hledger/hledger/Hledger/Cli/Commands/Check.md

check

Check for various kinds of errors in your data.

_FLAGS

hledger provides a number of built-in correctness checks to help validate your data and prevent errors. Some are run automatically, some when you enable --strict mode; or you can run any of them on demand with this check command. check produces no output and a zero exit code if all is well. Eg:

hledger check                      # run basic checks
hledger check -s                   # run basic and strict checks
hledger check ordereddates payees  # run basic checks and two others

If you are an Emacs user, you can also configure flycheck-hledger to run these checks, providing instant feedback as you edit the journal.

Here are the checks currently available. Generally, they are performed in the order they are shown here (and only the first failure is reported).

Basic checks

These important checks are performed by default, by almost all hledger commands:

• parseable - data files are in a supported format, with no syntax errors and no invalid include directives. This ensures that all files exist and are readable.

• autobalanced - all transactions are balanced, after inferring missing amounts and conversion costs where possible, and then converting to cost. This ensures that each individual transaction is well formed.

• assertions - all balance assertions in the journal are passing. Balance assertions are like canaries in your journal, they catch many problems. This check can sometimes get in the way, eg when you are troubleshooting bookkeeping errors, or parsing a journal fragment, so it can be disabled temporarily with -I/--ignore-assertions.

Strict checks

These additional checks are performed by any command when the -s/--strict flag is used (AKA strict mode). They provide extra error-catching power when you are serious about keeping your data clean and free of typos:

• balanced - like autobalanced, but in conversion transactions, costs must be written explicitly. This ensures some redundancy in the entry, guarding against typos.

• commodities - all commodity symbols used must be declared. This guards against forgetting or mistyping commodity symbols.

• accounts - all account names used must be declared. This prevents the use of mistyped or outdated account names.

Other checks

These other checks are not wanted by everyone, but can be run using the check command:

• ordereddates - within each file, transactions are ordered by date. This is a simple and effective error catcher, and you should use it. Alas! not everyone wants it. If you do, use hledger check -s ordereddates. Note, this check is performed early, before balance assertions (because copy-pasted dates are often the root cause of balance assertion failures).

• payees - all payees used by transactions must be declared. This will force you to always use known/declared payee names. For most people this is a bit too restrictive.

• tags - all tags used by transactions must be declared. This prevents mistyped tag names.

• recentassertions - all accounts with balance assertions must have a balance assertion within the last 7 days before their latest posting. This encourages you to add balance assertions fairly regularly for your active asset/liability accounts, which in turn should encourage you to check and reconcile with their real world balances fairly regularly. close --assert can be helpful. (The older balance assertions become redundant; you can remove them periodically, or leave them in place, perhaps commented, as documentation.)

• uniqueleafnames - no two accounts may have the same leaf name. The leaf name is the last colon-separated part of an account name, eg checking in assets:bank:checking. This encourages you to keep those unique, effectively giving each account a short name which is easier to remember and to type in reporting commands.

Custom checks

You can build your own custom checks with add-on command scripts. See also Cookbook > Scripting. Here are some examples from hledger/bin/:

• hledger-check-tagfiles - all tag values containing / (a forward slash) exist as file paths

• hledger-check-fancyassertions - more complex balance assertions are passing