hledger/hledger/hledger.m4.md

author	date	title
author	monthyear	hledger(1)

m4_dnl Quick hledger docs editing intro: m4_dnl .m4.md are hledger docs source, 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 (). Text literals are enclosed in {{}}. m4_dnl Macros may depend on command line flags, configured in Shake.hs. m4_dnl In Emacs: m4_dnl markdown-mode S-TAB cycles visibility, TAB toggles one section. m4_dnl C-x n s on a heading narrows to that section (C-x n w to widen again).

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 cmdhelp 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 ?

web({{ Quick links: Commands, Queries, Regular expressions, Period expressions, Journal, Directives, CSV, Timeclock, Timedot, Valuation, Common tasks }})

man({{ # NAME }})

This is the command-line interface (CLI) for the hledger accounting tool. Here we also describe hledger’s concepts and file formats. This manual is for hledger version.

man({{ # SYNOPSIS }})

hledger

hledger [-f FILE] COMMAND [OPTIONS] [ARGS]

hledger [-f FILE] ADDONCMD -- [OPTIONS] [ARGS]

man({{ # DESCRIPTION }})

m4_dnl Include the standard description: hledgerdescription

The basic function of the hledger CLI is to read a plain text file describing financial transactions (in accounting terms, a general journal) and print useful reports on standard output, or export them as CSV. hledger can also read some other file formats such as CSV files, translating them to journal format. Additionally, hledger lists other hledger-* executables found in the user’s $PATH and can invoke them as subcommands.

hledger reads files If using $LEDGER_FILE, note this must be a real environment variable, not a shell variable. You can specify standard input with -f-.

Transactions are dated movements of money between two (or more) named accounts, and are recorded with journal entries like this:

m4_dnl Format as a journal snippet: journal({{ 2015/10/16 bought food expenses:food $10 assets:cash }})

Most users use a text editor to edit the journal, usually with an editor mode such as ledger-mode for added convenience. hledger’s interactive add command is another way to record new transactions. hledger never changes existing transactions.

To get started, you can either save some entries like the above in ~/.hledger.journal, or run hledger add and follow the prompts. Then try some commands like hledger print or hledger balance. Run hledger with no arguments for a list of commands.

OPTIONS

General options

To see general usage help, including general options which are supported by most hledger commands, run hledger -h.

General help options:

helpoptions

General input options:

inputoptions

General reporting options:

reportingoptions

Command options

To see options for a particular command, including command-specific options, run: hledger COMMAND -h.

Command-specific options must be written after the command name, eg: hledger print -x.

Additionally, if the command is an add-on, you may need to put its options after a double-hyphen, eg: hledger ui -- --watch. Or, you can run the add-on executable directly: hledger-ui --watch.

Command arguments

Most hledger commands accept arguments after the command name, which are often a query, filtering the data in some way.

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

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

assets depth:2
-X USD

Good:

assets
depth:2
-X=USD

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

-X"$"

Good:

-X$

See also: Save frequently used options.

Special characters

Single escaping (shell metacharacters)

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

$ hledger register 'credit card'

or:

$ hledger register credit\ card

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

Double escaping (regular expression metacharacters)

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

$ hledger balance cur:'\$'

or:

$ hledger balance cur:\\$

Triple escaping (for add-on commands)

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

$ hledger ui cur:'\\$'

or:

$ hledger ui cur:\\\\$

If you wondered why four backslashes, perhaps this helps:

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

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

$ hledger-ui cur:\\$

Less escaping

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

• an @argumentfile
• hledger-ui’s filter field
• hledger-web’s search form
• GHCI’s prompt (used by developers).

Unicode characters

hledger is expected to handle non-ascii characters correctly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regular expressions

hledger uses regular expressions in a number of places:

• query terms, on the command line and in the hledger-web search form: REGEX, desc:REGEX, cur:REGEX, tag:...=REGEX
• CSV rules conditional blocks: if REGEX ...
• account alias directives and options: alias /REGEX/ = REPLACEMENT, --alias /REGEX/=REPLACEMENT

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

1. they are case insensitive
2. they are infix matching (they do not need to match the entire thing being matched)
3. they are POSIX ERE (extended regular expressions)
4. they also support GNU word boundaries (\b, \B, \<, \>)
5. they do not support backreferences; if you write \1, it will match the digit 1. Except when doing text replacement, eg in account aliases, where backreferences can be used in the replacement string to reference capturing groups in the search regexp.
6. they do not support mode modifiers ((?s)), character classes (\w, \d), or anything else not mentioned above.

Some things to note:

• In the alias directive and --alias option, regular expressions must be enclosed in forward slashes (/REGEX/). Elsewhere in hledger, these are not required.

• In queries, to match a regular expression metacharacter like $ as a literal character, prepend a backslash. Eg to search for amounts with the dollar sign in hledger-web, write cur:\$.

• On the command line, some metacharacters like $ have a special meaning to the shell and so must be escaped at least once more. See Special characters.

ENVIRONMENT

m4_dnl Standard LEDGER_FILE description: LEDGER_FILE

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

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

DATA FILES

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

You can override this with the $LEDGER_FILE environment variable:

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

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

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

The file name - means standard input:

$ cat some.journal | hledger -f-

Data formats

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

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

These formats are described in their own sections, below.

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

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

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

Or to read stdin (-) as timeclock format:

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

Multiple files

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

• most directives do not affect sibling files
• balance assertions will not see any account balances from previous files

If you need either of those things, you can

• use a single parent file which includes the others
• or concatenate the files into one before reading, eg: cat a.journal b.journal | hledger -f- CMD.

Strict mode

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

• Are the input files parseable, with valid syntax ?
• Are all transactions balanced ?
• Do all balance assertions pass ?

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

• Are all accounts posted to, declared with an account directive ? (Account error checking)
• Are all commodities declared with a commodity directive ? (Commodity error checking)
• Are all commodity conversions declared explicitly ?

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

TIME PERIODS

Smart dates

hledger’s user interfaces accept a flexible “smart date” syntax. Smart dates allow some english words, can be relative to today’s date, and can have less-significant date parts omitted (defaulting to 1).

Examples:

2004/10/1, 2004-01-01, 2004.9.1	exact date, several separators allowed. Year is 4+ digits, month is 1-12, day is 1-31
2004	start of year
2004/10	start of month
10/1	month and day in current year
21	day in current month
october, oct	start of month in current year
yesterday, today, tomorrow	-1, 0, 1 days from today
last/this/next day/week/month/quarter/year	-1, 0, 1 periods from the current period
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

Counterexamples - malformed digit sequences might give surprising results:

201813	6 digits with an invalid month is parsed as start of 6-digit year
20181301	8 digits with an invalid month is parsed as start of 8-digit year
20181232	8 digits with an invalid day gives an error
201801012	9+ digits beginning with a valid YYYYMMDD gives an error

Note “today’s date” can be overridden with the --today option, in case it’s needed for testing or for recreating old reports. (Except for periodic transaction rules; those are not affected by --today.)

Report start & end date

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

Often you will want to see a shorter time span, such as the current month. You can specify a start and/or end date using -b/--begin, -e/--end, -p/--period or a date: query (described below). All of these accept the smart date syntax.

Some notes:

• End dates are exclusive, as in Ledger, so you should write the date after the last day you want to see in the report.
• As noted in reporting options: among start/end dates specified with options, the last (i.e. right-most) option takes precedence.
• The effective report start and end dates are the intersection of the start/end dates from options and that from date: queries. That is, date:2019-01 date:2019 -p'2000 to 2030' yields January 2019, the smallest common time span.
• A report interval (see below) will adjust start/end dates, when needed, so that they fall on subperiod boundaries.

Examples:

-b 2016/3/17	begin on St. Patrick’s day 2016
-e 12/1	end at the start of december 1st of the current year (11/30 will be the last date included)
-b thismonth	all transactions on or after the 1st of the current month
-p thismonth	all transactions in the current month
date:2016/3/17..	the above written as queries instead (.. can also be replaced with -)
date:..12/1
date:thismonth..
date:thismonth

Report intervals

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

The following “standard” report intervals can be enabled by using their corresponding flag:

• -D/--daily
• -W/--weekly
• -M/--monthly
• -Q/--quarterly
• -Y/--yearly

These standard intervals always start on natural interval boundaries: eg --weekly starts on mondays, --monthly starts on the first of the month, --yearly always starts on January 1st, etc.

Certain more complex intervals, and more flexible boundary dates, can be specified by -p/--period. These are described in period expressions, below.

Report intervals can only be specified by the flags above, and not by query arguments, currently.

Report intervals have another effect: multi-period reports are always expanded to fill a whole number of subperiods. So if you use a report interval (other than --daily), and you have specified a start or end date, you may notice those dates being overridden (ie, the report starts earlier than your requested start date, or ends later than your requested end date). This is done to ensure “full” first and last subperiods, so that all subperiods’ numbers are comparable.

To summarise:

• In multiperiod reports, all subperiods are forced to be the same length, to simplify reporting.
• Reports with the standard --weekly/--monthly/--quarterly/--yearly intervals are required to start on the first day of a week/month/quarter/year. We’d like more flexibility here but it isn’t supported yet.
• --period (below) can specify more complex intervals, starting on any date.

Period expressions

The -p/--period option accepts period expressions, a shorthand way of expressing a start date, end date, and/or report interval all at once.

Here’s a basic period expression specifying the first quarter of 2009. Note, hledger always treats start dates as inclusive and end dates as exclusive:

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

Keywords like “from” and “to” are optional, and so are the spaces, as long as you don’t run two dates together. “to” can also be written as “..” or “-”. These are equivalent to the above:

-p "2009/1/1 2009/4/1"

-p2009/1/1to2009/4/1

-p2009/1/1..2009/4/1

Dates are smart dates, so if the current year is 2009, the above can also be written as:

-p "1/1 4/1"

-p "january-apr"

-p "this year to 4/1"

If you specify only one date, the missing start or end date will be the earliest or latest transaction in your journal:

-p "from 2009/1/1"	everything after january 1, 2009
-p "from 2009/1"	the same
-p "from 2009"	the same
-p "to 2009"	everything before january 1, 2009

A single date with no “from” or “to” defines both the start and end date like so:

-p "2009"	the year 2009; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2010/1/1”
-p "2009/1"	the month of jan; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2009/2/1”
-p "2009/1/1"	just that day; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2009/1/2”

Or you can specify a single quarter like so:

-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

-p/--period’s argument can also begin with, or entirely consist of, a report interval. This should be separated from the start/end dates (if any) by a space, or the word in. The basic intervals (which can also be written as command line flags) are daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. Some examples:

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

-p "monthly in 2008"

-p "quarterly"

As mentioned above, the weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly intervals require a report start date that is the first day of a week, month, quarter or year. And, report start/end dates will be expanded if needed to span a whole number of intervals.

For example:

-p "weekly from 2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1"	starts on 2008/12/29, closest preceding Monday
-p "monthly in 2008/11/25"	starts on 2018/11/01
-p "quarterly from 2009-05-05 to 2009-06-01"	starts on 2009/04/01, ends on 2009/06/30, which are first and last days of Q2 2009
-p "yearly from 2009-12-29"	starts on 2009/01/01, first day of 2009

More complex report intervals

Some more complex kinds of interval are also supported in period expressions:

• biweekly
• fortnightly
• bimonthly
• every day|week|month|quarter|year
• every N days|weeks|months|quarters|years

These too will cause report start/end dates to be expanded, if needed, to span a whole number of intervals. Examples:

-p "bimonthly from 2008"	periods will have boundaries on 2008/01/01, 2008/03/01, …
-p "every 2 weeks"	starts on closest preceding Monday
-p "every 5 months from 2009/03"	periods will have boundaries on 2009/03/01, 2009/08/01, …

Intervals with custom start date

All intervals mentioned above are required to start on their natural calendar boundaries, but the following intervals can start on any date:

Weekly on 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 custom day:

• every Nth day [of month]
• every Nth WEEKDAYNAME [of month]

Yearly on custom day:

• every MM/DD [of year] (month number and day of month number)
• every MONTHNAME DDth [of year] (full or three-letter english month name, case insensitive, and day of month number)
• every DDth MONTHNAME [of year] (equivalent to the above)

Examples:

-p "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"

Periods or dates ?

Report intervals like the above are most often used with -p|--period, to divide reports into multiple subperiods - each generated date marks a subperiod boundary. Here, the periods between the dates are what’s important.

But report intervals can also be used with --forecast to generate future transactions, or with balance --budget to generate budget goal-setting transactions. For these, the dates themselves are what matters.

Events on multiple weekdays

The every WEEKDAYNAME form has a special variant with multiple day names, comma-separated. Eg: every mon,thu,sat. Also, weekday and weekendday are shorthand for mon,tue,wed,thu,fri and sat,sun respectively.

This form 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. (Because gaps between periods are not allowed; if you’d like to change this, see #1632.)

Examples:

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

DEPTH

With the --depth NUM option (short form: -NUM), commands like account, balance and register will show only the uppermost accounts in the account tree, down to level NUM. Use this when you want a summary with less detail. This flag has the same effect as a depth: query argument: depth:2, --depth=2 or -2 are equivalent.

QUERIES

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

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

  utilities food:groceries

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

  "personal care"

• Regular expressions are also supported:

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

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

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

• Add a not: prefix to negate a term:

  not:cur:USD

Query types

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

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

amt:N, amt:<N, amt:<=N, amt:>N, amt:>=N
Match postings with a single-commodity amount equal to, less than, or greater than N. (Postings with multi-commodity amounts are not tested and will always match.) The comparison has two modes: if N is preceded by a + or - sign (or is 0), the two signed numbers are compared. Otherwise, the absolute magnitudes are compared, ignoring sign.

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

cur:REGEX
Match postings or transactions including any amounts whose currency/commodity symbol is fully matched by REGEX. (For a partial match, use .*REGEX.*). Note, to match special characters which are regex-significant, you need to escape them with \. And for characters which are significant to your shell you may need one more level of escaping. So eg to match the dollar sign:
hledger print cur:\\$.

desc:REGEX
Match transaction descriptions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When querying by tag, note that:

• Accounts also inherit the tags of their parent accounts
• Postings also inherit the tags of their account and their transaction
• Transactions also acquire the tags of their postings.

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

Combining query terms

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.

while the print command shows transactions which:

• match any of the description terms AND
• have any postings matching any of the positive account terms AND
• have no postings matching any of the negative account terms AND
• match all the other terms.

You can do more powerful queries (such as AND-ing two like terms) by running a first query with print, and piping the result into a second hledger command. Eg: how much of food expenses was paid with cash ?

$ hledger print assets:cash | hledger -f- -I balance expenses:food

If you are interested in full boolean expressions for queries, see #203.

Queries and command options

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

Queries and 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 1.22.0 where it’s reversed, see #1625).

Querying with account aliases

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

Querying with cost or value

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

CONVERSION & COST

This section is about converting between commodities. Some definitions:

• A “commodity conversion” is an exchange of one currency or commodity for another. Eg a foreign currency exchange, or a purchase or sale of stock or cryptocurrency.

• A “conversion transaction” is a transaction involving one or more such conversions.

• “Conversion rate” is the exchange rate in a conversion - the cost per unit of one commodity in the other.

• “Cost” is how much of one commodity was paid to acquire the other (when buying), or how much was received in exchange for the other (when selling). We call both of these “cost” for convenience (after all, it is cost for one party or the other).

Recording conversions

As a concrete example, let’s assume 100 EUR was converted to 120 USD. There are several ways to record this in the journal, each with pros and cons which will be explained in more detail below. (Also, these examples use journal format which is properly explained much further below; sorry about that, you may want to read some of that first.)

Implicit conversion

You can just record the outflow (100 EUR) and inflow (120 USD) in the appropriate asset account:

2021-01-01
    assets:cash    -100 EUR
    assets:cash     120 USD

hledger will assume this transaction is balanced, inferring that the conversion rate must be 1 EUR = 1.20 USD. You can see the inferred rate by using hledger print -x.

Pro:

• Easy, concise
• hledger can do cost reporting

Con:

• Less error checking - typos in amounts or commodity symbols may not be detected
• conversion rate is not clear
• disturbs the accounting equation

You can prevent accidental implicit conversions due to a mistyped commodity symbol, by using hledger check commodities. You can prevent implicit conversions entirely, by using hledger check balancednoautoconversion, or -s/--strict.

Priced conversion

You can add the conversion rate using @ notation:

2021-01-01
    assets:cash        -100 EUR @ 1.20 USD
    assets:cash         120 USD

Now hledger will check that 100 * 1.20 = 120, and would report an error otherwise.

Pro:

• Still concise
• makes the conversion rate clear
• provides some error checking
• hledger can do cost reporting

Con:

• Disturbs the accounting equation without the –infer-equity flag

Equity conversion

In strict double entry bookkeeping, the above transaction is not balanced in EUR or in USD, since some EUR disappears, and some USD appears. This violates the accounting equation (A+L+E=0), and prevents reports like balancesheetequity from showing a zero total.

The proper way to make it balance is to add a balancing posting for each commodity, using an equity account:

2021-01-01
    assets:cash        -100 EUR
    equity:conversion   100 EUR
    equity:conversion  -120 USD
    assets:cash         120 USD

Pro:

• Preserves the accounting equation
• keeps track of conversions and related gains/losses in one place
• works in any double entry accounting system
• hledger can convert this to transaction prices using the –infer-costs flag

Con:

• More verbose
• conversion rate is not clear
• depends on the order of postings

Priced equity conversion

Another notation is to record both the conversion rate and the equity postings:

2021-01-01
    assets:cash        -100 EUR @ 1.20 USD
    equity:conversion   100 EUR
    equity:conversion  -120 USD
    assets:cash         120 USD

Pro:

• Preserves the accounting equation
• keeps track of conversions and related gains/losses in one place
• makes the conversion rate clear
• provides some error checking
• hledger can do cost reporting

Con:

• Most verbose
• Requires –infer-costs flag
• Not compatible with ledger

Inferring missing conversion rates

hledger will do this automatically for implicit conversions. Currently it can not do this for equity conversions.

Inferring missing equity postings

With the --infer-equity flag, hledger will add equity postings to priced and implicit conversions.

Inferring missing transaction prices from equity postings

With the --infer-costs flag, hledger will add transaction prices from equity postings, and will be able to handle transaction prices and equity postings together.

Cost reporting

With the -B/--cost flag, hledger will convert the amounts in priced and implicit conversions to their cost in the other commodity. This is useful to see a report of what you paid for things (or how much you sold things for). Currently -B/--cost does not work on equity conversions, and it disables --infer-equity.

These operations are transient, only affecting reports. If you want to change the journal file permanently, you could pipe each entry through hledger -f- -I print [-x] [--infer-equity] [--infer-costs] [-B]

Conversion summary

• Recording the conversion rate is good because it makes that clear and allows cost reporting.
• Recording equity postings is good because it balances the accounting equation and is correct bookkeeping.
• Combining these is possible with the –infer-costs flag, but has certain requirements for the order of postings.
• When you want to see the cost (or sale proceeds) of things, use -B/--cost.
• When you want to see a balanced balance sheet or correct journal entries, use --infer-equity.
• --cost will remove any balancing equity posts, so as not to disturb the accounting equation.
• Conversion/cost operations are performed before valuation.

VALUATION

Instead of reporting amounts in their original commodity, hledger can convert them to cost/sale amount (using the conversion rate recorded in the transaction), and/or to market value (using some market price on a certain date). This is controlled by the --value=TYPE[,COMMODITY] option, which will be described below. We also provide the simpler -V and -X COMMODITY options, and often one of these is all you need:

-V: Value

The -V/--market flag converts amounts to market value in their default valuation commodity, using the market prices in effect on the valuation date(s), if any. More on these in a minute.

-X: Value in specified commodity

The -X/--exchange=COMM option is like -V, except you tell it which currency you want to convert to, and it tries to convert everything to that.

Valuation date

Since market prices can change from day to day, market value reports have a valuation date (or more than one), which determines which market prices will be used.

For single period reports, if an explicit report end date is specified, that will be used as the valuation date; otherwise the valuation date is the journal’s end date.

For multiperiod reports, each column/period is valued on the last day of the period, by default.

Market prices

To convert a commodity A to its market value in another commodity B, hledger looks for a suitable market price (exchange rate) as follows, in this order of preference :

1. A declared market price or inferred market price: A’s latest market price in B on or before the valuation date as declared by a P directive, or (with the --infer-market-prices flag) inferred from transaction prices.

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

3. A forward chain of market prices: a synthetic price formed by combining the shortest chain of “forward” (only 1 above) market prices, leading from A to B.

4. Any chain of market prices: a chain of any market prices, including both forward and reverse prices (1 and 2 above), leading from A to B.

There is a limit to the length of these price chains; if hledger reaches that length without finding a complete chain or exhausting all possibilities, it will give up (with a “gave up” message visible in --debug=2 output). That limit is currently 1000.

Amounts for which no suitable market price can be found, are not converted.

–infer-market-prices: market prices from transactions

Normally, market value in hledger is fully controlled by, and requires, P directives in your journal. Since adding and updating those can be a chore, and since transactions usually take place at close to market value, why not use the recorded transaction prices as additional market prices (as Ledger does) ? We could produce value reports without needing P directives at all.

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. (And if both occur on the same day, the P directive takes precedence).

There is a downside: value reports can sometimes be affected in confusing/undesired ways by your journal entries. If this happens to you, read all of this Valuation section carefully, and try adding --debug or --debug=2 to troubleshoot.

--infer-market-prices can infer market prices from:

• multicommodity transactions with explicit prices (@/@@)

• multicommodity transactions with implicit prices (no @, two commodities, unbalanced). (With these, the order of postings matters. hledger print -x can be useful for troubleshooting.)

• but not, currently, from “more correct” multicommodity transactions (no @, multiple commodities, balanced).

There is another 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

Valuation commodity

When you specify a valuation commodity (-X COMM or --value TYPE,COMM):
hledger will convert all amounts to COMM, wherever it can find a suitable market price (including by reversing or chaining prices).

When you leave the valuation commodity unspecified (-V or --value TYPE):
For each commodity A, hledger picks a default valuation commodity as follows, in this order of preference:

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

2. The price commodity from the latest P-declared market price for A on any date. (Allows conversion to proceed when there are inferred prices before the valuation date.)

3. If there are no P directives at all (any commodity or date) and the --infer-market-prices flag is used: the price commodity from the latest transaction-inferred price for A on or before valuation date.

This means:

• If you have P directives, they determine which commodities -V will convert, and to what.

• If you have no P directives, and use the --infer-market-prices flag, transaction prices determine it.

Amounts for which no valuation commodity can be found are not converted.

Simple valuation examples

Here are some quick examples of -V:

; one euro is worth this many dollars from nov 1
P 2016/11/01 € $1.10

; purchase some euros on nov 3
2016/11/3
    assets:euros        €100
    assets:checking

; the euro is worth fewer dollars by dec 21
P 2016/12/21 € $1.03

How many euros do I have ?

$ hledger -f t.j bal -N euros
                €100  assets:euros

What are they worth at end of nov 3 ?

$ hledger -f t.j bal -N euros -V -e 2016/11/4
             $110.00  assets:euros

What are they worth after 2016/12/21 ? (no report end date specified, defaults to today)

$ hledger -f t.j bal -N euros -V
             $103.00  assets:euros

–value: Flexible valuation

-V and -X are special cases of the more general --value option:

 --value=TYPE[,COMM]  TYPE is then, end, now or YYYY-MM-DD.
                      COMM is an optional commodity symbol.
                      Shows amounts converted to:
                      - default valuation commodity (or COMM) using market prices at posting dates
                      - default valuation commodity (or COMM) using market prices at period end(s)
                      - default valuation commodity (or COMM) using current market prices
                      - default valuation commodity (or COMM) using market prices at some date

The TYPE part selects cost or value and valuation date:

--value=then

Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commodity, using market prices on each posting’s date.

--value=end

Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commodity, using market prices on the last day of the report period (or if unspecified, the journal’s end date); or in multiperiod reports, market prices on the last day of each subperiod.

--value=now

Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commodity using current market prices (as of when report is generated).

--value=YYYY-MM-DD

Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commodity using market prices on this date.

To select a different valuation commodity, add the optional ,COMM part: a comma, then the target commodity’s symbol. Eg: --value=now,EUR. hledger will do its best to convert amounts to this commodity, deducing market prices as described above.

More valuation examples

Here are some examples showing the effect of --value, as seen with print:

P 2000-01-01 A  1 B
P 2000-02-01 A  2 B
P 2000-03-01 A  3 B
P 2000-04-01 A  4 B

2000-01-01
  (a)      1 A @ 5 B

2000-02-01
  (a)      1 A @ 6 B

2000-03-01
  (a)      1 A @ 7 B

Show the cost of each posting:

$ hledger -f- print --cost
2000-01-01
    (a)             5 B

2000-02-01
    (a)             6 B

2000-03-01
    (a)             7 B

Show the value as of the last day of the report period (2000-02-29):

$ hledger -f- print --value=end date:2000/01-2000/03
2000-01-01
    (a)             2 B

2000-02-01
    (a)             2 B

With no report period specified, that shows the value as of the last day of the journal (2000-03-01):

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

2000-02-01
    (a)             3 B

2000-03-01
    (a)             3 B

Show the current value (the 2000-04-01 price is still in effect today):

$ hledger -f- print --value=now
2000-01-01
    (a)             4 B

2000-02-01
    (a)             4 B

2000-03-01
    (a)             4 B

Show the value on 2000/01/15:

$ hledger -f- print --value=2000-01-15
2000-01-01
    (a)             1 B

2000-02-01
    (a)             1 B

2000-03-01
    (a)             1 B

You may need to explicitly set a commodity’s display style, when reverse prices are used. Eg this output might be surprising:

P 2000-01-01 A 2B

2000-01-01
  a  1B
  b

$ hledger print -x -X A
2000-01-01
    a               0
    b               0

Explanation: because there’s no amount or commodity directive specifying a display style for A, 0.5A gets the default style, which shows no decimal digits. Because the displayed amount looks like zero, the commodity symbol and minus sign are not displayed either. Adding a commodity directive sets a more useful display style for A:

P 2000-01-01 A 2B
commodity 0.00A

2000-01-01
  a  1B
  b

$ hledger print -X A
2000-01-01
    a           0.50A
    b          -0.50A

Interaction of valuation and queries

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

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

See: 1625

Effect of valuation on reports

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

Report type	-B, --cost	-V, -X	--value=then	--value=end	--value=DATE, --value=now
print
posting amounts	cost	value at report end or today	value at posting date	value at report or journal end	value at DATE/today
balance assertions/assignments	unchanged	unchanged	unchanged	unchanged	unchanged
register
starting balance (-H)	cost	value at report or journal end	valued at day each historical posting was made	value at report or journal end	value at DATE/today
starting balance (-H) with report interval	cost	value at day before report or journal start	valued at day each historical posting was made	value at day before report or journal start	value at DATE/today
posting amounts	cost	value at report or journal end	value at posting date	value at report or journal end	value at DATE/today
summary posting amounts with report interval	summarised cost	value at period ends	sum of postings in interval, valued at interval start	value at period ends	value at DATE/today
running total/average	sum/average of displayed values	sum/average of displayed values	sum/average of displayed values	sum/average of displayed values	sum/average of displayed values
balance (bs, bse, cf, is)
balance changes	sums of costs	value at report end or today of sums of postings	value at posting date	value at report or journal end of sums of postings	value at DATE/today of sums of postings
budget amounts (–budget)	like balance changes	like balance changes	like balance changes	like balances	like balance changes
grand total	sum of displayed values	sum of displayed values	sum of displayed valued	sum of displayed values	sum of displayed values
balance (bs, bse, cf, is) with report interval
starting balances (-H)	sums of costs of postings before report start	value at report start of sums of all postings before report start	sums of values of postings before report start at respective posting dates	value at report start of sums of all postings before report start	sums of postings before report start
balance changes (bal, is, bs –change, cf –change)	sums of costs of postings in period	same as –value=end	sums of values of postings in period at respective posting dates	balance change in each period, valued at period ends	value at DATE/today of sums of postings
end balances (bal -H, is –H, bs, cf)	sums of costs of postings from before report start to period end	same as –value=end	sums of values of postings from before period start to period end at respective posting dates	period end balances, valued at period ends	value at DATE/today of sums of postings
budget amounts (–budget)	like balance changes/end balances	like balance changes/end balances	like balance changes/end balances	like balances	like balance changes/end balances
row totals, row averages (-T, -A)	sums, averages of displayed values	sums, averages of displayed values	sums, averages of displayed values	sums, averages of displayed values	sums, averages of displayed values
column totals	sums of displayed values	sums of displayed values	sums of displayed values	sums of displayed values	sums of displayed values
grand total, grand average	sum, average of column totals	sum, average of column totals	sum, average of column totals	sum, average of column totals	sum, average of column totals

--cumulative is omitted to save space, it works like -H but with a zero starting balance.

Glossary:

cost

calculated using price(s) recorded in the transaction(s).

value

market value using available market price declarations, or the unchanged amount if no conversion rate can be found.

report start

the first day of the report period specified with -b or -p or date:, otherwise today.

report or journal start

the first day of the report period specified with -b or -p or date:, otherwise the earliest transaction date in the journal, otherwise today.

report end

the last day of the report period specified with -e or -p or date:, otherwise today.

report or journal end

the last day of the report period specified with -e or -p or date:, otherwise the latest transaction date in the journal, otherwise today.

report interval

a flag (-D/-W/-M/-Q/-Y) or period expression that activates the report’s multi-period mode (whether showing one or many subperiods).

PIVOTING

Normally hledger sums amounts, and organizes them in a hierarchy, based on account name. The --pivot FIELD option causes it to sum and organize hierarchy based on the value of some other field instead. FIELD can be: status, code, description, payee, note, or the full name (case insensitive) of any tag. As with account names, values containing colon:separated:parts will be displayed hierarchically in reports.

--pivot is a general option affecting all reports; you can think of hledger transforming the journal before any other processing, replacing every posting’s account name with the value of the specified field on that posting, inheriting it from the transaction or using a blank value if it’s not present.

An example:

2016/02/16 Member Fee Payment
    assets:bank account                    2 EUR
    income:member fees                    -2 EUR  ; member: John Doe

Normal balance report showing account names:

$ hledger balance
               2 EUR  assets:bank account
              -2 EUR  income:member fees
--------------------
                   0

Pivoted balance report, using member: tag values instead:

$ hledger balance --pivot member
               2 EUR
              -2 EUR  John Doe
--------------------
                   0

One way to show only amounts with a member: value (using a query, described below):

$ hledger balance --pivot member tag:member=.
              -2 EUR  John Doe
--------------------
              -2 EUR

Another way (the acct: query matches against the pivoted “account name”):

$ hledger balance --pivot member acct:.
              -2 EUR  John Doe
--------------------
              -2 EUR

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)

hledger can optionally produce debug output (if enabled with --debug=N); this goes to stderr, and is not affected by -o/--output-file. If you need to capture it, use shell redirects, eg: hledger bal --debug=3 >file 2>&1.

Output styling

hledger commands can produce colour output when the terminal supports it. This is controlled by the --color/--colour option: - if the --color/--colour option is given a value of yes or always (or no or never), colour will (or will not) be used; - otherwise, if the NO_COLOR environment variable is set, colour will not be used; - otherwise, colour will be used if the output (terminal or file) supports it.

hledger commands can also use unicode box-drawing characters to produce prettier tables and output. This is controlled by the --pretty option: - if the --pretty option is given a value of yes or always (or no or never), unicode characters will (or will not) be used; - otherwise, unicode characters will not be used.

Output format

Some commands offer additional output formats, other than the usual plain text terminal output. Here are those commands and the formats currently supported:

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

• ¹ Also affected by the balance commands’ --layout option.
• ² balance does not support html output without a report interval or with --budget.

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

$ hledger print -O csv    # print CSV on stdout

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

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

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

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

CSV output

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

HTML output

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

JSON output

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

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

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

SQL output

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

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

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

Commodity styles

The display style of a commodity/currency is inferred according to the rules described in Commodity display style. The inferred display style can be overridden by an optional -c/--commodity-style option (Exceptions: as is the case for inferred styles, price amounts, and all amounts displayed by the print command, will be displayed with all of their decimal digits visible, regardless of the specified precision). For example, the following will override the display style for dollars.

$ hledger print -c '$1.000,0'

The format specification of the style is identical to the commodity display style specification for the commodity directive. The command line option can be supplied repeatedly to override the display style for multiple commodity/currency symbols.

COMMANDS

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

m4_dnl XXX maybe later m4_dnl Each command’s detailed docs are available : m4_dnl m4_dnl - command line help, eg: hledger balance --help m4_dnl - m4_dnl - info manuals, eg: hledger help --info hledger (or possibly info hledger) m4_dnl - web manuals, eg: https://hledger.org/hledger.html#balance m4_dnl

Here are the built-in commands, with the most often-used in bold:

Data entry:

These data entry commands are the only ones which can modify your journal file.

• add - add transactions using guided prompts
• import - add any new transactions from other files (eg csv)

Data management:

• check - check for various kinds of issue in the data
• close (equity) - generate balance-resetting transactions
• diff - compare account transactions in two journal files
• rewrite - generate extra postings, similar to print –auto

Financial statements:

• aregister (areg) - show transactions in a particular account
• balancesheet (bs) - show assets, liabilities and net worth
• balancesheetequity (bse) - show assets, liabilities and equity
• cashflow (cf) - show changes in liquid assets
• incomestatement (is) - show revenues and expenses
• roi - show return on investments

Miscellaneous reports:

• accounts - show account names
• activity - show postings-per-interval bar charts
• balance (bal) - show balance changes/end balances/budgets in any accounts
• codes - show transaction codes
• commodities - show commodity/currency symbols
• descriptions - show unique transaction descriptions
• files - show input file paths
• help - show hledger user manuals in several formats
• notes - show unique note segments of transaction descriptions
• payees - show unique payee segments of transaction descriptions
• prices - show market price records
• print - show transactions (journal entries)
• print-unique - show only transactions with unique descriptions
• register (reg) - show postings in one or more accounts & running total
• register-match - show a recent posting that best matches a description
• stats - show journal statistics
• tags - show tag names
• test - run self tests

Add-on commands:

Programs or scripts named hledger-SOMETHING in your PATH are add-on commands; these appear in the commands list with a + mark. The following add-on commands can be installed, eg by the hledger-install script:

• ui - hledger’s official curses-style TUI
• web - hledger’s official web UI
• iadd - a popular alternative to hledger’s add command.
• interest - generates interest transactions
• stockquotes - downloads market prices. (Alpha quality, needs your help.)

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, the detailed command docs, in alphabetical order.

m4_dnl cf Hledger/Cli/Commands/commands.m4: commands({{##}})

Add-on commands

Add-on commands are programs or scripts in your PATH

• whose name starts with hledger-
• whose name ends with a recognised file extension: .bat,.com,.exe, .hs,.lhs,.pl,.py,.rb,.rkt,.sh or none
• and (on unix, mac) which are executable by the current user.

Add-ons are a relatively easy way to add local features or experiment with new ideas. They can be written in any language, but haskell scripts have a big advantage: they can use the same hledger library functions that built-in commands use for command-line options, parsing and reporting. Some experimental/example add-on scripts can be found in the hledger repo’s bin/ directory.

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

$ hledger web -- --serve

and not:

$ hledger web --serve

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

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

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

$ hledger-web --serve

JOURNAL FORMAT

hledger’s default file format, representing a General Journal.

hledger’s usual data source is a plain text file containing journal entries in hledger journal format. This file represents a standard accounting general journal. I use file names ending in .journal, but that’s not required. The journal file contains a number of transaction entries, each describing a transfer of money (or any commodity) between two or more named accounts, in a simple format readable by both hledger and humans.

hledger’s journal format is a compatible subset, mostly, of ledger’s journal format, so hledger can work with compatible ledger journal files as well. It’s safe, and encouraged, to run both hledger and ledger on the same journal file, eg to validate the results you’re getting.

You can use hledger without learning any more about this file; just use the add or web or import commands to create and update it.

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

Here’s a description of each part of the file format (and hledger’s data model). These are mostly in the order you’ll use them, but in some cases related concepts have been grouped together for easy reference, or linked before they are introduced, so feel free to skip over anything that looks unnecessary right now.

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 default year 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.)

Secondary dates

Real-life transactions sometimes involve more than one date - eg the date you write a cheque, and the date it clears in your bank. When you want to model this, for more accurate daily balances, you can specify individual posting dates.

Or, you can use the older secondary date feature (Ledger calls it auxiliary date or effective date). Note: we support this for compatibility, but I usually recommend avoiding this feature; posting dates are almost always clearer and simpler.

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

The meaning of secondary dates is up to you, but it’s best to follow a consistent rule. Eg “primary = the bank’s clearing date, secondary = date the transaction was initiated, if different”, as shown here:

2010/2/23=2/19 movie ticket
  expenses:cinema                   $10
  assets:checking

$ hledger register checking
2010-02-23 movie ticket         assets:checking                $-10         $-10

$ hledger register checking --date2
2010-02-19 movie ticket         assets:checking                $-10         $-10

Posting dates

You can give individual postings a different date from their parent transaction, by adding a posting comment containing a tag (see below) like date:DATE. This is probably the best way to control posting dates precisely. Eg in this example the expense should appear in May reports, and the deduction from checking should be reported on 6/1 for easy bank reconciliation:

2015/5/30
    expenses:food     $10  ; food purchased on saturday 5/30
    assets:checking        ; bank cleared it on monday, date:6/1

$ hledger -f t.j register food
2015-05-30                      expenses:food                  $10           $10

$ hledger -f t.j register checking
2015-06-01                      assets:checking               $-10          $-10

DATE should be a simple date; if the year is not specified it will use the year of the transaction’s date. You can set the secondary date similarly, with date2:DATE2. The date: or date2: tags must have a valid simple date value if they are present, eg a date: tag with no value is not allowed.

Ledger’s earlier, more compact bracketed date syntax is also supported: [DATE], [DATE=DATE2] or [=DATE2]. hledger will attempt to parse any square-bracketed sequence of the 0123456789/-.= characters in this way. With this syntax, DATE infers its year from the transaction and DATE2 infers its year from DATE.

Status

Transactions, or individual postings within a transaction, can have a status mark, which is a single character before the transaction description or posting account name, separated from it by a space, indicating one of three statuses:

mark	status
	unmarked
!	pending
*	cleared

When reporting, you can filter by status with the -U/--unmarked, -P/--pending, and -C/--cleared flags; or the status:, status:!, and status:* queries; or the U, P, C keys in hledger-ui.

Note, in Ledger and in older versions of hledger, the “unmarked” state is called “uncleared”. As of hledger 1.3 we have renamed it to unmarked for clarity.

To replicate Ledger and old hledger’s behaviour of also matching pending, combine -U and -P.

Status marks are optional, but can be helpful eg for reconciling with real-world accounts. Some editor modes provide highlighting and shortcuts for working with status. Eg in Emacs ledger-mode, you can toggle transaction status with C-c C-e, or posting status with C-c C-c.

What “uncleared”, “pending”, and “cleared” actually mean is up to you. Here’s one suggestion:

status	meaning
uncleared	recorded but not yet reconciled; needs review
pending	tentatively reconciled (if needed, eg during a big reconciliation)
cleared	complete, reconciled as far as possible, and considered correct

With this scheme, you would use -PC to see the current balance at your bank, -U to see things which will probably hit your bank soon (like uncashed checks), and no flags to see the most up-to-date state of your finances.

Code

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

Description

A transaction’s description is the rest of the line following the date and status mark (or until a comment begins). Sometimes called the “narration” in traditional bookkeeping, it can be used for whatever you wish, or left blank. Transaction descriptions can be queried, unlike comments.

Payee and note

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

Comments

Lines in the journal beginning with a semicolon (;) or hash (#) or star (*) are comments, and will be ignored. (Star comments cause org-mode nodes to be ignored, allowing emacs users to fold and navigate their journals with org-mode or orgstruct-mode.)

You can attach comments to a transaction by writing them after the description and/or indented on the following lines (before the postings). Similarly, you can attach comments to an individual posting by writing them after the amount and/or indented on the following lines. Transaction and posting comments must begin with a semicolon (;).

Some examples:

# a file comment
; another file comment
* also a file comment, useful in org/orgstruct mode

comment
A multiline file comment, which continues
until a line containing just "end comment"
(or end of file).
end comment

2012/5/14 something  ; a transaction comment
    ; the transaction comment, continued
    posting1  1  ; a comment for posting 1
    posting2
    ; a comment for posting 2
    ; another comment line for posting 2
; a file comment (because not indented)

You can also comment larger regions of a file using comment and end comment directives.

Tags

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

A simple tag is a word (which may contain hyphens) followed by a full colon, written inside a transaction or posting comment line:

2017/1/16 bought groceries  ; sometag:

Tags can have a value, which is the text after the colon, up to the next comma or end of line, with leading/trailing whitespace removed:

    expenses:food    $10 ; a-posting-tag: the tag value

Note this means hledger’s tag values can not contain commas or newlines. Ending at commas means you can write multiple short tags on one line, comma separated:

    assets:checking  ; a comment containing tag1:, tag2: some value ...

Here,

• “a comment containing” is just comment text, not a tag
• “tag1” is a tag with no value
• “tag2” is another tag, whose value is “some value ...”

Tags in a transaction comment affect the transaction and all of its postings, while tags in a posting comment affect only that posting. For example, the following transaction has three tags (A, TAG2, third-tag) and the posting has four (those plus posting-tag):

1/1 a transaction  ; A:, TAG2:
    ; third-tag: a third transaction tag, <- with a value
    (a)  $1  ; posting-tag:

Tags are like Ledger’s metadata feature, except hledger’s tag values are simple strings.

Postings

A posting is an addition of some amount to, or removal of some amount from, an account. Each posting line begins with at least one space or tab (2 or 4 spaces is common), followed by:

• (optional) a status character (empty, !, or *), followed by a space
• (required) an account name (any text, optionally containing single spaces, until end of line or a double space)
• (optional) two or more spaces or tabs followed by an amount.

Positive amounts are being added to the account, negative amounts are being removed.

The amounts within a transaction must always sum up to zero. As a convenience, one amount may be left blank; it will be inferred so as to balance the transaction.

Be sure to note the unusual two-space delimiter between account name and amount. This makes it easy to write account names containing spaces. But if you accidentally leave only one space (or tab) before the amount, the amount will be considered part of the account name.

Virtual postings

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

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

1/1 opening balances
  (assets:checking)   $1000
  (assets:savings)    $2000

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

1/1 buy food with cash, update budget envelope subaccounts, & something else
  assets:cash                    $-10 ; <- these balance
  expenses:food                    $7 ; <-
  expenses:food                    $3 ; <-
  [assets:checking:budget:food]  $-10    ; <- and these balance
  [assets:checking:available]     $10    ; <-
  (something:else)                 $5       ; <- not required to balance

Ordinary non-parenthesised, non-bracketed postings are called real postings. You can exclude virtual postings from reports with the -R/--real flag or real:1 query.

Account names

Account names typically have several parts separated by a full colon, from which hledger derives a hierarchical chart of accounts. They can be anything you like, but in finance there are traditionally five top-level accounts: assets, liabilities, revenue, expenses, and equity.

Account names may contain single spaces, eg: assets:accounts receivable. Because of this, they must always be followed by two or more spaces (or newline).

Account names can be aliased.

Amounts

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

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

1

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

$1
4000 AAPL
3 "green apples"

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

-$1
$-1

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

+ $1
$-      1

Scientific E notation is allowed:

1E-6
EUR 1E3

Decimal marks, digit group marks

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

1.23
1,23456780000009

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

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

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

1,000
1.000

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

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

Commodity

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

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

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

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

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

Directives influencing number parsing and display

You can add decimal-mark and commodity directives to the journal, to declare and control these things more explicitly and precisely. These are described below, in JOURNAL FORMAT -> Declaring commodities. Here’s a quick example:

# the decimal mark character used by all amounts in this file (all commodities)
decimal-mark .

# display styles for the $, EUR, INR and no-symbol commodities:
commodity $1,000.00
commodity EUR 1.000,00
commodity INR 9,99,99,999.00
commodity 1 000 000.9455

Commodity display style

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

A commodity’s display style is inferred as follows.

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

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

• The commodity directive for that commodity (including the no-symbol commodity), if any.
• The amounts in that commodity seen in the journal’s transactions. (Posting amounts only; prices and periodic or auto rules are ignored, currently.)
• The built-in fallback style, which looks like this: $1000.00. (Symbol on the left, period decimal mark, two decimal places.)

A style is inferred from journal amounts as follows:

• Use the general style (decimal mark, symbol placement) of the first amount
• Use the first-seen digit group style (digit group mark, digit group sizes), if any
• Use the maximum number of decimal places of all.

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

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

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

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

Rounding

Amounts are stored internally as decimal numbers with up to 255 decimal places, and displayed with the number of decimal places specified by the commodity display style. Note, hledger uses banker’s rounding: it rounds to the nearest even number, eg 0.5 displayed with zero decimal places is “0”). (Guaranteed since hledger 1.17.1; in older versions this could vary if hledger was built with Decimal < 0.5.1.)

Transaction prices

Within a transaction, you can note an amount’s price in another commodity. This can be used to document the cost (in a purchase) or selling price (in a sale). For example, transaction prices are useful to record purchases of a foreign currency. Note transaction prices are fixed at the time of the transaction, and do not change over time. See also market prices, which represent prevailing exchange rates on a certain date.

There are several ways to record a transaction price:

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

   2009/1/1
     assets:euros     €100 @ $1.35  ; one hundred euros purchased at $1.35 each
     assets:dollars                 ; balancing amount is -$135.00
   

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

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

3. Specify amounts for all postings, using exactly two commodities, and let hledger infer the price that balances the transaction:

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

4. Like 1, but the @ is parenthesised, i.e. (@); this is for compatibility with Ledger journals (Virtual posting costs), and is equivalent to 1 in hledger.

5. Like 2, but as in 4 the @@ is parenthesised, i.e. (@@); in hledger, this is equivalent to 2.

Use the -B/--cost flag to convert amounts to their transaction price’s commodity, if any. (mnemonic: “B” is from “cost Basis”, as in Ledger). Eg here is how -B affects the balance report for the example above:

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

Note -B is sensitive to the order of postings when a transaction price is inferred: the inferred price will be in the commodity of the last amount. So if example 3’s postings are reversed, while the transaction is equivalent, -B shows something different:

2009/1/1
  assets:dollars  $-135              ; 135 dollars sold
  assets:euros     €100              ; for 100 euros

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

Equity conversion postings

Transaction prices can be converted to and from equity conversion postings using the --infer-equity and --infer-costs flags.

With --infer-equity, hledger will add equity postings to balance out any transaction prices.

2009/1/1
  assets:euros     €100 @ $1.35      ; 100 euros bought
  assets:dollars  -$135              ; for $135

$ hledger print --infer-equity

2009-01-01
    assets:euros               €100 @ $1.35  ; 100 euros bought
    equity:conversion:$-€:€           €-100  ; 100 euros bought, generated-posting:
    equity:conversion:$-€:$         $135.00  ; 100 euros bought, generated-posting:
    assets:dollars                    $-135  ; for $135

The reverse is possible using --infer-costs, which will check any equity conversion postings and generate a transaction price for the first non-conversion posting which matches.

2009-01-01
    assets:euros                       €100  ; 100 euros bought
    equity:conversion                 €-100
    equity:conversion                  $135
    assets:dollars                    $-135  ; for $135

$ hledger print --infer-costs

2009-01-01
    assets:euros               €100 @@ $135  ; 100 euros bought
    equity:conversion                 €-100
    equity:conversion                  $135
    assets:dollars                    $-135  ; for $135

Note that the above will assign the transaction price to the first matching posting in the transaction. If you want to assign it to a different posting, or if you have several different sets of conversion postings which must match different postings, you must manually specify the transaction price. If you do this, equity conversion postings must occur in adjacent pairs and must exactly match the amount of a non-conversion posting.

2009-01-01
    assets:dollars                    $-135  ; $135 paid
    equity:conversion                 €-100
    equity:conversion                  $135
    assets:euros               €100 @@ $135  ; to buy 100 euros

2009-01-01
    assets:euros               €100 @ $1.35  ; 100 euros bought
    equity:conversion                 €-100
    equity:conversion                  $135
    assets:pounds               £80 @@ $100  ; 80 pounds bought
    equity:conversion                  £-80
    equity:conversion                  $100
    assets:dollars                    $-235  ; for $235 total

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

Lot prices, lot dates

Ledger allows another kind of price, lot price (four variants: {UNITPRICE}, {{{{TOTALPRICE}}}}, {=FIXEDUNITPRICE}, {{{{=FIXEDTOTALPRICE}}}}), and/or a lot date ([DATE]) to be specified. These are normally used to select a lot when selling investments. hledger will parse these, for compatibility with Ledger journals, but currently ignores them. A transaction price, lot price and/or lot date may appear in any order, after the posting amount and before the balance assertion if any.

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, below).

Assertions and ordering

hledger sorts an account’s postings and assertions first by date and then (for postings on the same day) by parse order. Note this is different from Ledger, which sorts assertions only by parse order. (Also, Ledger assertions do not see the accumulated effect of repeated postings to the same account within a transaction.)

So, hledger balance assertions keep working if you reorder differently-dated transactions within the journal. But if you reorder same-dated transactions or postings, assertions might break and require updating. This order dependence does bring an advantage: precise control over the order of postings and assertions within a day, so you can assert intra-day balances.

Assertions and multiple included files

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

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

Assertions and multiple -f files

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

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

Assertions and commodities

The asserted balance must be a simple single-commodity amount, and in fact the assertion checks only this commodity’s balance within the (possibly multi-commodity) account balance. This is how assertions work in Ledger also. We could call this a “partial” balance assertion.

To assert the balance of more than one commodity in an account, you can write multiple postings, each asserting one commodity’s balance.

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

2013/1/1
  a   $1
  a    1€
  b  $-1
  c   -1€

2013/1/2  ; These assertions succeed
  a    0  =  $1
  a    0  =   1€
  b    0 == $-1
  c    0 ==  -1€

2013/1/3  ; This assertion fails as 'a' also contains 1€
  a    0 ==  $1

It’s not yet possible to make a complete assertion about a balance that has multiple commodities. One workaround is to isolate each commodity into its own subaccount:

2013/1/1
  a:usd   $1
  a:euro   1€
  b

2013/1/2
  a        0 ==  0
  a:usd    0 == $1
  a:euro   0 ==  1€

Assertions and prices

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

2019/1/1
  (a)     $1 @ €1 = $1

We do allow prices to be written there, however, and print shows them, even though they don’t affect whether the assertion passes or fails. This is for backward compatibility (hledger’s close command used to generate balance assertions with prices), and because balance assignments do use them (see below).

Assertions and subaccounts

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

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

Assertions and virtual postings

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

Assertions and auto postings

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

• assert the balance calculated with --auto, and always use --auto with that file
• or assert the balance calculated without --auto, and never use --auto with that file
• or avoid balance assertions on accounts affected by auto postings (or avoid auto postings entirely).

Assertions and precision

Balance assertions compare the exactly calculated amounts, which are not always what is shown by reports. Eg a commodity directive may limit the display precision, but this will not affect balance assertions. Balance assertion failure messages show exact amounts.

Balance assignments

Ledger-style balance assignments are also supported. These are like balance assertions, but with no posting amount on the left side of the equals sign; instead it is calculated automatically so as to satisfy the assertion. This can be a convenience during data entry, eg when setting opening balances:

; starting a new journal, set asset account balances
2016/1/1 opening balances
  assets:checking            = $409.32
  assets:savings             = $735.24
  assets:cash                 = $42
  equity:opening balances

or when adjusting a balance to reality:

; no cash left; update balance, record any untracked spending as a generic expense
2016/1/15
  assets:cash    = $0
  expenses:misc

The calculated amount depends on the account’s balance in the commodity at that point (which depends on the previously-dated postings of the commodity to that account since the last balance assertion or assignment). Note that using balance assignments makes your journal a little less explicit; to know the exact amount posted, you have to run hledger or do the calculations yourself, instead of just reading it.

Balance assignments and prices

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

2019/1/1
  (a)             = $1 @ €2

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

Directives

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

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

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

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

Directives are not required when starting out with hledger, but you will probably add some as your needs grow. Here is an overview of directives by purpose:

purpose	directives	command line options with similar effect
READING/GENERATING DATA:
Declare a commodity’s or file’s decimal mark to help parse amounts accurately	commodity, D, decimal-mark
Apply changes to the data while parsing	alias, apply account, comment, D, Y	--alias
Inline extra data files	include	multiple -f/--file’s
Generate extra transactions or budget goals	~
Generate extra postings	=
CHECKING FOR ERRORS:
Define valid entities to allow stricter error checking	account, commodity, payee
DISPLAYING REPORTS:
Declare accounts’ display order and accounting type	account
Declare commodity display styles	commodity, D	-c/--commodity-style

And here are all the directives and their precise effects:

directive	effects	ends at file end?
account	Declares an account, for checking all entries in all files; and its display order and type, for reports. Subdirectives: any text, ignored.
alias	Rewrites account names, in following entries until end of current file or end aliases.	Y
apply account	Prepends a common parent account to all account names, in following entries until end of current file or end apply account.	Y
comment	Ignores part of the journal file, until end of current file or end comment.	Y
commodity	Declares a commodity, for checking all entries in all files; the decimal mark for parsing amounts of this commodity, for following entries until end of current file; and its display style, for reports. Takes precedence over D. Subdirectives: format (alternate syntax).	N, Y
D	Sets a default commodity to use for no-symbol amounts, and its decimal mark for parsing amounts of this commodity in following entries until end of current file; and its display style, for reports.	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.
payee	Declares a payee name, for checking all entries in all files.
P	Declares a market price for a commodity on some date, for valuation reports.
Y	Declares a year for yearless dates, for following entries until end of current file.	Y
~ (tilde)	Declares a periodic transaction rule that generates future transactions with --forecast and budget goals with balance --budget.
= (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

Directives and multiple files

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

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

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

Comment blocks

A line containing just comment starts a commented region of the file, and a line containing just end comment (or the end of the current file) ends it. See also comments.

Including other files

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

include FILEPATH

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

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

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

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

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

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

Default year

You can set a default year to be used for subsequent dates which don’t specify a year. This is a line beginning with Y followed by the year. Eg:

Y2009  ; set default year to 2009

12/15  ; equivalent to 2009/12/15
  expenses  1
  assets

Y2010  ; change default year to 2010

2009/1/30  ; specifies the year, not affected
  expenses  1
  assets

1/31   ; equivalent to 2010/1/31
  expenses  1
  assets

Declaring payees

The payee 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

Declaring the decimal mark

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

decimal-mark .

or

decimal-mark ,

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

Declaring commodities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

;commodity SAMPLEAMOUNT

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

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

;commodity SYMBOL
;  format SAMPLEAMOUNT

; display indian rupees with currency name on the left,
; thousands, lakhs and crores comma-separated,
; period as decimal point, and two decimal places.
commodity INR
  format INR 1,00,00,000.00

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

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

A few more examples:

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

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

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

Commodity error checking

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

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

Default commodity

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

For compatibility/historical reasons, D also acts like a commodity directive (setting the commodity’s decimal mark for parsing and display style for output).

The syntax is D AMOUNT. As with commodity, 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

If both commodity and D directives are found for a commodity, commodity takes precedence for setting decimal mark and display style.

If you are using D and also checking commodities, you will need to add a commodity directive similar to the D. (The hledger check commodities command expects commodity directives, and ignores D).

Declaring market prices

The P directive declares a market price, which is an exchange rate between two commodities on a certain date. (In Ledger, they are called “historical prices”.) These are often obtained from a stock exchange, cryptocurrency exchange, or the foreign exchange market.

The format is:

P DATE COMMODITY1SYMBOL COMMODITY2AMOUNT

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

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

# and $1.40 from 2010-01-01 onward:
P 2010-01-01 € $1.40

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

Declaring accounts

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 control 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), useful for reports like balancesheet and incomestatement.
• They can store other account information, as comments or as tags which can be used to filter reports.
• They help with account name completion (in hledger add, hledger-web, hledger-iadd, ledger-mode, etc.)
• In strict mode, they restrict which accounts may be posted to by transactions, which helps detect typos.

The simplest form is just the word account followed by a hledger-style account name, eg this account directive declares the assets:bank:checking account:

account assets:bank:checking

Account error checking

By default, accounts come into existence when a transaction references them by name. 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 the error later, as an extra account in balance reports, or an incorrect balance when reconciling.

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

• The declaration is case-sensitive; transactions must use the correct account name capitalisation.
• The account directive’s scope is “whole file and below” (see directives). This means it affects all of the current file, and any files it includes, but not parent or sibling files. The position of account directives within the file does not matter, though it’s usual to put them at the top.
• Accounts can only be declared in journal files (but will affect included files in other formats).
• It’s currently not possible to declare “all possible subaccounts” with a wildcard; every account posted to must be declared.

Account comments

Comments, beginning with a semicolon, can be added:

• on the same line, after two or more spaces (because ; is allowed in account names)
• on the next lines, indented

An example of both:

account assets:bank:checking    ; same-line comment, note 2+ spaces required before ;
  ; next-line comment
  ; some tags, type:A, acctnum:12345

Compatibility note: same-line comments are not supported by Ledger or hledger <1.13.

Account subdirectives

We also allow (and ignore) Ledger-style indented subdirectives, just for compatibility.:

account assets:bank:checking
  format blah blah  ; <- subdirective, ignored

Here is the full syntax of account directives:

account ACCTNAME  [;type:ACCTTYPE] [COMMENT]
  [;COMMENTS]
  [LEDGER-STYLE SUBDIRECTIVES, IGNORED]

Account types

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

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

• A or Asset (things you own)
• L or Liability (things you owe)
• E or Equity (investment/ownership; balanced counterpart of assets & liabilities)
• R or Revenue (what you received money from, AKA income; technically part of Equity)
• X or Expense (what you spend money on; technically part of Equity)

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

• C or Cash (a subtype of Asset, indicating liquid assets for the cashflow report)
• V or Conversion (a subtype of Equity, for conversions (see CONVERSION & COST).)

Here is a typical set of account type declarations:

account assets             ; type: A
account liabilities        ; type: L
account equity             ; type: E
account revenues           ; type: R
account expenses           ; type: X

account assets:bank        ; type: C
account assets:cash        ; type: C

account equity:conversion  ; type: V

Here are some tips for working with account types.

• The rules for inferring types from account names are as follows. These are just a convenience that sometimes help new users get going; if they don’t work for you, just ignore them and declare your account types. See also Regular expressions. Note the Cash regexp changed in hledger 1.24.99.2.

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

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

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

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

  1. A type: declaration for this account.
  2. A type: declaration in the parent accounts above it, preferring the nearest.
  3. An account type inferred from this account’s name.
  4. An account type inferred from a parent account’s name, preferring the nearest parent.
  5. Otherwise, it will have no type.

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

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

Account display order

Account directives also set the order in which accounts are displayed, eg in reports, the hledger-ui accounts screen, and the hledger-web sidebar. By default accounts are listed in alphabetical order. But if you have these account directives in the journal:

account assets
account liabilities
account equity
account revenues
account expenses

you’ll see those accounts displayed in declaration order, not alphabetically:

$ hledger accounts -1
assets
liabilities
equity
revenues
expenses

Undeclared accounts, if any, are displayed last, in alphabetical order.

Note that sorting is done at each level of the account tree (within each group of sibling accounts under the same parent). And currently, this directive:

account other:zoo

would influence the position of zoo among other’s subaccounts, but not the position of other among the top-level accounts. This means:

• you will sometimes declare parent accounts (eg account other above) that you don’t intend to post to, just to customize their display order
• sibling accounts stay together (you couldn’t display x:y in between a:b and a:c).

Rewriting accounts

You can define account alias rules which rewrite your account names, or parts of them, before generating reports. This can be useful for:

• expanding shorthand account names to their full form, allowing easier data entry and a less verbose journal
• adapting old journals to your current chart of accounts
• experimenting with new account organisations, like a new hierarchy
• combining two accounts into one, eg to see their sum or difference on one line
• customising reports

Account aliases also rewrite account names in account directives. They do not affect account names being entered via hledger add or hledger-web.

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

See also Rewrite account names.

Basic aliases

To set an account alias, use the alias directive in your journal file. This affects all subsequent journal entries in the current file or its included files (but note: not sibling or parent files). The spaces around the = are optional:

alias OLD = NEW

Or, you can use the --alias 'OLD=NEW' option on the command line. This affects all entries. It’s useful for trying out aliases interactively.

OLD and NEW are case sensitive full account names. hledger will replace any occurrence of the old account name with the new one. Subaccounts are also affected. Eg:

alias checking = assets:bank:wells fargo:checking
; rewrites "checking" to "assets:bank:wells fargo:checking", or "checking:a" to "assets:bank:wells fargo:checking:a"

Regex aliases

There is also a more powerful variant that uses a regular expression, indicated by wrapping the pattern in forward slashes. (This is the only place where hledger requires forward slashes around a regular expression.)

Eg:

alias /REGEX/ = REPLACEMENT

or:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Combining aliases

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

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

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

1. alias directives preceding the journal entry, most recently parsed first (ie, reading upward from the journal entry, bottom to top)
2. --alias options, in the order they appeared on the command line (left to right).

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

• the nearest alias declaration before/above the entry is applied first
• the next alias before/above that will be be applied next, and so on
• aliases defined after/below the entry do not affect it.

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

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

Aliases and multiple files

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

hledger -f a.aliases -f b.journal

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

include a.aliases

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

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

alias foo=Foo
alias bar=Bar

2020-01-01  ; affected by aliases above
  foo  1
  bar

include c.journal  ; also affected

end aliases

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

end aliases

Aliases can generate bad account names

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

2021-01-01
  a:aa     1
  b

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

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

2021-01-01
  old    1
  other

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

Aliases and account types

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

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

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

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

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

Default parent account

You can specify a parent account which will be prepended to all accounts within a section of the journal. Use the apply account and end apply account directives like so:

apply account home

2010/1/1
    food    $10
    cash

end apply account

which is equivalent to:

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

If end apply account is omitted, the effect lasts to the end of the file. Included files are also affected, eg:

apply account business
include biz.journal
end apply account
apply account personal
include personal.journal

Prior to hledger 1.0, legacy account and end spellings were also supported.

A default parent account also affects account directives. It does not affect account names being entered via hledger add or hledger-web. If account aliases are present, they are applied after the default parent account.

Periodic transactions

Periodic transaction rules describe transactions that recur. They allow hledger to generate temporary future transactions to help with forecasting, so you don’t have to write out each one in the journal, and it’s easy to try out different forecasts.

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

1. Two spaces accidentally added or omitted will cause you trouble - read about this below.
2. For troubleshooting, show the generated transactions with hledger print --forecast tag:generated or hledger register --forecast tag:generated.
3. Forecasted transactions will begin only after the last non-forecasted transaction’s date.
4. Forecasted transactions will end 6 months from today, by default. See below for the exact start/end rules.
5. period expressions can be tricky. Their documentation needs improvement, but is worth studying.
6. Some period expressions with a repeating interval must begin on a natural boundary of that interval. Eg in weekly from DATE, DATE must be a monday. ~ weekly from 2019/10/1 (a tuesday) will give an error.
7. Other period expressions with an interval are automatically expanded to cover a whole number of that interval. (This is done to improve reports, but it also affects periodic transactions. Yes, it’s a bit inconsistent with the above.) Eg:
   ~ every 10th day of month from 2020/01, which is equivalent to
   ~ every 10th day of month from 2020/01/01, will be adjusted to start on 2019/12/10.

Periodic transaction rules also have a second meaning: they are used to define budget goals, shown in budget reports.

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.):

~ monthly
    expenses:rent          $2000
    assets:bank:checking

There is an additional constraint on the period expression: the start date must fall on a natural boundary of the interval. Eg monthly from 2018/1/1 is valid, but monthly from 2018/1/15 is not.

Periodic rules and relative dates

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

1. the first day of the default year specified by a recent Y directive
2. or the date specified with --today
3. or the date on which you are running the report.

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

Two spaces between period expression and description!

If the period expression is followed by a transaction description, these must be separated by two or more spaces. This helps hledger know where the period expression ends, so that descriptions can not accidentally alter their meaning, as in this example:

; 2 or more spaces needed here, so the period is not understood as "every 2 months in 2020"
;               ||
;               vv
~ every 2 months  in 2020, we will review
    assets:bank:checking   $1500
    income:acme inc

So,

• Do write two spaces between your period expression and your transaction description, if any.
• Don’t accidentally write two spaces in the middle of your period expression.

Forecasting with periodic transactions

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

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

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

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

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

• the start date provided within --forecast’s argument, if any
• otherwise, the later of
  • the report start date, if specified (with -b/-p/date:)
  • the day after the latest ordinary transaction in the journal, if any
• otherwise today.

It ends on:

• the end date provided within --forecast’s argument, if any
• otherwise, the report end date, if specified (with -e/-p/date:)
• otherwise 180 days (6 months) from today.

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

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

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

  • You must use = between flag and argument; a space won’t work.
  • The period expression can specify the forecast period’s start date, end date, or both. See also Report start & end date.
  • The period expression should not specify a report interval. (Each periodic transaction rule specifies its own interval.)

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

Budgeting with periodic transactions

With the --budget flag, currently supported by the balance command, each periodic transaction rule declares recurring budget goals for the specified accounts. Eg the first example above declares a goal of spending $2000 on rent (and also, a goal of depositing $2000 into checking) every month. Goals and actual performance can then be compared in budget reports.

See also: Budgeting and Forecasting.

Auto postings

“Automated postings” or “auto postings” are extra postings which get added automatically to transactions which match certain queries, defined by “auto posting rules”, when you use the --auto flag.

An auto posting rule looks a bit like a transaction:

= QUERY
    ACCOUNT  AMOUNT
    ...
    ACCOUNT  [AMOUNT]

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

• a normal amount with a commodity symbol, eg $2. This will be used as-is.
• a number, eg 2. The commodity symbol (if any) from the matched posting will be added to this.
• a numeric multiplier, eg *2 (a star followed by a number N). The matched posting’s amount (and total price, if any) will be multiplied by N.
• a multiplier with a commodity symbol, eg *$2 (a star, number N, and symbol S). The matched posting’s amount will be multiplied by N, and its commodity symbol will be replaced with S.

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

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

Some examples:

; every time I buy food, schedule a dollar donation
= expenses:food
    (liabilities:charity)   $-1

; when I buy a gift, also deduct that amount from a budget envelope subaccount
= expenses:gifts
    assets:checking:gifts  *-1
    assets:checking         *1

2017/12/1
  expenses:food    $10
  assets:checking

2017/12/14
  expenses:gifts   $20
  assets:checking

$ hledger print --auto
2017-12-01
    expenses:food              $10
    assets:checking
    (liabilities:charity)      $-1

2017-12-14
    expenses:gifts             $20
    assets:checking
    assets:checking:gifts     -$20
    assets:checking            $20

Auto postings and multiple files

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

Auto postings and dates

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

Auto postings and transaction balancing / inferred amounts / balance assertions

Currently, auto postings are added:

• after missing amounts are inferred, and transactions are checked for balancedness,
• but before balance assertions are checked.

Note this means that journal entries must be balanced both before and after auto postings are added. This changed in hledger 1.12+; see #893 for background.

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

Auto posting tags

Automated postings will have some extra tags:

• generated-posting:= QUERY - shows this was generated by an auto posting rule, and the query
• _generated-posting:= QUERY - a hidden tag, which does not appear in hledger’s output. This can be used to match postings generated “just now”, rather than generated in the past and saved to the journal.

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

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

CSV FORMAT

How hledger reads CSV data, and the CSV rules file format.

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

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

We describe each CSV file’s format with a corresponding rules file. By default this is named like the CSV file with a .rules extension added. Eg when reading FILE.csv, hledger also looks for FILE.csv.rules in the same directory as FILE.csv. You can specify a different rules file with the --rules-file option. If a rules file is not found, hledger will create a sample rules file, which you’ll need to adjust.

This file contains rules describing the CSV data (header line, fields layout, date format etc.), and how to construct hledger journal entries (transactions) from it. Often there will also be a list of conditional rules for categorising transactions based on their descriptions. Here’s an overview of the CSV rules; these are described more fully below, after the examples:

skip	skip one or more header lines or matched CSV records
fields list	name CSV fields, assign them to hledger fields
field assignment	assign a value to one hledger field, with interpolation
Field names	hledger field names, used in the fields list and field assignments
separator	a custom field separator
if block	apply some rules to CSV records matched by patterns
if table	apply some rules to CSV records matched by patterns, alternate syntax
end	skip the remaining CSV records
date-format	how to parse dates in CSV records
decimal-mark	the decimal mark used in CSV amounts, if ambiguous
newest-first	disambiguate record order when there’s only one date
include	inline another CSV rules file
balance-type	choose which type of balance assignments to use

Note, for best error messages when reading CSV files, use a .csv, .tsv or .ssv file extension or file prefix - see File Extension below.

There’s an introductory Convert CSV files tutorial on hledger.org.

Examples

Here are some sample hledger CSV rules files. See also the full collection at:
https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/tree/master/examples/csv

Basic

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

Default account names are chosen, since we didn’t set them.

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.

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:

CSV rules

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

skip

skip N

The word “skip” followed by a number (or no number, meaning 1) tells hledger to ignore this many non-empty lines preceding the CSV data. (Empty/blank lines are skipped automatically.) You’ll need this whenever your CSV data contains header lines.

It also has a second purpose: it can be used inside if blocks to ignore certain CSV records (described below).

fields list

fields FIELDNAME1, FIELDNAME2, ...

A fields list (the word “fields” followed by comma-separated field names) is the quick way to assign CSV field values to hledger fields. (The other way is field assignments, see below.) A fields list does does two things:

1. It names the CSV fields. This is optional, but can be convenient later for interpolating them.

2. Whenever you use a standard hledger field name (defined below), the CSV value is assigned to that part of the hledger 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

Tips:

• The fields list always use commas, even if your CSV data uses another separator character.
• Currently 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).
• If the CSV contains column headings, it’s a good idea to use these, suitably modified, as the basis for your field names (eg lower-cased, with underscores instead of spaces).
• If some heading names match standard hledger fields, but you don’t want to set the hledger fields directly, alter those names, eg by appending an underscore.
• Fields you don’t care about can be given a dummy name (eg: _ ), or no name.

field assignment

HLEDGERFIELDNAME FIELDVALUE

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

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

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

Here are the standard hledger field (and pseudo-field) names, which you can use in a fields list and in field assignments. For more about the transaction parts they refer to, see Transactions.

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.

Tips:

• You can assign multi-line comments by writing literal \n in the code. A comment starting with \n will begin on a new line.
• Comments can contain tags, as usual.

account field

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

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

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

amountN sets the amount of the Nth posting, and causes that posting to be generated. By assigning to amount1, amount2, … etc. you can generate up to 99 postings.

amountN-in and amountN-out can be used instead, if the CSV uses separate fields for debits and credits (inflows and outflows). hledger assumes both of these CSV fields are unsigned, and will automatically negate the “-out” value. If they are signed, see “Setting amounts” below.

amount, or amount-in and amount-out are a legacy mode, to keep pre-hledger-1.17 CSV rules files working (and for occasional convenience). They are suitable only for two-posting transactions; they set both posting 1’s and posting 2’s amount. Posting 2’s amount will be negated, and also converted to cost if there’s a transaction price.

If you have an existing rules file using the unnumbered form, you might want to use the numbered form in certain conditional blocks, without having to update and retest all the old rules. To facilitate this, posting 1 ignores amount/amount-in/amount-out if any of amount1/amount1-in/amount1-out are assigned, and posting 2 ignores them if any of amount2/amount2-in/amount2-out are assigned, avoiding conflicts.

currency field

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

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

balance field

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

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

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

See Tips below for more about setting amounts and currency.

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.

if block

if MATCHER
 RULE

if
MATCHER
MATCHER
MATCHER
 RULE
 RULE

Conditional blocks (“if blocks”) are a block of rules that are applied only to CSV records which match certain patterns. They are often used for customising account names based on transaction descriptions.

Matching the whole record

Each MATCHER can be a record matcher, which looks like this:

REGEX

REGEX is a case-insensitive regular expression that tries to match anywhere within the CSV record. It is a POSIX ERE (extended regular expression) that also supports GNU word boundaries (\b, \B, \<, \>), and nothing else. If you have trouble, be sure to check our doc: https://hledger.org/hledger.html#regular-expressions

Important note: the record that is matched is not the original record, but a synthetic one, with any enclosing double quotes (but not enclosing whitespace) removed, and always comma-separated (which means that a field containing a comma will appear like two fields). Eg, if the original record is 2020-01-01; "Acme, Inc."; 1,000, the REGEX will actually see 2020-01-01,Acme, Inc., 1,000).

Matching individual fields

Or, MATCHER can be a field matcher, like this:

%CSVFIELD REGEX

which matches just the content of a particular CSV field. CSVFIELD is a percent sign followed by the field’s name or column number, like %date or %1.

Combining matchers

A single matcher can be written on the same line as the “if”; or multiple matchers can be written on the following lines, non-indented. Multiple matchers are OR’d (any one of them can match), unless one begins with an & symbol, in which case it is AND’ed with the previous matcher.

if
MATCHER
& MATCHER
 RULE

Rules applied on successful match

After the patterns there should be one or more rules to apply, all indented by at least one space. Three kinds of rule are allowed in conditional blocks:

• field assignments (to set a hledger field)
• skip (to skip the matched CSV record)
• end (to skip all remaining CSV records).

Examples:

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

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

if table

if,CSVFIELDNAME1,CSVFIELDNAME2,...,CSVFIELDNAMEn
MATCHER1,VALUE11,VALUE12,...,VALUE1n
MATCHER2,VALUE21,VALUE22,...,VALUE2n
MATCHER3,VALUE31,VALUE32,...,VALUE3n
<empty line>

Conditional tables (“if tables”) are a different syntax to specify field assignments that will be applied only to CSV records which match certain patterns.

MATCHER could be either field or record matcher, as described above. When MATCHER matches, values from that row would be assigned to the CSV fields named on the if line, in the same order.

Therefore if table is exactly equivalent to a sequence of of if blocks:

if MATCHER1
  CSVFIELDNAME1 VALUE11
  CSVFIELDNAME2 VALUE12
  ...
  CSVFIELDNAMEn VALUE1n

if MATCHER2
  CSVFIELDNAME1 VALUE21
  CSVFIELDNAME2 VALUE22
  ...
  CSVFIELDNAMEn VALUE2n

if MATCHER3
  CSVFIELDNAME1 VALUE31
  CSVFIELDNAME2 VALUE32
  ...
  CSVFIELDNAMEn VALUE3n

Each line starting with MATCHER should contain enough (possibly empty) values for all the listed fields.

Rules would be checked and applied in the order they are listed in the table and, like with if blocks, later rules (in the same or another table) or if blocks could override the effect of any rule.

Instead of ‘,’ you can use a variety of other non-alphanumeric characters as a separator. First character after if is taken to be the separator for the rest of the table. It is the responsibility of the user to ensure that separator does not occur inside MATCHERs and values - there is no way to escape separator.

Example:

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

end

This rule can be used inside if blocks (only), to make hledger stop reading this CSV file and move on to the next input file, or to command execution. Eg:

# ignore everything following the first empty record
if ,,,,
 end

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 date parsing pattern, which 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

For the supported strptime syntax, see:
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/time/docs/Data-Time-Format.html#v:formatTime

Note that although you can parse date-times which include a time zone, that time zone is ignored; it will not change the date that is parsed. This means when reading CSV data with times not in your local time zone, dates can be “off by one”.

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.

newest-first

hledger always sorts the generated transactions by date. Transactions on the same date should appear in the same order as their CSV records, as hledger can usually auto-detect whether the CSV’s normal order is oldest first or newest first. But if all of the following are true:

• the CSV might sometimes contain just one day of data (all records having the same date)
• the CSV records are normally in reverse chronological order (newest at the top)
• and you care about preserving the order of same-day transactions

then, you should add the newest-first rule as a hint. Eg:

# tell hledger explicitly that the CSV is normally newest first
newest-first

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

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

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

hledger accepts CSV conforming to RFC 4180. When CSV values are enclosed in quotes, note:

• they must be double quotes (not single quotes)
• spaces outside the quotes are not allowed

File Extension

To help hledger identify the format and show the right error messages, CSV/SSV/TSV files should normally be named with a .csv, .ssv or .tsv filename extension. Or, the file path should be prefixed with csv:, ssv: or tsv:. Eg:

$ hledger -f foo.ssv print

or:

$ cat foo | hledger -f ssv:- foo

You can override the file extension with a separator rule if needed. See also: Input files in the hledger manual.

Reading multiple CSV files

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

Valid transactions

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

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

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

Deduplicating, importing

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

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

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

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

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

• https://hledger.org/cookbook.html#setups-and-workflows
• https://plaintextaccounting.org -> data import/conversion

Setting amounts

Some tips on using the amount-setting rules discussed above.

Here are the ways to set a posting’s amount:

1. If the CSV has a single amount field:
   Assign (via a fields list or a field assignment) to amountN. This sets the Nth posting’s amount. N is usually 1 or 2 but can go up to 99.

2. If the CSV has separate amount fields for debit & credit (in & out):
   

   1. If both fields are unsigned:
      Assign to amountN-in and amountN-out. This sets posting N’s amount to whichever of these has a non-zero value, and negates the “-out” value.

   2. If either field is signed (can contain a minus sign):
      Use a conditional rule to flip the sign (of non-empty values). Since hledger always negates amountN-out, if it was already negative, we must undo that by negating once more (but only if the field is non-empty):

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

   3. If both fields, or neither field, can contain a non-zero value:
      hledger normally expects exactly one of the fields to have a non-zero value. Eg, the amountN-in/amountN-out rules would reject value pairs like these:

   "",  ""
   "0", "0"
   "1", "none"
   

   So, use smarter conditional rules to set the amount from the appropriate field. Eg, these rules would make it use only the value containing non-zero digits, handling the above:

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

3. If you want posting 2’s amount converted to cost:
   Assign to amount (or to amount-in and amount-out). (This is the legacy numberless syntax, which sets amount1 and amount2 and converts amount2 to cost.)

4. If the CSV has the balance instead of the transaction amount:
   Assign to balanceN, which sets posting N’s amount indirectly via a balance assignment. (Old syntax: balance, equivalent to balance1.)

   • If hledger guesses the wrong default account name:
     When setting the amount via balance assertion, hledger may guess the wrong default account name. So, set the account name explicitly, eg:

     fields date, description, balance1
     account1 assets:checking
     

Amount signs

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

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

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

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

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

Setting currency/commodity

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

2020-01-01,foo,$123.00

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

fields date,description,amount

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

If the currency is provided as a separate CSV field:

2020-01-01,foo,USD,123.00

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

fields date,description,currency,amount

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

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

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

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

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

Amount decimal places

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

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

Referencing other fields

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

# Name the third CSV field "amount1"
fields date,description,amount1

# Set hledger's amount1 to the CSV amount1 field followed by USD
amount1 %amount1 USD

# Set comment to the CSV amount1 (not the amount1 assigned above)
comment %amount1

Here, since there’s no CSV amount1 field, %amount1 will produce a literal “amount1”:

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

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

comment A
comment B
if something
 comment C

How CSV rules are evaluated

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

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

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

• skip (at top level)
• date-format
• newest-first
• fields - names the CSV fields, optionally sets up initial assignments to hledger fields

Then for each CSV record in turn:

• test all if blocks. If any of them contain a end rule, skip all remaining CSV records. Otherwise if any of them contain a skip rule, skip that many CSV records. If there are multiple matched skip rules, the first one wins.
• collect all field assignments at top level and in matched if blocks. When there are multiple assignments for a field, keep only the last one.
• compute a value for each hledger field - either the one that was assigned to it (and interpolate the %CSVFIELDNAME references), or a default
• generate a synthetic hledger transaction from these values.

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

TIMECLOCK FORMAT

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

hledger can read time logs in timeclock format. As with Ledger, these are (a subset of) timeclock.el’s format, containing clock-in and clock-out entries as in the example below. The date is a simple date. The time format is HH:MM[:SS][+-ZZZZ]. Seconds and timezone are optional. The timezone, if present, must be four digits and is ignored (currently the time is always interpreted as a local time).

i 2015/03/30 09:00:00 some:account name  optional description after two spaces
o 2015/03/30 09:20:00
i 2015/03/31 22:21:45 another account
o 2015/04/01 02:00:34

hledger treats each clock-in/clock-out pair as a transaction posting some number of hours to an account. Or if the session spans more than one day, it is split into several transactions, one for each day. For the above time log, hledger print generates these journal entries:

$ hledger -f t.timeclock print
2015-03-30 * optional description after two spaces
    (some:account name)         0.33h

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

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

Here is a sample.timeclock to download and some queries to try:

$ hledger -f sample.timeclock balance                               # current time balances
$ hledger -f sample.timeclock register -p 2009/3                    # sessions in march 2009
$ hledger -f sample.timeclock register -p weekly --depth 1 --empty  # time summary by week

To generate time logs, ie to clock in and clock out, you could:

• use emacs and the built-in timeclock.el, or the extended timeclock-x.el and perhaps the extras in ledgerutils.el

• at the command line, use these bash aliases: shell alias ti="echo i `date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'` \$* >>$TIMELOG" alias to="echo o `date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'` >>$TIMELOG"

• or use the old ti and to scripts in the ledger 2.x repository. These rely on a “timeclock” executable which I think is just the ledger 2 executable renamed.

TIMEDOT FORMAT

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

• convenient for quick, approximate, and retroactive time logging
• readable: you can see at a glance where time was spent.

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

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

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

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

2021-08-04 *
    (fos:hledger:timedot)    0.50

2021-08-04 *
    (per:admin:finance)      0

A day entry begins with a date line:

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

Optionally this can be followed on the same line by

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

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

• an account name - any word or phrase, usually a hledger-style account name.
• two or more spaces - a field separator, required if there is an amount (as in journal format).
• a timedot amount - dots representing quarter hours, or a number representing hours.
• an optional comment beginning with semicolon. This is ignored.

In more detail, timedot amounts can be:

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

• a number, representing hours. Eg: 1.5

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

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

• Lines beginning with # or ;, and blank lines, are ignored.

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

• One or more stars (*) followed by a space, at the start of a line, is ignored. So date lines or time transaction lines can also be Org-mode headlines.

• All Org-mode headlines before the first date line are ignored.

More examples:

# on this day, 6h was spent on client work, 1.5h on haskell FOSS work, etc.
2016/2/1
inc:client1   .... .... .... .... .... ....
fos:haskell   .... ..
biz:research  .

2016/2/2
inc:client1   .... ....
biz:research  .

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

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

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

Reporting:

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

2016-02-02 *
    (biz:research)          0.25

$ hledger -f a.timedot bal --daily --tree
Balance changes in 2016-02-01-2016-02-03:

            ||  2016-02-01d  2016-02-02d  2016-02-03d 
============++========================================
 biz        ||         0.25         0.25         1.00 
   research ||         0.25         0.25         1.00 
 fos        ||         1.50            0         3.00 
   haskell  ||         1.50            0            0 
   hledger  ||            0            0         3.00 
 inc        ||         6.00         2.00         4.00 
   client1  ||         6.00         2.00         4.00 
------------++----------------------------------------
            ||         7.75         2.25         8.00 

Using period instead of colon as account name separator:

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

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

A sample.timedot file.

COMMON TASKS

Here are some quick examples of how to do some basic tasks with hledger. For more details, see the reference section below, the hledger_journal(5) manual, or the more extensive docs at https://hledger.org.

Getting help

$ hledger                  # show available commands
$ hledger --help           # show common options
$ hledger CMD --help       # show common and command options, and command help
$ hledger help             # show available manuals/topics
$ hledger help hledger     # show hledger manual, as info/man/text (auto-chosen)
$ hledger help journal -m  # show the journal topic, as a man page scrolled to that section
$ hledger help --help      # show more detailed help for the help command

Find more docs, chat, mail list, reddit, issue tracker: https://hledger.org/support.html-feedback

Constructing command lines

hledger has an extensive and powerful command line interface. We strive to keep it simple and ergonomic, but you may run into one of the confusing real world details described in OPTIONS, below. If that happens, here are some tips that may help:

• command-specific options must go after the command (it’s fine to put all options there) (hledger CMD OPTS ARGS)
• running add-on executables directly simplifies command line parsing (hledger-ui OPTS ARGS)
• enclose “problematic” args in single quotes
• if needed, also add a backslash to hide regular expression metacharacters from the shell
• to see how a misbehaving command is being parsed, add --debug=2.

Starting a journal file

hledger looks for your accounting data in a journal file, $HOME/.hledger.journal by default:

$ hledger stats
The hledger journal file "/Users/simon/.hledger.journal" was not found.
Please create it first, eg with "hledger add" or a text editor.
Or, specify an existing journal file with -f or LEDGER_FILE.

You can override this by setting the LEDGER_FILE environment variable. It’s a good practice to keep this important file under version control, and to start a new file each year. So you could do something like this:

$ mkdir ~/finance
$ cd ~/finance
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/simon/finance/.git/
$ touch 2020.journal
$ echo "export LEDGER_FILE=$HOME/finance/2020.journal" >> ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.bashrc
$ hledger stats
Main file                : /Users/simon/finance/2020.journal
Included files           : 
Transactions span        :  to  (0 days)
Last transaction         : none
Transactions             : 0 (0.0 per day)
Transactions last 30 days: 0 (0.0 per day)
Transactions last 7 days : 0 (0.0 per day)
Payees/descriptions      : 0
Accounts                 : 0 (depth 0)
Commodities              : 0 ()
Market prices            : 0 ()

Setting opening balances

Pick a starting date for which you can look up the balances of some real-world assets (bank accounts, wallet..) and liabilities (credit cards..).

To avoid a lot of data entry, you may want to start with just one or two accounts, like your checking account or cash wallet; and pick a recent starting date, like today or the start of the week. You can always come back later and add more accounts and older transactions, eg going back to january 1st.

Add an opening balances transaction to the journal, declaring the balances on this date. Here are two ways to do it:

• The first way: open the journal in any text editor and save an entry like this:

  2020-01-01 * opening balances
      assets:bank:checking                $1000   = $1000
      assets:bank:savings                 $2000   = $2000
      assets:cash                          $100   = $100
      liabilities:creditcard               $-50   = $-50
      equity:opening/closing balances
  

  These are start-of-day balances, ie whatever was in the account at the end of the previous day.

  The * after the date is an optional status flag. Here it means “cleared & confirmed”.

  The currency symbols are optional, but usually a good idea as you’ll be dealing with multiple currencies sooner or later.

  The = amounts are optional balance assertions, providing extra error checking.

• The second way: run hledger add and follow the prompts to record a similar transaction:

  $ hledger add
  Adding transactions to journal file /Users/simon/finance/2020.journal
  Any command line arguments will be used as defaults.
  Use tab key to complete, readline keys to edit, enter to accept defaults.
  An optional (CODE) may follow transaction dates.
  An optional ; COMMENT may follow descriptions or amounts.
  If you make a mistake, enter < at any prompt to go one step backward.
  To end a transaction, enter . when prompted.
  To quit, enter . at a date prompt or press control-d or control-c.
  Date [2020-02-07]: 2020-01-01
  Description: * opening balances
  Account 1: assets:bank:checking
  Amount  1: $1000
  Account 2: assets:bank:savings
  Amount  2 [$-1000]: $2000
  Account 3: assets:cash
  Amount  3 [$-3000]: $100
  Account 4: liabilities:creditcard
  Amount  4 [$-3100]: $-50
  Account 5: equity:opening/closing balances
  Amount  5 [$-3050]: 
  Account 6 (or . or enter to finish this transaction): .
  2020-01-01 * opening balances
      assets:bank:checking                      $1000
      assets:bank:savings                       $2000
      assets:cash                                $100
      liabilities:creditcard                     $-50
      equity:opening/closing balances          $-3050
  
  Save this transaction to the journal ? [y]: 
  Saved.
  Starting the next transaction (. or ctrl-D/ctrl-C to quit)
  Date [2020-01-01]: .
  

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

$ git commit -m 'initial balances' 2020.journal

Recording transactions

As you spend or receive money, you can record these transactions using one of the methods above (text editor, hledger add) or by using the hledger-iadd or hledger-web add-ons, or by using the import command to convert CSV data downloaded from your bank.

Here are some simple transactions, see the hledger_journal(5) manual and hledger.org for more ideas:

2020/1/10 * gift received
  assets:cash   $20
  income:gifts

2020.1.12 * farmers market
  expenses:food    $13
  assets:cash

2020-01-15 paycheck
  income:salary
  assets:bank:checking    $1000

Reconciling

Periodically you should reconcile - compare your hledger-reported balances against external sources of truth, like bank statements or your bank’s website - to be sure that your ledger accurately represents the real-world balances (and, that the real-world institutions have not made a mistake!). This gets easy and fast with (1) practice and (2) frequency. If you do it daily, it can take 2-10 minutes. If you let it pile up, expect it to take longer as you hunt down errors and discrepancies.

A typical workflow:

1. Reconcile cash. Count what’s in your wallet. Compare with what hledger reports (hledger bal cash). If they are different, try to remember the missing transaction, or look for the error in the already-recorded transactions. A register report can be helpful (hledger reg cash). If you can’t find the error, add an adjustment transaction. Eg if you have $105 after the above, and can’t explain the missing $2, it could be:

   2020-01-16 * adjust cash
       assets:cash    $-2 = $105
       expenses:misc
   

2. Reconcile checking. Log in to your bank’s website. Compare today’s (cleared) balance with hledger’s cleared balance (hledger bal checking -C). If they are different, track down the error or record the missing transaction(s) or add an adjustment transaction, similar to the above. Unlike the cash case, you can usually compare the transaction history and running balance from your bank with the one reported by hledger reg checking -C. This will be easier if you generally record transaction dates quite similar to your bank’s clearing dates.

3. Repeat for other asset/liability accounts.

Tip: instead of the register command, use hledger-ui to see a live-updating register while you edit the journal: hledger-ui --watch --register checking -C

After reconciling, it could be a good time to mark the reconciled transactions’ status as “cleared and confirmed”, if you want to track that, by adding the * marker. Eg in the paycheck transaction above, insert * between 2020-01-15 and paycheck

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

$ git commit -m 'txns' 2020.journal

Reporting

Here are some basic reports.

Show all transactions:

$ hledger print
2020-01-01 * opening balances
    assets:bank:checking                      $1000
    assets:bank:savings                       $2000
    assets:cash                                $100
    liabilities:creditcard                     $-50
    equity:opening/closing balances          $-3050

2020-01-10 * gift received
    assets:cash              $20
    income:gifts

2020-01-12 * farmers market
    expenses:food             $13
    assets:cash

2020-01-15 * paycheck
    income:salary
    assets:bank:checking           $1000

2020-01-16 * adjust cash
    assets:cash               $-2 = $105
    expenses:misc

Show account names, and their hierarchy:

$ hledger accounts --tree
assets
  bank
    checking
    savings
  cash
equity
  opening/closing balances
expenses
  food
  misc
income
  gifts
  salary
liabilities
  creditcard

Show all account totals:

$ hledger balance
               $4105  assets
               $4000    bank
               $2000      checking
               $2000      savings
                $105    cash
              $-3050  equity:opening/closing balances
                 $15  expenses
                 $13    food
                  $2    misc
              $-1020  income
                $-20    gifts
              $-1000    salary
                $-50  liabilities:creditcard
--------------------
                   0

Show only asset and liability balances, as a flat list, limited to depth 2:

$ hledger bal assets liabilities --flat -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 --flat -2
Balance Sheet 2020-01-16

                        || 2020-01-16 
========================++============
 Assets                 ||            
------------------------++------------
 assets:bank            ||      $4000 
 assets:cash            ||       $105 
------------------------++------------
                        ||      $4105 
========================++============
 Liabilities            ||            
------------------------++------------
 liabilities:creditcard ||        $50 
------------------------++------------
                        ||        $50 
========================++============
 Net:                   ||      $4055 

The final total is your “net worth” on the end date. (Or use bse for a full balance sheet with equity.)

Show income and expense totals, formatted as an income statement:

hledger is 
Income Statement 2020-01-01-2020-01-16

               || 2020-01-01-2020-01-16 
===============++=======================
 Revenues      ||                       
---------------++-----------------------
 income:gifts  ||                   $20 
 income:salary ||                 $1000 
---------------++-----------------------
               ||                 $1020 
===============++=======================
 Expenses      ||                       
---------------++-----------------------
 expenses:food ||                   $13 
 expenses:misc ||                    $2 
---------------++-----------------------
               ||                   $15 
===============++=======================
 Net:          ||                 $1005 

The final total is your net income during this period.

Show transactions affecting your wallet, with running total:

$ hledger register cash
2020-01-01 opening balances     assets:cash                   $100          $100
2020-01-10 gift received        assets:cash                    $20          $120
2020-01-12 farmers market       assets:cash                   $-13          $107
2020-01-16 adjust cash          assets:cash                    $-2          $105

Show weekly posting counts as a bar chart:

$ hledger activity -W
2019-12-30 *****
2020-01-06 ****
2020-01-13 ****

Migrating to a new file

At the end of the year, you may want to continue your journal in a new file, so that old transactions don’t slow down or clutter your reports, and to help ensure the integrity of your accounting history. See the close command.

If using version control, don’t forget to git add the new file.

LIMITATIONS

The need to precede add-on command options with -- when invoked from hledger is awkward.

When input data contains non-ascii characters, a suitable system locale must be configured (or there will be an unhelpful error). Eg on POSIX, set LANG to something other than C.

In a Microsoft Windows CMD window, non-ascii characters and colours are not supported.

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

In a Cygwin/MSYS/Mintty window, the tab key is not supported in hledger add.

Not all of Ledger’s journal file syntax is supported. See file format differences.

On large data files, hledger is slower and uses more memory than Ledger.

TROUBLESHOOTING

Here are some issues you might encounter when you run hledger (and remember you can also seek help from the IRC channel, mail list or bug tracker):

Successfully installed, but “No command ‘hledger’ found”
stack and cabal install binaries into a special directory, which should be added to your PATH environment variable. Eg on unix-like systems, that is ~/.local/bin and ~/.cabal/bin respectively.

I set a custom LEDGER_FILE, but hledger is still using the default file
LEDGER_FILE should be a real environment variable, not just a shell variable. The command env | grep LEDGER_FILE should show it. You may need to use export. Here’s an explanation.

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

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

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

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

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

$ apt-get install language-pack-fr
$ locale -a
C
en_US.utf8
fr_BE.utf8
fr_CA.utf8
fr_CH.utf8
fr_FR.utf8
fr_LU.utf8
POSIX
$ LANG=fr_FR.utf8 hledger -f my.journal print

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

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

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

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