit card           $0                   =  $-500

2024-02-01 note some event, or a transaction not yet fully entered, on this date
    ; Postings are not required.

# Consistent YYYY-MM-DD date format is recommended,
# but you can use . or / and omit leading zeros if you prefer.
2024.01.01
2024/1/1

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. (There’s also a Ledger-compatible syntax, ; [DATE], which can be convenient.)

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 (and you can combine these, eg -UP to match all except cleared things). Or you can use the status:, status:!, and status:* queries, or the U, P, C keys in hledger-ui.

(Note: in Ledger the “unmarked” state is called “uncleared”; in hledger we renamed it to “unmarked” for semantic clarity.)

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

After the date, status mark and/or code fields, the rest of the line (or until a comment is begun with ;) is the transaction’s description. Here you can describe the transaction (called the “narration” in traditional bookkeeping), or you can record a payee/payer name, or you can leave it empty.

Transaction descriptions show up in print output and in register reports, and can be listed with the descriptions command.

You can query by description with desc:DESCREGEX, or pivot on description with --pivot desc.

Payee and note

Sometimes people want a dedicated payee/payer field that can be queried and checked more strictly. If you want that, you can write a | (pipe) character in the description. This divides it into a “payee” field on the left, and a “note” field on the right. (Either can be empty.)

You can query these with payee:PAYEEREGEX and note:NOTEREGEX, list their values with the payees and notes commands, or pivot on payee or note.

Note: in transactions with no | character, description, payee, and note all have the same value. Once a | is added, they become distinct. (If you’d like to change this behaviour, please propose it on the mail list.)

If you want more strict error checking, you can declare the valid payee names with payee directives, and then enforce these with hledger check payees. (Note: because of the above, for this you’ll need to ensure every transaction description contains a | and therefore a checkable payee name, even if it’s empty.)

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 including single spaces. If anything follows the account name on the same line, the account name must be ended by two or more spaces.)
(optional) an amount
(optional) a same-line posting comment, beginning with a semicolon (;).

If the amount is positive, it is being added to the account; if negative, it is being removed from the account.

The posting amounts in a transaction must sum up to zero, indicating that the inflows and outflows are equal. We call this a balanced transaction. (You can read more about the details of transaction balancing below.)

If no amount is written, it will be calculated automatically from the other postings in the transaction, so as to balance the transaction. In other words, in any transaction you can leave one posting amountless to save typing.

Debits and credits

The traditional accounting concepts of debit and credit of course exist in hledger, but we represent them with numeric sign. Positive and negative posting amounts represent debits and credits respectively.

You don’t need to remember that, but if you would like to - eg for helping newcomers or for talking with your accountant - here’s a handy mnemonic:

debit / plus / left / short words
credit / minus / right / longer words

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 spent on food” or “money borrowed from Frank”.

Account names are flexible. They may be capitalised or not; they may contain letters, numbers, punctuation, symbols, or single spaces; they may be in any language.

Typically we use the five traditional accounting categories as the starting point for account names. In english they are:

assets, liabilities, equity, revenues, expenses

These will be discussed more in Account types below. In hledger docs you may see them referred to as A, L, E, R, X for short.

Two space delimiter

Note the two or more spaces delimiter that’s sometimes required after account names. hledger’s account names, inherited from Ledger, are very permissive; they may contain pretty much any kind of text, including single spaces and semicolons. Because of this, they must be terminated by two or more spaces if there is anything following them on the same line. For example, if an amount, balance assignment, or same-line comment follows an account name, they must be preceded by two or more spaces, else they would be considered part of the account name:

bad:     assets:accounts receivable $10        ; <- too close!
good:    assets:accounts receivable  $10

bad:     assets:accounts receivable =$1000     ; <- too close!
good:    assets:accounts receivable  =$1000

bad:     assets:accounts receivable ; comment.   <- too close!
good:    assets:accounts receivable  ; comment

This two-space delimiter appears in a few places in hledger, such as after account names in postings or account directives; also after the period expression in periodic transaction rules. When you are starting out, expect it to catch you out at least once. It’s annoying sometimes, but it lets us use expressive account names while still keeping the syntax light.

Account hierarchy

For more precise reporting, we usually divide accounts into more detailed subaccounts, subsubaccounts, and so on, by writing a full colon between account name parts. For example, instead of writing assets and expenses, we might write assets:bank:checking and expenses:food. From these names hledger will infer this hierarchy of five accounts:

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

Or as an outline:

assets
 bank
  checking
expenses
 food

hledger reports can summarise the account tree to any depth, so you can make your subcategories as detailed as you like. But don’t go overboard, especially when getting started; simpler categories can be less work.

Other account name features

Enclosing the account name in parentheses or brackets, like (expenses:food), enables a non-standard bookkeeping feature: virtual postings.

Account names can be rewritten and restructured, temporarily or permanently, by account aliases.

Amounts

After the account name, there is usually an amount. (Remember: 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”):

..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

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

1.23
1,23

Both of these are common in international number formats, so hledger is not biased towards one or the other. Because hledger also supports digit group marks (eg thousands separators), this means that a number like 1,000 or 1.000 containing just one period or comma is ambiguous. In such cases, hledger by default assumes it is a decimal mark, and will parse both of those as 1.

To help hledger parse such ambiguous numbers more accurately, if you use digit group marks, we recommend declaring the decimal mark explicitly. The best way is to add a decimal-mark directive at the top of each data file, like this:

decimal-mark .

Or you can declare it per commodity with commodity directives, described below.

hledger also accepts numbers like 10. with no digits after the decimal mark (and will sometimes display numbers that way to disambiguate them - see Trailing decimal marks).

Digit group marks

In the integer part of the amount quantity (left of the decimal mark), groups of digits can optionally be separated by a digit group mark - a comma or period (whichever is not used as decimal mark), or a space (several Unicode space variants, like no-break space, are also accepted). So these are all valid amounts in a journal file:

     $1,000,000.00
  EUR 2.000.000,00
INR 9,99,99,999.00
      1 000 000.00   ; <- ordinary space  
      1 000 000.00   ; <- no-break space

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.

By default, the format of amounts in the journal influences how hledger displays them in output. This is explained in Commodity display style below.

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:

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

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

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.

Note that the cost normally should be a positive amount, though it’s not required to be. This can be a little confusing, see discussion at –infer-market-prices: market prices from transactions.

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 calculates and checks an account’s balance assertions in date order (and when there are multiple assertions on the same day, in parse order). Note this is different from Ledger, which checks assertions always in parse order, ignoring dates.

This means in hledger you can freely reorder transactions, postings, or files, and balance assertions will usually keep working. The exception is when you reorder multiple postings on the same day, to the same account, which have balance assertions; those will likely need updating.

Assertions and multiple files

If an account has transactions appearing in multiple files, balance assertions can still work - but only if those files are part of a hierarchy made by include directives.

If the same files are specified with two -f options on the command line, the assertions in the second will not see the balances from the first.

To work around this, arrange your files in a hierarchy with include. Or, you could concatenate the files temporarily, and process them like one big file.

Why does it work this way ? It might be related to hledger’s goal of stable predictable reports. File hierarchy is considered “permanent”, part of your data, while the order of command line options/arguments is not. We don’t want transient changes to be able to change the meaning of the data. Eg it would be frustrating if tomorrow all your balance assertions broke because you wrote command line arguments in a different order. (Discussion welcome.)

Assertions and costs

Balance assertions ignore costs, and should normally be written without one:

2019/1/1
  (a)     $1 @ €1 = $1

We do allow costs to be written in balance assertion amounts, however, and print shows them, but 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 costs), and because balance assignments do use costs (see below).

Assertions and commodities

The balance assertions described so far are “single commodity balance assertions”: they assert and check the balance in one commodity, ignoring any others that may be present. This is how balance assertions work in Ledger also.

If an account contains multiple commodities, you can assert their balances by writing multiple postings with balance assertions, one for each commodity:

2013/1/1
  usd   $-1
  eur   €-1
  both

2013/1/2
  both    0 = $1
  both    0 = €1

In hledger you can make a stronger “sole commodity balance assertion” by writing two equals signs (== EXPECTEDBALANCE). This also asserts that there are no other commodities in the account besides the asserted one (or at least, that their current balance is zero):

2013/1/1
  usd   $-1  == $-1  ; these sole commodity assertions succeed
  eur   €-1  == €-1
  both      ;==  $1  ; this one would fail because 'both' contains $ and €

It’s less easy to make a “sole commodities balance assertion” (note the plural) - ie, asserting that an account contains two or more specified commodities and no others. It can be done by

isolating each commodity in a subaccount, and asserting those
and also asserting there are no commodities in the parent account itself:

2013/1/1
  usd       $-1
  eur       €-1
  both        0 == 0   ; nothing up my sleeve
  both:usd   $1 == $1  ; a dollar here
  both:eur   €1 == €1  ; a euro there

Assertions and subaccounts

All of the balance assertions above (both = and ==) are “subaccount-exclusive balance assertions”; they ignore any balances that exist in deeper subaccounts.

In hledger you can make “subaccount-inclusive balance assertions” by adding a star after the equals (=* or ==*):

2019/1/1
  equity:start
  assets:checking  $10
  assets:savings   $10
  assets            $0 ==* $20  ; assets + subaccounts contains $20 and nothing else

Assertions and status

Balance assertions always consider postings of all statuses (unmarked, pending, or cleared); they are not affected by the -U/--unmarked / -P/--pending / -C/--cleared flags or the status: query.

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.

Assertions and hledger add

Balance assertions can be included in the amounts given in add. All types of assertions are supported, and assertions can be used as in a normal journal file.

All transactions, not just those that have an explicit assertion, are validated against the existing assertions in the journal. This means it is possible for an added transaction to fail even if its assertions are correct as of the transaction date.

If this assertion checking is not desired, then it can be disabled with -I.

However, balance assignments are currently not supported.

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

Transaction balancing

How exactly does hledger decide when a transaction is balanced ? Especially when it involves costs, which often are not exact, because of repeating decimals, or imperfect data from financial institutions ? In each commodity, hledger sums the transaction’s posting amounts, after converting any with costs; then it checks if that sum is zero, when rounded to a suitable number of decimal digits - which we call the balancing precision.

Since version 1.50, hledger infers balancing precision in each transaction from the amounts in that transaction’s journal entry (like Ledger). Ie, when checking the balance of commodity A, it uses the highest decimal precision seen for A in the journal entry (excluding cost amounts). This makes transaction balancing robust; any imbalances must be visibly accounted for in the journal entry, display precision can be freely increased with -c, and compatibility with Ledger and Beancount journals is good.

Note that hledger versions before 1.50 worked differently: they allowed display precision to override the balancing precision. This masked small imbalances and caused fragility (see issue #2402). As a result, some journal entries (or CSV rules) that worked with hledger <1.50, are now rejected with an “unbalanced transaction” error. If you hit this problem, it’s easy to fix:

You can restore the old behaviour, by adding --txn-balancing=old to the command or to your ~/.hledger.conf file. This lets you keep using old journals unchanged, though without the above benefits.
Or you can fix the problem entries (recommended). There are three ways, use whichever seems best:
1. make cost amounts more precise (add more/better decimal digits)
2. or make non-cost amounts less precise (remove unnecessary decimal digits that are raising the precision)
3. or add a posting to absorb the imbalance (eg “expenses:rounding”. Remember that one posting may omit the amount; that’s convenient here.)

data part	has tags	explanation
assets:checking account		no tags attached
expenses:food account	atag	atag: in comment
assets:checking posting	p1tag, ttag	p1tag: in comment, ttag acquired from transaction
expenses:food posting	p2tag, atag, ttag	p2tag: in comment, atag from account, ttag from transaction
groceries transaction	ttag, p1tag, p2tag, atag	ttag: in comment, p1tag from first posting, p2tag and atag from second posting

Directives

Besides transactions, there is something else you can put in a journal file: directives. These are declarations, beginning with a keyword, that modify hledger’s behaviour. Some directives can have more specific subdirectives, indented below them. hledger’s directives are similar to Ledger’s in many cases, but there are also many differences. Directives are not required, but can be useful. Here are the main directives:

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

Directives and multiple files

Directives vary in their scope, ie which journal entries and which input files they affect. Most often, a directive will affect the following entries and included files if any, until the end of the current file - and no further. You might find this inconvenient! For example, alias directives do not affect parent or sibling files. But there are usually workarounds; for example, put alias directives in your top-most file, before including other files.

The restriction, though it may be annoying at first, is in a good cause; it allows reports to be stable and deterministic, independent of the order of input. Without it, reports could show different numbers depending on the order of -f options, or the positions of include directives in your files.

Directive effects

Here are all hledger’s directives, with their effects and scope summarised - nine main directives, plus four others which we consider non-essential:

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 display style for all amounts of this commodity 3. the decimal mark for parsing amounts of this commodity, in the rest of this file and its children, if there is no `decimal-mark` directive 4. the precision to use for balanced-transaction checking in this commodity, in this file and its children. Takes precedence over `D`. Subdirectives: `format` (ignored). Command line equivalent: `-c/--commodity-style`	N, N, Y, Y
`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.

`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.
They can store additional account information as comments, or as tags which can be used to filter or pivot reports.
They can restrict which accounts may be posted to by transactions, eg in strict mode, which helps prevent errors.
They influence account display order in reports, allowing non-alphabetic sorting (eg Revenues to appear above Expenses).
They can help hledger know your accounts’ types (asset, liability, equity, revenue, expense), enabling reports like balancesheet and incomestatement.
They help with account name completion (in hledger add, hledger-web, hledger-iadd, ledger-mode, etc.)

They are written as the word account followed by a hledger-style account name. Eg:

account assets:bank:checking

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

account assets:bank:checking
  format subdirective  ; currently ignored

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 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, or when you run hledger check accounts, 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.
If you use the –infer-equity flag, you will also need declarations for the account names it generates.

Account display order

Account directives also cause hledger to display accounts in a particular order, not just alphabetically. Eg, here is a conventional ordering for the top-level accounts:

account assets
account liabilities
account equity
account revenues
account expenses

Now hledger displays them in that order:

$ hledger accounts
assets
liabilities
equity
revenues
expenses

If there are undeclared accounts, those will be displayed last, in alphabetical order.

Sorting is done within each group of sibling accounts, at each level of the account tree. Eg, a declaration like account parent:child influences child’s position among its siblings.

Note, it does not affect parent’s position; for that, you need an account parent declaration.

Sibling accounts are always displayed together; hledger won’t display x:y in between a:b and a:c.

An account directive both declares an account as a valid posting target, and declares its display order; you can’t easily do one without the other.

Account types

hledger knows that in accounting there are three main account types:

`Asset`	`A`	things you own
`Liability`	`L`	things you owe
`Equity`	`E`	owner’s investment, balances the two above

and two more representing changes in these:

`Revenue`	`R`	inflows (also known as `Income`)
`Expense`	`X`	outflows

hledger also uses a couple of subtypes:

`Cash`	`C`	liquid assets
`Conversion`	`V`	commodity conversions equity

As a convenience, hledger will detect these types automatically from english account names. But it’s better to declare them explicitly by adding a type: tag in the account directives. The tag’s value can be any of the types or one-letter abbreviations above.

Here is a typical set of account type declarations. Subaccounts will inherit their parent’s type, or can override it:

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

This enables the easy balancesheet, balancesheetequity, cashflow and incomestatement reports, and querying by type:.

Tips:

You can list accounts and their types, for troubleshooting:

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

It’s a good idea to declare at least one account for each account type. Having some types declared and some inferred can disrupt certain reports.

The rules for inferring types from account names are as follows (using Regular expressions).
If they don’t work for you, just ignore them and declare your types with type: tags.

If account's name contains this case insensitive 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

As mentioned above, subaccounts will inherit a type from their parent account. To be precise, 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.
Account aliases can disrupt account types.

`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.

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:

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

2023-01-01  ; 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

2023-01-01  ; 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 --types -1 --alias assets=bassetts

`commodity` directive

The commodity directive performs several functions:

It declares which commodity symbols may be used in the journal, enabling useful error checking with strict mode or the check command. See Commodity error checking below.
It declares how all amounts in this commodity should be displayed, eg how many decimals to show. See Commodity display style above.
(If no decimal-mark directive is in effect:) It sets the decimal mark to expect (period or comma) when parsing amounts in this commodity, in this file and files it includes, from the directive until end of current file. See Decimal marks above.
It declares the precision with which this commodity’s amounts should be compared when checking for balanced transactions, anywhere in this file and files it includes, until end of current file.

Declaring commodities solves several common parsing/display problems, so we recommend it.

Note that effects 3 and 4 above end at the end of the directive’s file, and will not affect sibling or parent files. So if you are relying on them (especially 4) and using multiple files, placing your commodity directives in a top-level parent file might be important. Or, keep your decimal marks unambiguous and your entries well balanced and precise.

Omitting the commodity symbol will set the display style for just the no-symbol commodity, not all commodities.

Commodity styles can be overridden by the -c/--commodity-style command line option.

(Related: #793)

Commodity directive syntax

A commodity directive is normally the word commodity followed by a sample amount (and optionally a comment). Only the amount’s symbol and the number’s format is significant. Eg:

commodity $1000.00
commodity 1.000,00 EUR
commodity 1 000 000.0000   ; the no-symbol commodity

Commodities do not have tags (tags in the comment will be ignored).

A commodity directive’s sample amount must always include a period or comma decimal mark (this rule helps disambiguate decimal marks and digit group marks). If you don’t want to show any decimal digits, write the decimal mark at the end:

commodity 1000. AAAA       ; show AAAA with no decimals

Commodity symbols containing spaces, numbers, or punctuation must be enclosed in double quotes, as usual:

commodity 1.0000 "AAAA 2023"

Commodity directives normally include a sample amount, but can declare only a symbol (ie, just function 1 above):

commodity $
commodity INR
commodity "AAAA 2023"
commodity ""               ; the no-symbol commodity

Commodity directives may also be written with an indented format subdirective, as in Ledger. The symbol is repeated and must be the same in both places. Other subdirectives are currently ignored:

; 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
  an unsupported subdirective  ; ignored by hledger

Commodity error checking

In strict mode (-s/--strict) (or when you run hledger check commodities), hledger will report an error if an undeclared commodity symbol is used. (With one exception: zero amounts are always allowed to have no commodity symbol.) It works like account error checking (described above).

`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 .

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 SOMEFILE

This has the same effect as if SOMEFILE’s content was inlined at this point. (With any include directives in SOMEFILE processed similarly, recursively.)

Only journal files can include other files. They can include journal, timeclock or timedot files, but not CSV files.

If the file path begins with a tilde, that means your home directory: include ~/main.journal.

If it begins with a slash, it is an absolute path: include /home/user/main.journal. Otherwise it is relative to the including file’s folder: include ../finances/main.journal.

Also, the path may have a file type prefix to force a specific file format, overriding the file extension(s) (as described in Data formats): include timedot:notes/2023.md.

The path may contain glob patterns to match multiple files. hledger’s globs are similar to zsh’s: ? to match any character; [a-z] to match any character in a range; * to match zero or more characters that aren’t a path separator (like /); ** to match zero or more subdirectories and/or zero or more characters at the start of a file name; etc. Also, hledger’s globs always exclude the including file itself. So, you can do

include *.journal to include all other journal files in the current directory (excluding dot files)
include **.journal to include all other journal files in this directory and below (excluding dot directories/files)
include timelogs/2???.timedot to include all timedot files named like a year number.

There is a limitation: hledger’s globs always exclude paths involving dot files or dot directories. This is a workaround for unavoidable dot directory traversal; you can disable it and revert to older behaviour with the --old-glob flag, for now.

If you are using many, or deeply nested, include files, and have an error that’s hard to pinpoint: a good troubleshooting command is hledger files --debug=6 (or 7).

`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 Value reporting.

`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    ; a comment

Payees do not have tags (tags in the comment will be ignored).

To declare the empty payee name, use "".

payee ""

Ledger-style indented subdirectives, if any, 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; if you want to prevent this, you can declare and check your tags .

Periodic transactions

The ~ directive declares a “periodic rule” which generates temporary extra transactions, usually recurring at some interval, when hledger is run with the --forecast flag. These “forecast transactions” are useful for forecasting future activity. They exist only for the duration of the report, and only when --forecast is used; they are not saved in the journal file by hledger.

Periodic rules also have a second use: with the --budget flag they set budget goals for budgeting.

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

Two spaces accidentally added or omitted will cause you trouble - read about this below.
For troubleshooting, show the generated transactions with hledger print --forecast tag:generated or hledger register --forecast tag:generated.
Forecasted transactions will begin only after the last non-forecasted transaction’s date.
Forecasted transactions will end 6 months from today, by default. See below for the exact start/end rules.
period expressions can be tricky. Their documentation needs improvement, but is worth studying.
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.
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 2023/01, which is equivalent to
~ every 10th day of month from 2023/01/01, 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:

the first day of the default year specified by a recent Y directive
or the date specified with --today
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 2023"
;               ||
;               vv
~ every 2 months  in 2023, 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.

Auto postings

The = directive declares an “auto posting rule”, which adds extra postings to existing transactions. (Remember, postings are the account name & amount lines below a transaction’s date & description.)

In the journal, an auto posting rule looks quite like a transaction, but instead of date and description it has = (mnemonic: “match”) and a query, like this:

= QUERY
    ACCOUNT    AMOUNT
    ...

Queries are just like command line queries; an account name substring is most common. Query terms containing spaces should be enclosed in single or double quotes.

Each = rule works like this: when hledger is run with the --auto flag, wherever the QUERY matches a posting in the journal, the rule’s postings are added to that transaction, immediately below the matched posting. Note these generated postings are temporary, existing only for the duration of the report, and only when --auto is used; they are not saved in the journal file by hledger.

The postings can contain the special string %account which will be expanded to the account name of the matched account.

Generated postings’ amounts can depend on the matched posting’s amount. So auto postings can be useful for, eg, adding tax postings with a standard percentage. AMOUNT can be:

a number with no commodity symbol, like 2. The matched posting’s commodity symbol will be added to this.
a normal amount with a commodity symbol, like $2. This will be used as-is.
an asterisk followed by a number, like *2. This will multiply the matched posting’s amount (and total price, if any) by the number.
an asterisk followed by an amount with commodity symbol, like *$2. This multiplies and also replaces the commodity symbol with this new one.

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

Note that depending fully on generated data such as this has some drawbacks - it’s less portable, less future-proof, less auditable by others, and less robust (eg your balance assertions will depend on whether you use or don’t use --auto). An alternative is to use auto postings in “one time” fashion - use them to help build a complex journal entry, view it with hledger print --auto, and then copy that output into the journal file to make it permanent.

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”.

Auto postings on forecast transactions only

Tip: you can can make auto postings that will apply to forecast transactions but not recorded transactions, by adding tag:_generated-transaction to their QUERY. This can be useful when generating new journal entries to be saved in the journal.

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.

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 costs

A cost in a balance assignment will cause the calculated amount to have that cost attached:

2019/1/1
  (a)             = $1 @ €2

$ hledger print --explicit
2019-01-01
    (a)         $1 @ €2 = $1 @ €2

Balance assignments and multiple files

Balance assignments handle multiple files like balance assertions. They see balance from other files previously included from the current file, but not from previous sibling or parent files.

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 current file.

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: DATE1=DATE2. If the year is omitted, the primary date’s year is assumed. When running reports, the primary (left side) date is used by default, but with the --date2 flag (--aux-date or--effective also work, for Ledger users), the secondary (right side) date will be used instead.

The meaning of secondary dates is up to you. Eg it could be “primary is the bank’s clearing date, secondary is the date the transaction was initiated, if different”.

In practice, this feature usually adds confusion:

You have to remember the primary and secondary dates’ meaning, and follow that consistently.
It splits your bookkeeping into two modes, and you have to remember which mode is appropriate for a given report.
Usually your balance assertions will work with only one of these modes.
It makes your financial data more complicated, less portable, and less clear in an audit.
It interacts with every feature, creating an ongoing cost for implementors.
It distracts new users and supporters.
Posting dates are simpler and work better.

So secondary dates are officially deprecated in hledger, remaining only as a Ledger compatibility aid; we recommend using posting dates instead.

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, like (some:account) 10, is called an unbalanced virtual posting. These postings do not participate in transaction balancing. (And if you write them without an amount, a zero amount is always inferred.) These can occasionally be convenient for special circumstances, but they violate double entry bookkeeping and make your data less portable across applications, so many people avoid using them at all.

A posting with brackets around the account name ([some:account]) is called a balanced virtual posting. The balanced virtual postings in a transaction must add up to zero, just like ordinary postings, but separately from them. These are not part of double entry bookkeeping either, but they are at least balanced. An example:

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

Ordinary 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.

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.

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 that 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”.
{=UNITCOST} and {{{{=TOTALCOST}}}} (fixed price)
- when buying, means “this cost is also the fixed value, 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 @ ..., selects an existing lot by its cost basis. Does not check if that lot is present.
[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
supports @ and @@
treats (@) and (@@) as synonyms for @ and @@
and ignores the rest. (This can break transaction balancing.)

Beancount has simpler notation and different behaviour:

@ UNITCOST and @@ TOTALCOST
- expresses a cost without creating a lot, as in hledger
- when buying (acquiring) or selling (disposing of) a lot, and combined with {...}: is not used except to document the cost/selling price
{UNITCOST} and {{{{TOTALCOST}}}}
- when buying, expresses the cost for transaction balancing, and also creates a lot with this cost basis attached
- when selling,
  - 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
{}, {YYYY-MM-DD}, {"LABEL"}, {UNITCOST, "LABEL"}, {UNITCOST, YYYY-MM-DD, "LABEL"}
- when selling, other combinations of date/cost/label, like the above, are accepted for selecting the lot.

Currently, hledger

supports @ and @@
accepts the {UNITCOST}/{{{{TOTALCOST}}}} notation, but ignores it
and rejects the rest.

CSV

hledger can read transactions from CSV (comma-separated values) files. More precisely, it can read DSV (delimiter-separated values), from a file or standard input. Comma-separated, semicolon-separated and tab-separated are the most common variants, and hledger will recognise these three automatically based on a .csv, .ssv or .tsv file name extension or a csv:, ssv: or tsv: file path prefix.

(To learn about producing CSV or TSV output, see Output format.)

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 expects this rules file to be named like the CSV file, with an extra .rules extension added, 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 option.

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 Tutorial: Import CSV data 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.)

`source`	optionally declare which file to read data from
`archive`	optionally enable an archive of imported files
`encoding`	optionally declare which text encoding the data has
`separator`	declare the field separator, instead of relying on file extension
`decimal-mark`	declare the decimal mark used in CSV amounts, when ambiguous
`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
`skip`	(at top level) skip header line(s) at start of file
`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
`skip`	(inside an `if` rule) skip current record(s)
`end`	(inside an `if` rule) skip all remaining records
`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.

`source`

If you tell hledger to read a csv file with -f foo.csv, it will look for rules in foo.csv.rules. Or, you can tell it to read the rules file, with -f foo.csv.rules, and it will look for data in foo.csv (since 1.30). These are mostly equivalent, but the second method provides some extra features. For one, the data file can be missing, without causing an error; it is just considered empty.

For more flexibility, add a source rule, which lets you specify a different data file:

source ./Checking1.csv

If the file does not exist, it is just considered empty, without raising an error.

If you specify just a file name with no path, hledger will look for it in the ~/Downloads folder:

source Checking1.csv

You can use a glob pattern, to avoid specifying the file name exactly:

source Checking1*.csv

This has another benefit: if the pattern matches multiple files, hledger will read the newest (most recently modified) one. This avoids problems if you have downloaded a file multiple times without cleaning up.

All this enables a convenient workflow where can you just download CSV files, then run hledger import rules/*.

Data cleaning / data generating commands

After source’s file pattern, you can write | (pipe) and a data cleaning command (or command pipeline). If hledger’s CSV rules aren’t enough, you can pre-process the downloaded data here with a shell command or script, to make it more suitable for conversion. The command will be executed by your default shell, in the directory of the rules file, will receive the data file’s content as standard input, and should output zero or more lines of character-separated-values, suitable for conversion by the CSV rules.

Examples:

source ./paypal.json | paypalcsv
source data/simplefin.json | simplefincsv - 'chase.*card'
source OfxDownload*.csv | grep -vE '^(([^,]*,){6}[^,]*|)$' | sort -t, -n +2
source History_for_Account_Z20144832*.csv   # | grep -E '^([^,]*,){12}[^,]*$' | sed -E -e 's/^ //' -e 's/\.([0-9]),/.\10,/g' -e 's/,([0-9]+),/,\1.00,/g'

Or, after source you can write | and a data generating command (with no file pattern before the |). This command receives no input, and should output zero or more lines of character-separated values, suitable for conversion by the CSV rules.

Examples:

source | paypaljson | paypalcsv
source | paypalcsv data/paypal.json 
source | simplefinjson >data/simplefin.json && simplefincsv data/simplefin.json 'chase.*card'
source | simplefincsv data/simplefin.json 'unify.*checking'

(paypal* and simplefin* scripts are in bin/)

Whenever hledger runs one of these commands, it will echo the command on stderr. If the command produces error output, but exits successfully, hledger will show the error output as a warning. If the command fails, hledger will fail and show the error output in the error message.

Added in 1.50; experimental.

`archive`

With archive added to a rules file, the import command will archive each successfully processed data file or data command output in a nearby data/ directory. The archive file name will be based on the rules file and the data file’s modification date and extension (or for a data-generating command, the current date and the “.csv” extension). The original data file, if any, will be removed.

Also, in this mode import will prefer the oldest file matched by the source rule’s glob pattern, not the newest. (So if there are multiple downloads, they will be imported and archived oldest first.)

Archiving is optional, but it can be useful for troubleshooting your CSV rules, regenerating entries with improved rules, checking for variations in your bank’s CSV, etc.

Added in 1.50; experimental.

`encoding`

encoding ENCODING

hledger normally expects non-ascii text to be using the system locale’s text encoding. If you need to read CSV files which have some other encoding, you can do it by adding encoding ENCODING to your CSV rules. Eg: encoding iso-8859-1.

The following encodings are supported:

ascii, utf-8, utf-16, utf-32, iso-8859-1, iso-8859-2, iso-8859-3, iso-8859-4, iso-8859-5, iso-8859-6, iso-8859-7, iso-8859-8, iso-8859-9, iso-8859-10, iso-8859-11, iso-8859-13, iso-8859-14, iso-8859-15, iso-8859-16, cp1250, cp1251, cp1252, cp1253, cp1254, cp1255, cp1256, cp1257, cp1258, koi8-r, koi8-u, gb18030, macintosh, jis-x-0201, jis-x-0208, iso-2022-jp, shift-jis, cp437, cp737, cp775, cp850, cp852, cp855, cp857, cp860, cp861, cp862, cp863, cp864, cp865, cp866, cp869, cp874, cp932.

Added in 1.42.

`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. You’ll need this whenever your CSV data contains header lines. Note, empty and blank lines are skipped automatically, so you don’t need to count those.

skip has a second meaning: it can be used inside if blocks (described below), to skip one or more records whenever the condition is true. Records skipped in this way are ignored, except they are still required to be valid CSV.

`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

Note currently there is no locale awareness for things like %b, and setting LC_TIME won’t help.

`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 same-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`

If CSV records within a single day are ordered opposite to the overall record order, you can add the intra-day-reversed rule to improve the order of journal entries. Eg, here the overall record order is newest first, but same-day records are oldest first:

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

# 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.

CSV fields and hledger fields

This can be confusing, so here’s an overview. (It mentions some things we haven’t covered yet.)

CSV fields are provided by your data file. Their default name is their position in the CSV record, starting with 1. You can also give them a readable name (with the fields rule).
hledger fields are predefined. They correspond to parts of a transaction’s journal entry (mostly). date, description, account1, amount1, account2 are some of these.
These are the only fields you’ll work with; you can’t make new ones in a rules file. (If you need extra CSV fields, you can add them to the data in preprocessing, before running the rules.)
You’ll be reading CSV fields. (They can’t be written to.) They’ll be on the right hand side, with a % prefix. Eg
- testing a CSV field’s value: if %CSVFIELD ...
- interpolating its value: HLEDGERFIELD %CSVFIELD
You’ll be writing to hledger fields. (They can’t be read.) They’ll be on the left hand side, with no prefix. Eg
- setting the transaction’s description: description VALUE
You can give a CSV field the same name as one of the hledger fields. If you do, its value will be automatically assigned to that hledger field.

`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:

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.
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 either by their 1-based position in the CSV record (%N) or by the name they were given in the fields list (%CSVFIELD), and regular expression match groups (\N).

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:

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
```
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.

Posting comments can also contain a posting date. A secondary date, or a year-less date, will be ignored.

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 ways to set posting amounts from CSV, useful in different situations.

amount is the oldest and simplest. Assigning to this sets the amount of the first and second postings. In the second posting, the amount will be negated; also, if it has a cost attached, it will be converted to cost.
amount-in and amount-out work exactly like the above, but should be used when the CSV has two amount fields (such as “Debit” and “Credit”, or “Inflow” and “Outflow”). Whichever field has a non-zero value will be used as the amount of the first and second postings. Here are some tips to avoid confusion:
- It’s not “amount-in for posting 1 and amount-out for posting 2”, it is “extract a single amount from the amount-in or amount-out field, and use that for posting 1 and (negated) for posting 2”.
- Don’t use both amount and amount-in/amount-out in the same rules file; choose based on whether the amount is in a single CSV field or spread across two fields.
- In each record, at most one of the two CSV fields should contain a non-zero amount; the other field must contain a zero or nothing.
- hledger assumes both CSV fields contain unsigned numbers, and it automatically negates the amount-out values.
- If the data doesn’t fit these requirements, you’ll probably need an if rule (see below).
amountN (where N is a number from 1 to 99) sets the amount of only a single posting: the Nth posting in the transaction. You’ll usually need at least two such assignments to make a balanced transaction. You can also generate more than two postings, to represent more complex transactions. The posting numbers don’t have to be consecutive; with if rules, higher posting numbers can be useful to ensure a certain order of postings.
amountN-in and amountN-out work exactly like the above, but should be used when the CSV has two amount fields. This is analogous to amount-in and amount-out, and those tips also apply here.
Remember that a fields list can also do assignments. So in a fields list if you name a CSV field “amount”, that counts as assigning to amount. (If you don’t want that, call it something else in the fields list, like “amount_”.)
The above don’t handle every situation; if you need more flexibility, use an if rule to set amounts conditionally. See “Working with CSV > Setting amounts” below for more on this and on amount-setting generally.

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 the Working with CSV 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

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 of matcher:

A whole record matcher is simplest: it is just a word, single-line text fragment, or other regular expression, which hledger will try to match case-insensitively anywhere within the CSV record.
Eg: whole foods.
A field matcher has a percent-prefixed CSV field number or name before the pattern.
Eg: %3 whole foods or %description whole foods.
hledger will try to match the pattern just within the named CSV field.

When using these, there’s two things to be aware of:

Whole record matchers don’t see the exact original record; they see a reconstruction of it, in which values are comma-separated, and quotes enclosing values and whitespace outside those quotes are removed.
Eg when reading an SSV record like: 2023-01-01 ; "Acme, Inc. " ; 1,000
the whole record matcher sees instead: 2023-01-01,Acme, Inc. ,1,000
Field matchers expect either a CSV field number, or a CSV field name declared with fields. (Don’t use a hledger field name here, unless it is also a CSV field name.) A non-CSV field name will cause the matcher to match against "" (the empty string), and does not raise an error, allowing easier reuse of common rules with different CSV files.

You can also prefix a matcher with ! (and optional space) to negate it. Eg ! whole foods, ! %3 whole foods, !%description whole foods will match if “whole foods” is NOT present. Added in 1.32.

The pattern is, as usual in hledger, a POSIX extended regular expression that also supports GNU word boundaries (\b, \B, \<, \>) and nothing else. For more details and tips, see Regular expressions in CSV rules below.

Multiple matchers

When an if block has multiple matchers, each on its own line,

By default they are OR’d (any of them can match).
Matcher lines beginning with & (or &&, since 1.42) are AND’ed with the matcher above (all in the AND’ed group must match).
Matcher lines beginning with & ! (since 1.41, or && !, since 1.42) are first negated and then AND’ed with the matcher above.

You can also combine multiple matchers one the same line separated by && (AND) or && ! (AND NOT). Eg %description amazon && %date 2025-01-01 will match only when the description field contains “amazon” and the date field contains “2025-01-01”. Added in 1.42.

Match groups

Added in 1.32

Matchers can define match groups: parenthesised portions of the regular expression which are available for reference in field assignments. Groups are enclosed in regular parentheses (( and )) and can be nested. Each group is available in field assignments using the token \N, where N is an index into the match groups for this conditional block (e.g. \1, \2, etc.).

Example: Warp credit card payment postings to the beginning of the billing period (Month start), to match how they are presented in statements, using posting dates:

if %date (....-..)-..
  comment2 date:\1-01

Another example: Read the expense account from the CSV field, but throw away a prefix:

if %account1 liabilities:family:(expenses:.*)
    account1 \1

`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 && MATCHERC,VALUE1,VALUE2,...  (*since 1.42*)
; Comment line that explains MATCHERD
MATCHERD,VALUE1,VALUE2,...
<empty line>

The first character after if is taken to be this if table’s field separator. It is unrelated to the separator used in the CSV file. It should be a non-alphanumeric character like , or | that does not appear anywhere else in the table (it should not be used in field names or matchers or values, and it cannot be escaped with a backslash).

Each line must contain the same number of separators; empty values are allowed. Whitespace can be used in the matcher lines for readability (but not in the if line, currently). You can use the comment lines in the table body. The table must be terminated by an empty line (or end of file).

An if table like the above is interpreted as follows: try all of the lines with matchers; whenever a line with matchers succeeds, assign all of the values on that line to the corresponding hledger fields; If multiple lines match, later lines will override fields assigned by the earlier ones - just like the sequence of if blocks would behave.

If table presented above is equivalent to this sequence of if blocks:

if MATCHERA
  HLEDGERFIELD1 VALUE1
  HLEDGERFIELD2 VALUE2
  ...

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

; Comment line which explains MATCHERD
if MATCHERD
  HLEDGERFIELD1 VALUE1
  HLEDGERFIELD2 VALUE2
  ...

Example:

if,account2,comment
atm transaction fee,expenses:business:banking,deductible? check it
%description groceries,expenses:groceries,
;; Comment line that desribes why this particular date is special
2023/01/12.*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 specify a rules file with --rules, that rules file will be used for all the CSV files.

Reading files specified by rule

Instead of specifying a CSV file in the command line, you can specify a rules file, as in hledger -f foo.csv.rules CMD. By default this will read data from foo.csv in the same directory, but you can add a source rule to specify a different data file, perhaps located in your web browser’s download directory.

This feature was added in hledger 1.30, so you won’t see it in most CSV rules examples. But it helps remove some of the busywork of managing CSV downloads. Most of your financial institutions’s default CSV filenames are different and can be recognised by a glob pattern. So you can put a rule like source Checking1*.csv in foo-checking.csv.rules, and then periodically follow a workflow like:

Download CSV from Foo’s website, using your browser’s defaults
Run hledger import foo-checking.csv.rules to import any new transactions

After import, you can: discard the CSV, or leave it where it is for a while, or move it into your archives, as you prefer. If you do nothing, next time your browser will save something like Checking1-2.csv, and hledger will use that because of the * wild card and because it is the most recent.

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

Regular expressions in CSV rules

Regular expressions in if conditions (AKA matchers) are POSIX extended regular expressions, that also support GNU word boundaries (\b, \B, \<, \>), and nothing else. (For more detail, see Regular expressions.)

Here are some examples that might be useful in CSV rules:

Is field “foo” truly empty ? if %foo ^$
Is it empty or containing only whitespace ? if %foo ^ *$
Is it non-empty ? if %foo .
Does it contain non-whitespace ? if %foo [^ ]

Testing the value of numeric fields is a little harder. You can’t use hledger queries like amt:0 or amt:>10 in CSV rules. But you can often achieve the same thing with a regular expression.

Note the content and layout of number fields in CSV varies, and can change over time (eg if you switch data providers). So numeric regexps are always somewhat specific to your particular CSV data; and it’s a good idea to make them defensive and robust if you can.

Here are some examples:

Does foo contain a non-zero number ? if %foo [1-9]
Is it negative ? if %foo -
Is it non-negative ? if ! %foo -
Is it >= 10 ? if %foo [1-9][0-9]+\. (assuming a decimal period and no leading zeros)
Is it >= 10 and < 20 ? if %foo \b1[0-9]\.

Setting amounts

Continuing from amount field above, here are more tips for amount-setting:

If the amount is in a single CSV field:
1. 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.
2. 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
```
If the amount is in two CSV fields (such as Debit and Credit, or In and Out):
1. If both fields are unsigned:
  Assign one field to amountN-in and the other to amountN-out. hledger will automatically negate the “out” field, and will use whichever field value is non-zero as posting N’s amount.
2. If either field is signed:
  You will probably need to override hledger’s sign for one or the other field, as in the following example:
```
# Negate the -out value, but only if it is not empty:
fields date, description, amount1-in, amount1-out
if %amount1-out [1-9]
 amount1-out -%amount1-out
```
1. 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
```
If you want posting 2’s amount converted to cost:
Use the unnumbered amount (or amount-in and amount-out) syntax.
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 making it easier to parse and to reverse amount signs. (This only works for whole amounts, not for cost amounts such as COST in amount1 AMT @ COST):

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 "".

It’s not possible (without preprocessing the CSV) to set an amount to its absolute value, ie discard its sign.

Setting currency/commodity

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

2023-01-01,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

2023-01-01 foo
    expenses:unknown         $123.00
    income:unknown          $-123.00

If the currency is provided as a separate CSV field:

2023-01-01,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

2023-01-01 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

2023-01-01 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

When you are reading CSV data, eg with a command like hledger -f foo.csv print, hledger will infer each commodity’s decimal precision (and other commodity display styles) from the amounts - much as when reading a journal file without commodity directives (see the link).

Note, the commodity styles are not inferred from the numbers in the original CSV data; rather, they are inferred from the amounts generated by the CSV rules.

When you are importing CSV data with the import command, eg hledger import foo.csv, there’s another step: import tries to make the new entries conform to the journal’s existing styles. So for each commodity - let’s say it’s EUR - import will choose:

the style declared for EUR by a commodity directive in the journal
otherwise, the style inferred from EUR amounts in the journal
otherwise, the style inferred from EUR amounts generated by the CSV rules.

TLDR: if import is not generating the precisions or styles you want, add a commodity directive to specify them.

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 get a confusing error while reading a CSV file, it may help to try to understand which of these steps is failing:

Any included rules files are inlined, from top to bottom, depth first (scanning each included file for further includes, recursively, before proceeding).
Top level rules (date-format, fields, newest-first, skip etc) are read, top to bottom. “Top level rules” means non-conditional rules. If a rule occurs more than once, the last one wins; except for skip/end rules, where the first one wins.
The CSV file is read as text. Any non-ascii characters will be decoded using the text encoding specified by the encoding rule, otherwise the system locale’s text encoding.
Any top-level skip or end rule is applied. skip [N] immediately skips the current or next N CSV records; end immediately skips all remaining CSV records (not normally used at top level).
Now any remaining CSV records are processed. For each CSV record, in file order:
- Is there a conditional skip/end rule that applies for this record ? Search the if blocks, from top to bottom, for a succeeding one containing a skip or end rule. If found, skip the specified number of CSV records, then continue at 5.
  Otherwise…
- Do some basic validation on this CSV record (eg, check that it has at least two fields).
- For each hledger field (date, description, account1, etc.):
  1. Get the field’s assigned value, first searching top level assignments, made directly or by the fields rule, then assignments made inside succeeding if blocks. If there are more than one, the last one wins.
  2. Compute the field’s actual value (as text), by interpolating any %CSVFIELD references within the assigned value; or by choosing a default value if there was no assignment.
- Generate a hledger transaction from the hledger field values, parsing them if needed (eg from text to an amount).

This is all done by the CSV reader, one of several readers hledger can use to read transactions from an input file. When all input files have been read successfully, their transactions are passed 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

hledger can read time logs in the timeclock time logging format of timeclock.el. As with Ledger, hledger’s timeclock format is a subset/variant of timeclock.el’s.

hledger’s timeclock format was updated in hledger 1.43 and 1.50. If your old time logs are rejected, you should adapt them to modern hledger; for now, you can restore the pre-1.43 behaviour with the --old-timeclock flag.

Here the timeclock format in hledger 1.50+:

# Comment lines like these, and blank lines, are ignored:
# comment line
; comment line
* comment line

# Lines beginning with b, h, or capital O are also ignored, for compatibility:
b SIMPLEDATE HH:MM[:SS][+-ZZZZ][ TEXT]
h SIMPLEDATE HH:MM[:SS][+-ZZZZ][ TEXT]
O SIMPLEDATE HH:MM[:SS][+-ZZZZ][ TEXT]

# Lines beginning with i or o are are clock-in / clock-out entries:
i SIMPLEDATE HH:MM[:SS][+-ZZZZ] ACCOUNT[  DESCRIPTION][;COMMENT]]
o SIMPLEDATE HH:MM[:SS][+-ZZZZ][ ACCOUNT][;COMMENT]

The date is a hledger simple date (YYYY-MM-DD or similar). The time parts must use two digits. The seconds are optional. A + or - four-digit time zone is accepted for compatibility, but currently ignored; times are always interpreted as a local time.

In clock-in entries (i), the account name is required. A transaction description, separated from the account name by 2+ spaces, is optional. A transaction comment, beginning with ;, is also optional. (Indented following comment lines are also allowed, as in journal format.)

In clock-out entries (o) have no description, but can have a comment if you wish. A clock-in and clock-out pair form a “transaction” posting some number of hours to an account - also known as a session. Eg:

i 2015/03/30 09:00:00 session1
o 2015/03/30 10:00:00

$ hledger -f a.timeclock print
2015-03-30 * 09:00-10:00
    (session1)           1.00h

Clock-ins and clock-outs are matched by their account/session name. If a clock-out does not specify a name, the most recent unclosed clock-in is closed. You can have multiple sessions active simultaneously. Entries are processed in the order they are parsed. Sessions spanning more than one day are automatically split at day boundaries.

Eg, the following time log:

i 2015/03/30 09:00:00 some account  optional description after 2 spaces ; optional comment, tags:
o 2015/03/30 09:20:00
i 2015/03/31 22:21:45 another:account
o 2015/04/01 02:00:34
i 2015/04/02 12:00:00 another:account  ; this demonstrates multple sessions being clocked in
i 2015/04/02 13:00:00 some account
o 2015/04/02 14:00:00
o 2015/04/02 15:00:00 another:account

generates these transactions:

$ hledger -f t.timeclock print
2015-03-30 * optional description after 2 spaces   ; optional comment, tags:
    (some account)           0.33h

2015-03-31 * 22:21-23:59
    (another:account)           1.64h

2015-04-01 * 00:00-02:00
    (another:account)           2.01h

2015-04-02 * 12:00-15:00  ; this demonstrates multiple sessions being clocked in
    (another:account)           3.00h

2015-04-02 * 13:00-14:00
    (some account)           1.00h

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 these shell aliases at the command line:

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 Emacs’s built-in timeclock.el, or the extended timeclock-x.el, and perhaps the extras in ledgerutils.el
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 more convenient for quick, approximate, and retroactive time logging, and more human-readable (you can see at a glance where time was spent). A quick example:

2023-05-01
hom:errands          .... ....  ; two hours; the space is ignored
fos:hledger:timedot  ..         ; half an hour
per:admin:finance               ; no time spent yet

hledger reads this as a transaction on this day with three (unbalanced) postings, where each dot represents “0.25”. No commodity symbol is assumed, but we typically interpret it as hours.

$ hledger -f a.timedot print   # .timedot file extension (or timedot: prefix) is required
2023-05-01 *
    (hom:errands)                    2.00  ; two hours
    (fos:hledger:timedot)            0.50  ; half an hour
    (per:admin:finance)                 0

A timedot file contains a series of transactions (usually one per day). Each begins with a simple date (Y-M-D, Y/M/D, or Y.M.D), optionally be followed on the same line by a transaction description, and/or a transaction comment following a semicolon.

After the date line are zero or more time postings, consisting of:

An account name - any hledger-style account name, optionally indented.
Two or more spaces - required if there is an amount (as in journal format).
A timedot amount, which can be
- empty (representing zero)
- a number, optionally followed by a unit s, m, h, d, w, mo, or y, representing a precise number of seconds, minutes, hours, days weeks, months or years (hours is assumed by default), which will be converted to hours according to 60s = 1m, 60m = 1h, 24h = 1d, 7d = 1w, 30d = 1mo, 365d = 1y.
- one or more dots (period characters), each representing 0.25. These are the dots in “timedot”. Spaces are ignored and can be used for grouping/alignment.
- Added in 1.32 one or more letters. These are like dots but they also generate a tag t: (short for “type”) with the letter as its value, and a separate posting for each of the values. This provides a second dimension of categorisation, viewable in reports with --pivot t.
An optional comment following a semicolon (a hledger-style posting comment).

There is some flexibility to help with keeping time log data and notes in the same file:

Blank lines and lines beginning with # or ; are ignored.
After the first date line, lines which do not contain a double space are parsed as postings with zero amount. (hledger’s register reports will show these if you add -E).
Before the first date line, lines beginning with * (eg org headings) are ignored. And from the first date line onward, Emacs org mode heading prefixes at the start of lines (one or more *’s followed by a space) will be ignored. This means the time log can also be a org outline.

Timedot files don’t support directives like journal files. So a common pattern is to have a main journal file (eg time.journal) that contains any needed directives, and then includes the timedot file (include time.timedot).

Timedot examples

Numbers:

2016/2/3
inc:client1   4
fos:hledger   3h
biz:research  60m

Dots:

# 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  .

$ 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

Letters:

# Activity types:
#  c cleanup/catchup/repair
#  e enhancement
#  s support
#  l learning/research

2023-11-01
work:adm  ccecces

$ hledger -f a.timedot print
2023-11-01
    (work:adm)  1     ; t:c
    (work:adm)  0.5   ; t:e
    (work:adm)  0.25  ; t:s

$ hledger -f a.timedot bal
                1.75  work:adm
--------------------
                1.75

$ hledger -f a.timedot bal --pivot t
                1.00  c
                0.50  e
                0.25  s
--------------------
                1.75

Org:

* 2023 Work Diary
** Q1
*** 2023-02-29
**** DONE
0700 yoga
**** UNPLANNED
**** BEGUN
hom:chores
 cleaning  ...
 water plants
  outdoor - one full watering can
  indoor - light watering
**** TODO
adm:planning: trip
*** LATER

Using . as account name separator:

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

$ hledger -f a.timedot --alias '/\./=:' bal -t
                4.50  fos
                4.00    hledger:timedot
                0.50    ledger
--------------------
                4.50

PART 3: REPORTING CONCEPTS

Time periods

Report start & end date

Most hledger reports will by default show the full time period 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 period, such as the current month. You can specify a start and/or end date with the -b/--begin, -e/--end, or -p/--period options, or a date: query argument, described below. All of these accept the smart date syntax, also described below.

End dates are exclusive; specify the day after the last day you want to see in the report.

When dates are specified by multiple options, the last (right-most) option wins. And when date: queries and date options are combined, the report period will be their intersection.

Examples:

-b 2016/3/17: beginning on St. Patrick’s day 2016
-e 12/1: ending at the start of December 1st in the current year
-p 'this month': during the current month
-p thismonth: same as above, spaces are optional
-b 2023: beginning on the first day of 2023
date:2023.. or date:2023-: same as above

-b 2024 -e 2025 -p '2000 to 2030' date:2020-01 date:2020 :
during January 2020 (the smallest common period, with the -p overriding -b and -e)

Smart dates

In hledger’s user interfaces (though not in the journal file), you can optionally use “smart date” syntax. Smart dates can be written with english words, can be relative, and can have parts omitted. Missing parts are inferred as 1, when needed. Smart dates can be interpreted as dates or periods depending on the context.

Examples:

2004-01-01, 2004/10/1, 2004.9.1, 20240504, 2024Q1 :
Exact dates. The year must have at least four digits, the month must be 1-12, the day must be 1-31, the separator can be - or / or . or nothing. The q can be upper or lower case and the quarter number must be 1-4.

2004-10: start of month
2004q3: start of third quarter of 2004
q3: start of third quarter of current year
2004: start of year
10/1 or oct or october: October 1st in current year
21: 21st day in current month
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

Dates with no separators are allowed but might give surprising results if mistyped:

20181301 (YYYYMMDD with an invalid month) is parsed as an eight-digit year
20181232 (YYYYMMDD with an invalid day) gives a parse error
201801012 (a valid YYYYMMDD followed by additional digits) gives a parse error

The meaning of relative dates depends on today’s date. If you need to test or reproduce old reports, you can use the --today option to override that. (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 adjustments

Start date adjustment

If you let hledger infer a report’s start date, it will adjust the date to the previous natural boundary of the report interval, for convenient periodic reports. (If you don’t want that, specify a start date.)

For example, if the journal’s first transaction is on january 10th,

hledger register (no report interval) will start the report on january 10th.
hledger register --monthly will start the report on the previous month boundary, january 1st.
hledger register --monthly --begin 1/5 will start the report on january 5th [1].

Also if you are generating transactions or budget goals with periodic transaction rules, their start date may be adjusted in a similar way (in certain situations).

End date adjustment

A report’s end date is always adjusted to include a whole number of intervals, so that the last subperiod has the same length as the others.

For example, if the journal’s last transaction is on february 20th,

hledger register will end the report on february 20th.
hledger register --monthly will end the report at the end of february.
hledger register --monthly --end 2/14 also will end the report at the end of february (overriding the requested end date).
hledger register --monthly --begin 1/5 --end 2/14 will end the report on march 4th [1].

[1] Since hledger 1.29.

Period headings

With non-standard subperiods, hledger will show “STARTDATE..ENDDATE” headings. With standard subperiods (ie, starting on a natural interval boundary), you’ll see more compact headings, which are usually preferable. (Though month names will be in english, currently.)

So if you are specifying a start date and you want compact headings: choose a start of year for yearly reports, a start of quarter for quarterly reports, a start of month for monthly reports, etc. (Remember, you can write eg -b 2024 or 1/1 as a shortcut for a start of year, or 2024-04 or 202404 or Apr for a start of month or quarter.)

For weekly reports, choose a date that’s a Monday. (You can try different dates until you see the short headings, or write eg -b '3 weeks ago'.)

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] (31st day will be adjusted to each month’s last day)
every Nth WEEKDAYNAME [of month]

Yearly on a custom month and 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, usually preferred: -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. So all of these are equivalent: depth:2, --depth=2, -2.

You can also provide custom depths for specific accounts, by providing a REGEX=NUM argument instead of just NUM (since 1.41). For example, --depth assets=2 (or depth:assets=2) will collapse accounts matching the regular expression “assets” to depth 2. So assets:bank:savings would be collapsed to assets:bank, but liabilities:bank:credit card would not be affected.

If REGEX contains spaces or other special characters, enclose it in quotes in the usual way. Eg: --depth 'credit card=2'

Combining depth options

If a command line contains multiple general depth options, the last one wins. (Useful for overriding a depth specified by scripts.)

Or a command may contain a combination of general and custom depth options. In this case, the most specifically (deepest) matching option wins. Some examples:

--depth assets=3 --depth expenses=2 --depth 1 would collapse accounts containing “assets” to depth 3, accounts containing “expenses” to depth 2, and all other accounts to depth 1.
--depth assets=1 --depth savings=2 would collapse assets:bank:savings to depth 2 (not depth 1; because “savings” matches a deeper part of the account name than “assets”).

Note currently, to override a custom depth option --depth REGEX=NUM with a later option, the later option must use the same REGEX.

Queries

Many hledger commands accept query arguments, which restrict their scope and let you report on a precise subset of your data. Here’s a quick overview of hledger’s queries:

By default, a query argument is treated as a case-insensitive substring pattern for matching account names. Eg:

dining groceries
car:fuel
Patterns containing spaces or other special characters must be enclosed in single or double quotes:

'personal care'
Patterns are actually regular expressions, so you can add regexp metacharacters for more precision (or you may need to backslash-escape certain characters; see “Regular expressions” above):

'^expenses\b'
'food$'
'fuel|repair'
'accounts (payable|receivable)'
To match something other than the account name, you can add a query type prefix, such as:

date:202312-
status:
desc:amazon
cur:USD
cur:\\$
amt:'>0'
acct:groceries (but acct: is the default, so we usually don’t bother writing it)
To negate a query, add a not: prefix:

not:status:'*'
not:desc:'opening|closing'
not:cur:USD
Multiple query terms can be combined, as space-separated queries Eg: hledger print date:2022 desc:amazon desc:amzn (show transactions dated in 2022 whose description contains “amazon” or “amzn”).
Or more flexibly as boolean queries. Eg: hledger print expr:'date:2022 and (desc:amazon or desc:amzn) and not date:202210'

All hledger commands use the same query language, but different commands may interpret the query in different ways. We haven’t described the commands yet (that’s coming in PART 4: COMMANDS below) but here’s the gist of it:

Transaction-oriented commands (print, aregister, close, import, descriptions..) try to match transactions (including the transaction’s postings).
Posting-oriented commands (register, balance, balancesheet, incomestatement, accounts..) try to match postings. Postings inherit their transaction’s attributes for querying purposes, so transaction fields like date or description can still be referenced in a posting query.
A few commands match in more specific ways. (Eg aregister, which has a special first argument.)

Query types

Here are the query types available:

acct: query

acct:REGEX, or just REGEX
Match account names containing this case insensitive regular expression.
This is the default query type, so we usually don’t bother writing the “acct:” prefix.

amt: query

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.) amt: needs quotes to hide the less than/greater than sign from the command line shell.

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.

Keep in mind that amt: matches posting amounts, not account balances.

code: query

code:REGEX
Match by transaction code (eg check number).

cur: query

cur:REGEX
Match postings or transactions including any amounts whose currency/commodity symbol is fully matched by REGEX. (Contrary to hledger’s usual infix matching. To do infix matching, write .*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 will usually need one more level of escaping. Eg to match the dollar sign: cur:\\$ or cur:'\$'

desc: query

desc:REGEX
Match transaction descriptions.

date: query

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: query

date2:PERIODEXPR
If you use secondary dates: this matches secondary dates within the specified period. It is not affected by the --date2 flag.

depth: query

depth:[REGEXP=]N
Match (or display, depending on command) accounts at or above this depth, optionally only for accounts matching a provided regular expression. See Depth for detailed rules.

note: query

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

payee: query

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

real: query

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

status: query

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

type: query

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: query

tag:NAMEREGEX[=VALREGEX]
Match by tag name, and optionally also by tag value. Note:

Both regular expressions do infix matching. If you need a complete match, use ^ and $.
Eg: tag:'^fullname$', tag:'^fullname$=^fullvalue$
To match values, ignoring names, do tag:.=VALREGEX
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.

Negative queries

not: query

not:QUERY
You can prepend not: to a query to negate the match.
Eg: not:equity, not:desc:apple
(Also, a trick: not:not:... can sometimes solve query problems conveniently.)

Space-separated queries

When given multiple space-separated 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.

Boolean queries

You can write more complicated “boolean” query expressions, enclosed in quotes and prefixed with expr:. These can combine subqueries with NOT, AND, OR operators (case insensitive), and parentheses for grouping. Eg, to show transactions involving both cash and expense accounts:

hledger print expr:'cash AND expenses'

The prefix and enclosing quotes are required, so don’t write hledger print cash AND expenses. That would be a space-separated query showing transactions involving accounts with any of “cash”, “and”, “expenses” in their names.

You can write space-separated queries inside a boolean query, and they will combine as described above, but it might be confusing and best avoided. Eg these are equivalent, showing transactions involving cash or expenses accounts:

hledger print expr:'cash expenses'
hledger print cash expenses

There is a restriction with date: queries: they may not be used inside OR expressions.

Actually, there are three types of boolean query: expr: for general use, and any: and all: variants which can be useful with print.

expr: query

expr:'QUERYEXPR'
For example, expr:'date:lastmonth AND NOT (food OR rent)' means “match things which are dated in the last month and do not have food or rent in the account name”.

When using expr: with transaction-oriented commands like print, posting-oriented query terms like acct: and amt: are considered to match the transaction if they match any of its postings.
So, hledger print expr:'cash and amt:>0' means “show transactions with (at least one posting involving a cash account) and (at least one posting with a positive amount)”.

any: query

any:'QUERYEXPR'
Like expr:, but when used with transaction-oriented commands like print, it matches the transaction only if a posting can be matched by all of QUERYEXPR.
So, hledger print any:'cash and amt:>0' means “show transactions where at least one posting posts a positive amount to a cash account”.

all: query

all:'QUERYEXPR'
Like expr:, but when used with transaction-oriented commands like print, it matches the transaction only if all postings are matched by all of QUERYEXPR (and there is at least one posting).
So, hledger print all:'cash and amt:0' means “show transactions where all postings involve a cash account and have a zero amount”.
Or, hledger print all:'cash or checking' means “show transactions which touch only cash and/or checking accounts”.

Queries and command options

Some queries can also be expressed as command-line options: depth:2 is equivalent to --depth 2, date:2023 is equivalent to -p 2023, etc. When you mix command options and query arguments, generally the resulting query is their intersection.

Queries and account aliases

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

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, #1625.)

Pivoting

Normally, hledger groups amounts and displays their totals by account (name). With --pivot PIVOTEXPR, some other field’s (or multiple fields’) value is used as a synthetic account name, causing different grouping and display. PIVOTEXPR can be

any of these standard transaction or posting fields (their value is substituted): status, code, desc, payee, note, acct, comm/cur, amt, cost
or a tag name
or any combination of these, colon-separated.

Some special cases:

Colons appearing in PIVOTEXPR or in a pivoted tag value will generate account hierarchy.
When pivoting a posting that has multiple values for a tag, the tag’s first value will be used as the pivoted value.
When a posting has multiple commodities, the pivoted value of “comm”/“cur” will be ““. Also when an unrecognised tag name or field is provided, its pivoted value will be”“. (If this causes confusing output, consider excluding those postings from the report.)

Examples:

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

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

Hierarchical reports can be generated with multiple pivot values:

$ hledger balance Income:Dues --pivot kind:member
              -2 EUR  Lifetime:John Doe
--------------------
              -2 EUR

Generating data

hledger can enrich the data provided to it, or generate new data, in a number of ways. Mostly, this is done only if you request it:

Missing amounts or missing costs in transactions are inferred automatically when possible.
The --infer-equity flag infers missing conversion equity postings from @/@@ costs.
The --infer-costs flag infers missing costs from conversion equity postings.
The --infer-market-prices flag infers P price directives from costs.
The --auto flag adds extra postings to transactions matched by auto posting rules.
The --forecast option generates transactions from periodic transaction rules.
The balance --budget report infers budget goals from periodic transaction rules.
Commands like close, rewrite, and hledger-interest generate transactions or postings.
CSV data is converted to transactions by applying CSV conversion rules.. etc.

Such generated data is temporary, existing only at report time. You can convert it to permanent recorded data by, eg, capturing the output of hledger print and saving it in your journal file. This can sometimes be useful as a data entry aid.

If you are curious what data is being generated and why, run hledger print -x --verbose-tags. -x/--explicit shows inferred amounts and --verbose-tags adds tags like generated-transaction (from periodic rules) and generated-posting, modified (from auto posting rules). Similar hidden tags (with an underscore prefix) are always present, also, so you can always match such data with queries like tag:generated or tag:modified.

Forecasting

Forecasting, or speculative future reporting, can be useful for estimating future balances, or for exploring different future scenarios.

The simplest and most flexible way to do it with hledger is to manually record a bunch of future-dated transactions. You could keep these in a separate future.journal and include that with -f only when you want to see them.

–forecast

There is another way: with the --forecast option, hledger can generate temporary “forecast transactions” for reporting purposes, according to periodic transaction rules defined in the journal. Each rule can generate multiple recurring transactions, so by changing one rule you can change many forecasted transactions.

Forecast transactions usually start after ordinary transactions end. By default, they begin after your latest-dated ordinary transaction, or today, whichever is later, and they end six months from today. (The exact rules are a little more complicated, and are given below.)

This is the “forecast period”, which need not be the same as the report period. You can override it - eg to forecast farther into the future, or to force forecast transactions to overlap your ordinary transactions - by giving the –forecast option a period expression argument, like --forecast=..2099 or --forecast=2023-02-15... Note that the = is required.

Inspecting forecast transactions

print is the best command for inspecting and troubleshooting forecast transactions. Eg:

~ monthly from 2022-12-20    rent
    assets:bank:checking
    expenses:rent           $1000

$ hledger print --forecast --today=2023/4/21
2023-05-20 rent
    ; generated-transaction: ~ monthly from 2022-12-20
    assets:bank:checking
    expenses:rent                  $1000

2023-06-20 rent
    ; generated-transaction: ~ monthly from 2022-12-20
    assets:bank:checking
    expenses:rent                  $1000

2023-07-20 rent
    ; generated-transaction: ~ monthly from 2022-12-20
    assets:bank:checking
    expenses:rent                  $1000

2023-08-20 rent
    ; generated-transaction: ~ monthly from 2022-12-20
    assets:bank:checking
    expenses:rent                  $1000

2023-09-20 rent
    ; generated-transaction: ~ monthly from 2022-12-20
    assets:bank:checking
    expenses:rent                  $1000

Here there are no ordinary transactions, so the forecasted transactions begin on the first occurrence after today’s date. (You won’t normally use --today; it’s just to make these examples reproducible.)

Forecast reports

Forecast transactions affect all reports, as you would expect. Eg:

$ hledger areg rent --forecast --today=2023/4/21
Transactions in expenses:rent and subaccounts:
2023-05-20 rent                 as:ba:checking               $1000         $1000
2023-06-20 rent                 as:ba:checking               $1000         $2000
2023-07-20 rent                 as:ba:checking               $1000         $3000
2023-08-20 rent                 as:ba:checking               $1000         $4000
2023-09-20 rent                 as:ba:checking               $1000         $5000

$ hledger bal -M expenses --forecast --today=2023/4/21
Balance changes in 2023-05-01..2023-09-30:

               ||   May    Jun    Jul    Aug    Sep 
===============++===================================
 expenses:rent || $1000  $1000  $1000  $1000  $1000 
---------------++-----------------------------------
               || $1000  $1000  $1000  $1000  $1000

Forecast tags

Forecast transactions generated by –forecast have a hidden tag, _generated-transaction. So if you ever need to match forecast transactions, you could use tag:_generated-transaction (or just tag:generated) in a query.

For troubleshooting, you can add the --verbose-tags flag. Then, visible generated-transaction tags will be added also, so you can view them with the print command. Their value indicates which periodic rule was responsible.

Forecast period, in detail

Forecast start/end dates are chosen so as to do something useful by default in almost all situations, while also being flexible. Here are (with luck) the exact rules, to help with troubleshooting:

The forecast period starts on:

the later of
- the start date in the periodic transaction rule
- the start date in --forecast’s argument
otherwise (if those are not available): the later of
- the report start date specified with -b/-p/date:
- the day after the latest ordinary transaction in the journal
otherwise (if none of these are available): today.

The forecast period ends on:

the earlier of
- the end date in the periodic transaction rule
- the end date in --forecast’s argument
otherwise: the report end date specified with -e/-p/date:
otherwise: 180 days (~6 months) from today.

Forecast troubleshooting

When –forecast is not doing what you expect, one of these tips should help:

Remember to use the --forecast option.
Remember to have at least one periodic transaction rule in your journal.
Test with print --forecast.
Check for typos or too-restrictive start/end dates in your periodic transaction rule.
Leave at least 2 spaces between the rule’s period expression and description fields.
Check for future-dated ordinary transactions suppressing forecasted transactions.
Try setting explicit report start and/or end dates with -b, -e, -p or date:
Try adding the -E flag to encourage display of empty periods/zero transactions.
Try setting explicit forecast start and/or end dates with --forecast=START..END
Consult Forecast period, in detail, above.
Check inside the engine: add --debug=2 (eg).

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.

You can generate budget goals and forecast transactions at the same time, from the same or different periodic transaction rules: hledger bal -M --budget --forecast ...

Amount formatting

Commodity display style

For the amounts in each commodity, hledger chooses a consistent display style (symbol placement, decimal mark and digit group marks, number of decimal digits) to use in most reports. This is inferred as follows:

First, if there’s a D directive declaring a default commodity, that commodity symbol and amount format is applied to all no-symbol amounts in the journal.

Then each commodity’s display style is determined from its commodity directive. We recommend always declaring commodities with commodity directives, since they help ensure consistent display styles and precisions, and bring other benefits such as error checking for commodity symbols. Here’s an example:

# Set display styles (and decimal marks, for parsing, if there is no decimal-mark directive)
# 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

But for convenience, if a commodity directive is not present, hledger infers a commodity’s display styles from its amounts as they are written in the journal (excluding cost amounts and amounts in periodic transaction rules or auto posting rules). It uses

the symbol placement and decimal mark of the first amount seen
the digit group marks of the first amount with digit group marks
and the maximum number of decimal digits seen across all amounts.

And as fallback if no applicable amounts are found, it would use a default style, like $1000.00 (symbol on the left with no space, period as decimal mark, and two decimal digits).

Finally, commodity styles can be overridden by the -c/--commodity-style command line option.

Rounding

Amounts are stored internally as decimal numbers with up to 255 decimal places. They are displayed with their original journal precisions by print and print-like reports, and rounded to their display precision (the number of decimal digits specified by the commodity display style) by other reports. When rounding, hledger uses banker’s rounding (it rounds to the nearest even digit). So eg 0.5 displayed with zero decimal digits appears as “0”.

Trailing decimal marks

If you’re wondering why your print report sometimes shows trailing decimal marks, with no decimal digits; it does this when showing amounts that have digit group marks but no decimal digits, to disambiguate them and allow them to be re-parsed reliably (see Decimal marks). Eg:

commodity $1,000.00

2023-01-02
    (a)      $1000

$ hledger print
2023-01-02
    (a)        $1,000.

If this is a problem (eg when exporting to Ledger), you can avoid it by disabling digit group marks, eg with -c/–commodity (for each affected commodity):

$ hledger print -c '$1000.00'
2023-01-02
    (a)          $1000

or by forcing print to always show decimal digits, with –round:

$ hledger print -c '$1,000.00' --round=soft
2023-01-02
    (a)      $1,000.00

Amount parseability

More generally, hledger output falls into three rough categories, which format amounts a little bit differently to suit different consumers:

1. “hledger-readable output” - should be readable by hledger (and by humans)

This is produced by reports that show full journal entries: print, import, close, rewrite etc.
It shows amounts with their original journal precisions, which may not be consistent from one amount to the next.
It adds a trailing decimal mark when needed to avoid showing ambiguous amounts.
It can be parsed reliably (by hledger and ledger2beancount at least, but perhaps not by Ledger..)

2. “human-readable output” - usually for humans

This is produced by all other reports.
It shows amounts with standard display precisions, which will be consistent within each commodity.
It shows ambiguous amounts unmodified.
It can be parsed reliably in the context of a known report (when you know decimals are consistently not being shown, you can assume a single mark is a digit group mark).

3. “machine-readable output” - usually for other software

This is produced by all reports when an output format like csv, tsv, json, or sql is selected.
It shows amounts as 1 or 2 do, but without digit group marks.
It can be parsed reliably (if needed, the decimal mark can be changed with -c/–commodity-style).

Cost reporting

In some transactions - for example a currency conversion, or a purchase or sale of stock - one commodity is exchanged for another. In these transactions there is a conversion rate, also called the cost (when buying) or selling price (when selling). (In hledger docs we just say “cost” generically for convenience.) With the -B/--cost flag, hledger can show amounts “at cost”, converted to the cost’s commodity.

Recording costs

We’ll explore several ways of recording transactions involving costs. These are also summarised at hledger Cookbook > Cost notation.

Costs can be recorded explicitly in the journal, using the @ UNITCOST or @@ TOTALCOST notation described in Journal > Costs:

Variant 1

2022-01-01
  assets:dollars    $-135
  assets:euros       €100 @ $1.35   ; $1.35 per euro (unit cost)

Variant 2

2022-01-01
  assets:dollars    $-135
  assets:euros       €100 @@ $135   ; $135 total cost

Typically, writing the unit cost (variant 1) is preferable; it can be more effort, requiring more attention to decimal digits; but it reveals the per-unit cost basis, and makes stock sales easier.

Costs can also be left implicit, and hledger will infer the cost that is consistent with a balanced transaction:

Variant 3

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

Here, hledger will attach a @@ €100 cost to the first amount (you can see it with hledger print -x). This form looks convenient, but there are downsides:

It sacrifices some error checking. For example, if you accidentally wrote €10 instead of €100, hledger would not be able to detect the mistake.
It is sensitive to the order of postings - if they were reversed, a different entry would be inferred and reports would be different.
The per-unit cost basis is not easy to read.

So generally this kind of entry is not recommended. You can make sure you have none of these by using -s (strict mode), or by running hledger check balanced.

Reporting at cost

Now when you add the -B/--cost flag to reports (“B” is from Ledger’s -B/–basis/–cost flag), any amounts which have been annotated with costs will be converted to their cost’s commodity (in the report output). Ie they will be displayed “at cost” or “at sale price”.

Some things to note:

Costs are attached to specific posting amounts in specific transactions, and once recorded they do not change. This contrasts with market prices, which are ambient and fluctuating.
Conversion to cost is performed before conversion to market value (described below).

Equity conversion postings

There is a problem with the entries above - they are not conventional Double Entry Bookkeeping (DEB) notation, and because of the “magical” transformation of one commodity into another, they cause an imbalance in the Accounting Equation. This shows up as a non-zero grand total in balance reports like hledger bse.

For most hledger users, this doesn’t matter in practice and can safely be ignored ! But if you’d like to learn more, keep reading.

Conventional DEB uses an extra pair of equity postings to balance the transaction. Of course you can do this in hledger as well:

Variant 4

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

Now the transaction is perfectly balanced according to standard DEB, and hledger bse’s total will not be disrupted.

And, hledger can still infer the cost for cost reporting, but it’s not done by default - you must add the --infer-costs flag like so:

$ hledger print --infer-costs
2022-01-01 one hundred euros purchased at $1.35 each
    assets:dollars       $-135 @@ €100
    assets:euros                  €100
    equity:conversion             $135
    equity:conversion            €-100

$ hledger bal --infer-costs -B
               €-100  assets:dollars                                                                                                                                              
                €100  assets:euros                                                                                                                                                
--------------------                                                                                                                                                              
                   0

Here are some downsides of this kind of entry:

The per-unit cost basis is not easy to read.
Instead of -B you must remember to type -B --infer-costs.
--infer-costs works only where hledger can identify the two equity:conversion postings and match them up with the two non-equity postings. So writing the journal entry in a particular format becomes more important. More on this below.

Inferring equity conversion postings

Can we go in the other direction ? Yes, if you have transactions written with the @/@@ cost notation, hledger can infer the missing equity postings, if you add the --infer-equity flag. Eg:

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
    equity:conversion:$-€:$         $135.00

The equity account names will be “equity:conversion:A-B:A” and “equity:conversion:A-B:B” where A is the alphabetically first commodity symbol. You can customise the “equity:conversion” part by declaring an account with the V/Conversion account type.

Note you will need to add account declarations for these to your journal, if you use check accounts or check --strict.

Combining costs and equity conversion postings

Finally, you can use both the @/@@ cost notation and equity postings at the same time. This in theory gives the best of all worlds - preserving the accounting equation, revealing the per-unit cost basis, and providing more flexibility in how you write the entry:

Variant 5

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

All the other variants above can (usually) be rewritten to this final form with:

$ hledger print -x --infer-costs --infer-equity

Downsides:

The precise format of the journal entry becomes more important. If hledger can’t detect and match up the cost and equity postings, it will give a transaction balancing error.
The add command does not yet accept this kind of entry (#2056).
This is the most verbose form.

Requirements for detecting equity conversion postings

--infer-costs has certain requirements (unlike --infer-equity, which always works). It will infer costs only in transactions with:

Two non-equity postings, in different commodities. Their order is significant: the cost will be added to the first of them.
Two postings to equity conversion accounts, next to one another, which balance the two non-equity postings. This balancing is checked to the same precision (number of decimal places) used in the conversion posting’s amount. Equity conversion accounts are:
- any accounts declared with account type V/Conversion, or their subaccounts
- otherwise, accounts named equity:conversion, equity:trade, or equity:trading, or their subaccounts.

And multiple such four-posting groups can coexist within a single transaction. When --infer-costs fails, it does not infer a cost in that transaction, and does not raise an error (ie, it infers costs where it can).

Reading variant 5 journal entries, combining cost notation and equity postings, has all the same requirements. When reading such an entry fails, hledger raises an “unbalanced transaction” error.

Infer cost and equity by default ?

Should --infer-costs and --infer-equity be enabled by default ? Try using them always, eg with a shell alias:

alias h="hledger --infer-equity --infer-costs"

and let us know what problems you find.

Value reporting

hledger can also show amounts “at market value”, converted to some other commodity using the market price or conversion rate on a certain date.

This is controlled by the --value=TYPE[,COMMODITY] option. We also provide simpler -V and -X COMMODITY aliases for this, which are often sufficient. The market prices are declared with a special P directive, and/or they can be inferred from the costs recorded in transactions, by using the --infer-market-prices flag.

-X: Value in specified commodity

The -X COMM (or --exchange=COMM) option converts amounts to their market value in the specified commodity, using the market prices in effect on the valuation date(s), if any. (More on these in a minute.)

Use this when you want to (eg) show everything in your base currency as far as possible. (Commodities for which no conversion rate can be found, will not be converted.)

COMM should be the full commodity symbol or name. Remember to quote special shell characters, if needed. Some examples:

-X€
-X$ (nothing after $, no quoting needed)
-X CNY (the space after -X is optional)
-X 'red apples'
-X 'r&r'

-V: Value in default commodity(s)

The -V/--market flag is a variant of -X where you don’t have to specify COMM. Instead it tries to guess a default valuation commodity for each original commodity, based on the market prices in effect on the valuation date(s).

-V can often be a convenient shortcut for -X MYCURRENCY, but not always; depending on your data it could guess multiple valuation commodities. Usually you want to convert to a single commodity, so it’s better to use -X, unless you’re sure -V is doing what you want.

Valuation date

Market prices can change from day to day. hledger will use the prices on a particular valuation date (or on more than one date). By default hledger uses “end” dates for valuation. More specifically:

For single period reports (including normal print and register reports):
- If an explicit report end date is specified, that is used.
- Otherwise the latest transaction date or non-future P directive date is used.
For multiperiod reports, each period is valued on its last day.

This can be customised with the –value option described below, which can select either “then”, “end”, “now”, or “custom” dates.

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:

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.
A reverse market price: the inverse of a declared or inferred market price from B to A.
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.
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 Value reporting 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:

The price commodity from the latest P-declared market price for A on or before valuation date.
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.)
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.

–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.

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

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, the latest transaction date or price date is used as valuation date (2000-04-01):

$ hledger -f- print --value=end
2000-01-01
    (a)             3 B

2000-02-01
    (a)             3 B

2000-03-01
    (a)             3 B

The value today is the same (the 2000-04-01 price is still in effect):

$ 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

Interaction of valuation and queries

When matching postings based on queries in the presence of valuation, the following happens:

The query is separated into two parts:
1. the currency (cur:) or amount (amt:).
2. all other parts.
The postings are matched to the currency and amount queries based on pre-valued amounts.
Valuation is applied to the postings.
The postings are matched to the other parts of the query based on post-valued amounts.

Related: #1625

Effect of valuation on reports

Here is a reference for how valuation is supposed to affect each part of hledger’s reports. It may be useful when troubleshooting. If you find problems, please report them, ideally with a reproducible example. Related: #329, #1083.

First, a quick 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).

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.

PART 4: COMMANDS

Here are hledger’s standard subcommands. You can list these by running hledger. If you have installed more add-on commands, they also will be listed.

In the following command docs, each command’s specific options are shown. Most commands also support the general options described above, though some of them might have no effect. (Usually if there’s a sensible way for a general option to affect a command, it will.) You can list all of a command’s options by running hledger CMD -h.

Help commands

commands - show the hledger commands list (default)
demo - show small hledger demos in the terminal
help - show the hledger manual with info, man, or pager

User interface commands

repl - run commands from an interactive prompt
run - run commands from a script
ui - (if installed) run hledger’s terminal UI
web - (if installed) run hledger’s web UI

Data entry commands

add - add transactions using terminal prompts
import - add new transactions from other files, eg CSV files

Basic report commands

accounts - show account names
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

Standard report commands

print - show transactions or export journal data
aregister (areg) - show transactions in a particular account
register (reg) - show postings in one or more accounts & running total
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

Advanced report commands

balance (bal) - show balance changes, end balances, budgets, gains..
roi - show return on investments

Chart commands

activity - show bar charts of posting counts per period

Data generation commands

close - generate balance-zeroing/restoring transactions
rewrite - generate auto postings, like print –auto

Maintenance commands

check - check for various kinds of error in the data
diff - compare account transactions in two journal files
setup - check and show the status of the hledger installation
test - run self tests

m4_dnl XXX maybe later m4_dnl man({{ m4_dnl For detailed command docs please see the appropriate man page (eg man hledger-print), m4_dnl or the info or web format of this manual. m4_dnl }}) m4_dnl notman({{

Next, these commands are described in detail.

m4_dnl Include the command docs. Each starts with a level 2 heading. m4_dnl (To change that, see Hledger/Cli/Commands/{*.md,commands.m4}) commands

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)
you can run addon commands via hledger (hledger ui [ARGS]) or directly (hledger-ui [ARGS])
enclose “problematic” arguments 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 (see below). 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 2023.journal
$ echo "export LEDGER_FILE=$HOME/finance/2023.journal" >> ~/.profile
$ source ~/.profile
$ hledger stats
Main file                : /Users/simon/finance/2023.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 LEDGER_FILE

Set LEDGER_FILE on unix

It depends on your shell, but running these commands in the terminal will work for many people; adapt if needed:

$ echo 'export LEDGER_FILE=~/finance/my.journal' >> ~/.profile
$ source ~/.profile

When correctly configured:

env | grep LEDGER_FILE will show your new setting
and so should hledger setup and hledger files.

Set LEDGER_FILE on mac

In a terminal window, follow the unix procedure above.

Also, this optional step may be helpful for GUI applications:

Add an entry to ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist like

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

Run killall Dock in a terminal window (or restart the machine), to complete the change.

When correctly configured for GUI applications:

apps started from the dock or a spotlight search, such as a GUI Emacs, will be aware of the new LEDGER_FILE setting.

Set LEDGER_FILE on Windows

Using the gui is easiest:

In task bar, search for environment variables, and choose “Edit environment variables for your account”.
Create or change a LEDGER_FILE setting in the User variables pane. A typical value would be C:\Users\USERNAME\finance\my.journal.
Click OK to complete the change.
And open a new powershell window. (Existing windows won’t see the change.)

Or at the command line, you can do it this way:

In a powershell window, run [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("LEDGER_FILE", "C:\User\USERNAME\finance\my.journal", [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)
And open a new powershell window. (Existing windows won’t see the change.)

Warning, doing this from the Windows command line can be tricky; other methods you may find online:

may not affect the current window
may not be persistent
may not work unless you are an administrator
may limit values to 1024 characters
may break dynamic references to other variables
may require a new-enough version of powershell
or may be intended for the older command window.
If you still have trouble, see eg Setting Windows PowerShell environment variables or Adding path permanently to windows using powershell doesn’t appear to work.

When correctly configured:

in a new powershell window, $env:LEDGER_FILE will show your new setting
and so should hledger setup and (once the file exists) hledger files.

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:
```
2023-01-01 * 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/2023.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 [2023-02-07]: 2023-01-01
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): .
2023-01-01 * 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 [2023-01-01]: .

If you’re using version control, this could be a good time to commit the journal. Eg:

$ git commit -m 'initial balances' 2023.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:

2023/1/10 * gift received
  assets:cash   $20
  income:gifts

2023.1.12 * farmers market
  expenses:food    $13
  assets:cash

2023-01-15 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:

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:
```
2023-01-16 * adjust cash
    assets:cash    $-2 = $105
    expenses:misc
```
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.
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 2023-01-15 and paycheck

If you’re using version control, this can be another good time to commit:

$ git commit -m 'txns' 2023.journal

Reporting

Here are some basic reports.

Show all transactions:

$ hledger print
2023-01-01 * opening balances
    assets:bank:checking                      $1000
    assets:bank:savings                       $2000
    assets:cash                                $100
    liabilities:creditcard                     $-50
    equity:opening/closing balances          $-3050

2023-01-10 * gift received
    assets:cash              $20
    income:gifts

2023-01-12 * farmers market
    expenses:food             $13
    assets:cash

2023-01-15 * paycheck
    income:salary
    assets:bank:checking           $1000

2023-01-16 * 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 2023-01-16

                        || 2023-01-16 
========================++============
 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 2023-01-01-2023-01-16

               || 2023-01-01-2023-01-16 
===============++=======================
 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
2023-01-01 opening balances     assets:cash                   $100          $100
2023-01-10 gift received        assets:cash                    $20          $120
2023-01-12 farmers market       assets:cash                   $-13          $107
2023-01-16 adjust cash          assets:cash                    $-2          $105

Show weekly posting counts as a bar chart:

$ hledger activity -W
2019-12-30 *****
2023-01-06 ****
2023-01-13 ****

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.

BUGS

reportbugs

Some known issues and limitations:

hledger uses the system’s text encoding when reading non-ascii text. If no system encoding is configured, or if the data’s encoding is different, hledger will give an error. (See Text encoding, Troubleshooting.)

On Microsoft Windows, depending what kind of terminal window you use, non-ascii characters, ANSI text formatting, and/or the add command’s TAB key, may not be fully supported. (For best results, try a powershell window.)

When processing large data files, hledger uses more memory than Ledger.

Troubleshooting

Here are some common issues you might encounter when you run hledger, and how to resolve them (and remember also you can usually get quick Support):

PATH issues: I get an error like “No command ‘hledger’ found”
Depending how you installed hledger, the executables may not be in your shell’s PATH. Eg on unix systems, stack installs hledger in ~/.local/bin and cabal installs it in ~/.cabal/bin. You may need to add one of these directories to your shell’s PATH, and/or open a new terminal window.

LEDGER_FILE issues: I configured LEDGER_FILE but hledger is not using it

LEDGER_FILE should be a real environment variable, not just a shell variable. Eg on unix, the command env | grep LEDGER_FILE should show it. You may need to use export (see https://stackoverflow.com/a/7411509). On Windows, $env:LEDGER_FILE should show it.
You may need to force your shell to see the new configuration. A simple way is to close your terminal window and open a new one.

Text decoding issues: I get errors like “Illegal byte sequence” or “Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character” or “commitAndReleaseBuffer: invalid argument (invalid character)”
hledger usually needs its input to be decodable with the system locale’s text encoding. See Text encoding and Install: Text encoding.

COMPATIBILITY ISSUES: hledger gives an error with my Ledger file
Not all of Ledger’s journal file syntax or feature set is supported. See hledger and Ledger for full details.

m4_dnl Some common markdown links. m4_dnl These are also usable in hledger/Hledger/Cli/Commands/*.md. m4_dnl Some are defined there also - don’t remove, they are needed there for Shake cmddocs eg. m4_dnl Duplicate definitions won’t give warnings as long as the target is identical. m4_dnl Be wary of pandoc/mdbook handling [shortcut] link syntax differently ?

m4_dnl Tips for editing hledger .m4.md docs. m4_dnl m4_dnl .m4.md are hledger docs source files processed with m4 to generate markdown. m4_dnl Lines beginning with m4_dnl are comments. m4_dnl Words enclosed in underscores are macros, defined in doc/common.m4. m4_dnl Macro arguments are enclosed in (). m4_dnl Literal text macro arguments are enclosed in {{}}. m4_dnl “{{foo}}” in docs can be written as “{{{{foo}}}}”. m4_dnl Macros can depend on command line flags, configured in Shake.hs. m4_dnl Emacs markdown-mode can be helpful: m4_dnl S-TAB cycles visibility of all sections. m4_dnl TAB on a heading toggles that section. m4_dnl C-x n s on a heading narrows to that section, C-x n w widens again.

310 KiB Raw Blame History Unescape Escape

PART 1: USER INTERFACE

Input

Text encoding

Data formats

Standard input

Multiple files

Strict mode

Commands

Add-on commands

Options

Special characters

Escaping shell special characters

Escaping regular expression special characters

Escaping in other situations

Unicode characters

Regular expressions

hledger’s regular expressions

Argument files

Config files

Shell completions

Output

Output destination

Output format

Text output

Box-drawing characters

Colour

Paging

HTML output

CSV / TSV output

FODS output

Beancount output

Beancount account names

Beancount commodity names

Beancount virtual postings

Beancount metadata

Beancount costs

Beancount operating currency

SQL output

JSON output

Commodity styles

Debug output

Environment

PART 2: DATA FORMATS

Journal

Journal cheatsheet

Comments

Transactions

Dates

Simple dates

Posting dates

Status

Code

Description

Payee and note

Transaction comments

Postings

Debits and credits

Account names

Two space delimiter

Account hierarchy

Other account name features

Amounts

Decimal marks

Digit group marks

Commodity

Costs

Balance assertions

Assertions and ordering

Assertions and multiple files

Assertions and costs

Assertions and commodities

Assertions and subaccounts

Assertions and status

Assertions and virtual postings

Assertions and auto postings

Assertions and precision

Assertions and hledger add

Posting comments

Transaction balancing

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Raw Blame History

`account` directive

`alias` directive

`end aliases` directive

`commodity` directive

`decimal-mark` directive

`include` directive

`P` directive

`payee` directive

`tag` directive

`D` directive

`apply account` directive

`Y` directive

`source`

`archive`

`encoding`

`separator`

`skip`

`date-format`

`timezone`

`newest-first`

`intra-day-reversed`

`decimal-mark`

`fields` list