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HLEDGER(1) hledger User Manuals HLEDGER(1)
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 1.20.99.
SYNOPSIS
hledger
hledger [-f FILE] COMMAND [OPTIONS] [ARGS]
hledger [-f FILE] ADDONCMD -- [OPTIONS] [ARGS]
DESCRIPTION
hledger is a reliable, cross-platform set of programs for tracking
money, time, or any other commodity, using double-entry accounting and
a simple, editable file format. hledger is inspired by and largely
compatible with ledger(1).
The basic function of the hledger CLI is to read a plain text file de-
scribing financial transactions (in accounting terms, a general jour-
nal) 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 data from one or more files in hledger journal, time-
clock, timedot, or CSV format specified with -f, or $LEDGER_FILE, or
$HOME/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps
C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal). 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:
2015/10/16 bought food
expenses:food $10
assets:cash
For more about this format, see hledger_journal(5).
Most users use a text editor to edit the journal, usually with an edi-
tor mode such as ledger-mode for added convenience. hledger's interac-
tive 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 sup-
ported by most hledger commands, run hledger -h.
General help options:
-h --help
show general or COMMAND help
--man show general or COMMAND user manual with man
--info show general or COMMAND user manual with info
--version
show general or ADDONCMD version
--debug[=N]
show debug output (levels 1-9, default: 1)
General input options:
-f FILE --file=FILE
use a different input file. For stdin, use - (default:
$LEDGER_FILE or $HOME/.hledger.journal)
--rules-file=RULESFILE
Conversion rules file to use when reading CSV (default:
FILE.rules)
--separator=CHAR
Field separator to expect when reading CSV (default: ',')
--alias=OLD=NEW
rename accounts named OLD to NEW
--anon anonymize accounts and payees
--pivot FIELDNAME
use some other field or tag for the account name
-I --ignore-assertions
disable balance assertion checks (note: does not disable balance
assignments)
-s --strict
do extra error checking (check that all posted accounts are de-
clared)
General reporting options:
-b --begin=DATE
include postings/txns on or after this date
-e --end=DATE
include postings/txns before this date
-D --daily
multiperiod/multicolumn report by day
-W --weekly
multiperiod/multicolumn report by week
-M --monthly
multiperiod/multicolumn report by month
-Q --quarterly
multiperiod/multicolumn report by quarter
-Y --yearly
multiperiod/multicolumn report by year
-p --period=PERIODEXP
set start date, end date, and/or reporting interval all at once
using period expressions syntax
--date2
match the secondary date instead (see command help for other ef-
fects)
-U --unmarked
include only unmarked postings/txns (can combine with -P or -C)
-P --pending
include only pending postings/txns
-C --cleared
include only cleared postings/txns
-R --real
include only non-virtual postings
-NUM --depth=NUM
hide/aggregate accounts or postings more than NUM levels deep
-E --empty
show items with zero amount, normally hidden (and vice-versa in
hledger-ui/hledger-web)
-B --cost
convert amounts to their cost/selling amount at transaction time
-V --market
convert amounts to their market value in default valuation com-
modities
-X --exchange=COMM
convert amounts to their market value in commodity COMM
--value
convert amounts to cost or market value, more flexibly than
-B/-V/-X
--infer-value
with -V/-X/--value, also infer market prices from transactions
--auto apply automated posting rules to modify transactions.
--forecast
generate future transactions from periodic transaction rules,
for the next 6 months or till report end date. In hledger-ui,
also make ordinary future transactions visible.
--color=WHEN (or --colour=WHEN)
Should color-supporting commands use ANSI color codes in text
output. 'auto' (default): whenever stdout seems to be a color-
supporting terminal. 'always' or 'yes': always, useful eg when
piping output into 'less -R'. 'never' or 'no': never. A
NO_COLOR environment variable overrides this.
When a reporting option appears more than once in the command line, the
last one takes precedence.
Some reporting options can also be written as query arguments.
Command options
To see options for a particular command, including command-specific op-
tions, 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 op-
tions 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 noth-
ing). 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 dou-
ble quotes, or by writing a backslash before them. Eg to match an ac-
count name containing a space:
$ hledger register 'credit card'
or:
$ hledger register credit\ card
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 be-
low), 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:
o an @argumentfile
o hledger-ui's filter field
o hledger-web's search form
o GHCI's prompt (used by developers).
Unicode characters
hledger is expected to handle non-ascii characters correctly:
o 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.)
o 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:
o A system locale must be configured, and it must be one that can de-
code 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 Trou-
bleshooting. This step is essential - without it, hledger will quit
on encountering a non-ascii character (as with all GHC-compiled pro-
grams).
o your terminal software (eg Terminal.app, iTerm, CMD.exe, xterm..)
must support unicode
o the terminal must be using a font which includes the required unicode
glyphs
o the terminal should be configured to display wide characters as dou-
ble width (for report alignment)
o 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 stan-
dard 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:
o query terms, on the command line and in the hledger-web search form:
REGEX, desc:REGEX, cur:REGEX, tag:...=REGEX
o CSV rules conditional blocks: if REGEX ...
o 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:
o In the alias directive and --alias option, regular expressions must
be enclosed in forward slashes (/REGEX/). Elsewhere in hledger,
these are not required.
o 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:\$.
o On the command line, some metacharacters like $ have a special mean-
ing to the shell and so must be escaped at least once more. See Spe-
cial characters.
ENVIRONMENT
LEDGER_FILE The journal file path when not specified with -f. Default:
~/.hledger.journal (on windows, perhaps C:/Users/USER/.hledger.jour-
nal).
A typical value is ~/DIR/YYYY.journal, where DIR is a version-con-
trolled finance directory and YYYY is the current year. Or ~/DIR/cur-
rent.journal, where current.journal is a symbolic link to YYYY.journal.
On Mac computers, you can set this and other environment variables in a
more thorough way that also affects applications started from the GUI
(say, an Emacs dock icon). Eg on MacOS Catalina I have a ~/.MacOSX/en-
vironment.plist file containing
{
"LEDGER_FILE" : "~/finance/current.journal"
}
To see the effect you may need to killall Dock, or reboot.
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 overrides 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 exten-
sions:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
journal hledger journal files and some Ledger .journal .j .hledger
journals, for transactions .ledger
time- timeclock files, for precise time log- .timeclock
clock ging
timedot timedot files, for approximate time .timedot
logging
csv comma/semicolon/tab/other-separated .csv .ssv .tsv
values, for data import
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:
$ hledger -f csv:/some/csv-file.dat stats
$ 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:
o most directives do not affect sibling files
o balance assertions will not see any account balances from previous
files
If you need either of those things, you can
o use a single parent file which includes the others
o 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 impor-
tant errors are detected, while still accepting easy journal files
without a lot of declarations:
o Are the input files parseable, with valid syntax ?
o Are all transactions balanced ?
o Do all balance assertions pass ?
With the -s/--strict flag, additional checks are performed:
o Are all accounts posted to, declared with an account directive ?
(Account error checking)
o Are all commodities declared with a commodity directive ? (Commodity
error checking)
See also: https://hledger.org/checking-for-errors.html
experimental.
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, exact date, several separators allowed. Year
2004.9.1 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, tomor- -1, 0, 1 days from today
row
last/this/next -1, 0, 1 periods from the current period
day/week/month/quar-
ter/year
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 re-
sults:
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
Report start & end date
By default, most hledger reports will show the full span of time repre-
sented 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:
o As in Ledger, end dates are exclusive, so you need to write the date
after the last day you want to include.
o As noted in reporting options: among start/end dates specified with
options, the last (i.e. right-most) option takes precedence.
o 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.
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 re-
placed with -)
date:..12/1
date:thismonth..
date:thismonth
Report intervals
A report interval can be specified so that commands like register, bal-
ance and activity will divide their reports into multiple subperiods.
The basic intervals can be selected with one of -D/--daily,
-W/--weekly, -M/--monthly, -Q/--quarterly, or -Y/--yearly. More com-
plex intervals may be specified with a period expression. Report in-
tervals can not be specified with a query.
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; equiva-
lent 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 cur-
rent year
The argument of -p can also begin with, or be, a report interval ex-
pression. The basic report intervals are daily, weekly, monthly, quar-
terly, or yearly, which have the same effect as the -D,-W,-M,-Q, or -Y
flags. Between report interval and start/end dates (if any), the word
in is optional. Examples:
-p "weekly from 2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1"
-p "monthly in 2008"
-p "quarterly"
Note that weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly intervals will always
start on the first day on week, month, quarter or year accordingly, and
will end on the last day of same period, even if associated period ex-
pression specifies different explicit start and end date.
For example:
-p "weekly from 2009/1/1 starts on 2008/12/29, closest preceding Mon-
to 2009/4/1" day
-p "monthly in starts on 2018/11/01
2008/11/25"
-p "quarterly from starts on 2009/04/01, ends on 2009/06/30,
2009-05-05 to 2009-06-01" which are first and last days of Q2 2009
-p "yearly from starts on 2009/01/01, first day of 2009
2009-12-29"
The following more complex report intervals are also supported: bi-
weekly, fortnightly, bimonthly, every day|week|month|quarter|year, ev-
ery N days|weeks|months|quarters|years.
All of these will start on the first day of the requested period and
end on the last one, as described above.
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 month from periods will have boundaries on 2009/03/01,
2009/03" 2009/08/01, ...
If you want intervals that start on arbitrary day of your choosing and
span a week, month or year, you need to use any of the following:
every Nth day of week, every WEEKDAYNAME (eg
mon|tue|wed|thu|fri|sat|sun), every Nth day [of month], every Nth WEEK-
DAYNAME [of month], every MM/DD [of year], every Nth MMM [of year], ev-
ery MMM Nth [of year].
Examples:
-p "every 2nd day of periods will go from Tue to Tue
week"
-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 Nov
-p "every 5th Nov" same
-p "every Nov 5th" same
Show historical balances at end of 15th each month (N is exclusive end
date):
hledger balance -H -p "every 16th day"
Group postings from start of wednesday to end of next tuesday (N is
start date and exclusive end date):
hledger register checking -p "every 3rd day of week"
DEPTH
With the --depth N option (short form: -N), commands like account, bal-
ance and register will show only the uppermost accounts in the account
tree, down to level N. Use this when you want a summary with less de-
tail. This flag has the same effect as a depth: query argument (so -2,
--depth=2 or depth:2 are equivalent).
QUERIES
One of hledger's strengths is being able to quickly report on precise
subsets of your data. Most commands accept an optional query expres-
sion, written as arguments after the command name, to filter the data
by date, account name or other criteria. The syntax is similar to a
web search: one or more space-separated search terms, quotes to enclose
whitespace, prefixes to match specific fields, a not: prefix to negate
the match.
We do not yet support arbitrary boolean combinations of search terms;
instead most commands show transactions/postings/accounts which match
(or negatively match):
o any of the description terms AND
o any of the account terms AND
o any of the status terms AND
o all the other terms.
The print command instead shows transactions which:
o match any of the description terms AND
o have any postings matching any of the positive account terms AND
o have no postings matching any of the negative account terms AND
o match all the other terms.
The following kinds of search terms can be used. Remember these can
also be prefixed with not:, eg to exclude a particular subaccount.
REGEX, acct:REGEX
match account names by this regular expression. (With no pre-
fix, acct: is assumed.) same as above
amt:N, amt:<N, amt:<=N, amt:>N, amt:>=N
match postings with a single-commodity amount that is equal to,
less than, or greater than N. (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 cur-
rency/commodity symbol is fully matched by REGEX. (For a par-
tial match, use .*REGEX.*). Note, to match characters which are
regex-significant, like the dollar sign ($), you need to prepend
\. And when using the command line you need to add one more
level of quoting to hide it from the shell, so eg do: hledger
print cur:'\$' or hledger print cur:\\$.
desc:REGEX
match transaction descriptions.
date:PERIODEXPR
match dates within the specified period. PERIODEXPR is a period
expression (with no report interval). Examples: date:2016,
date:thismonth, date:2000/2/1-2/15, date:lastweek-. If the
--date2 command line flag is present, this matches secondary
dates instead.
date2:PERIODEXPR
match secondary dates within the specified period.
depth:N
match (or display, depending on command) accounts at or above
this depth
note:REGEX
match transaction notes (part of description right of |, or
whole description when there's no |)
payee:REGEX
match transaction payee/payer names (part of description left of
|, or whole description when there's no |)
real:, real:0
match real or virtual postings respectively
status:, status:!, status:*
match unmarked, pending, or cleared transactions respectively
tag:REGEX[=REGEX]
match by tag name, and optionally also by tag value. Note a
tag: query is considered to match a transaction if it matches
any of the postings. Also remember that postings inherit the
tags of their parent transaction.
The following special search term is used automatically in hledger-web,
only:
inacct:ACCTNAME
tells hledger-web to show the transaction register for this ac-
count. Can be filtered further with acct etc.
Some of these can also be expressed as command-line options (eg depth:2
is equivalent to --depth 2). Generally you can mix options and query
arguments, and the resulting query will be their intersection (perhaps
excluding the -p/--period option).
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), or to market value (using some market price on a cer-
tain date). This is controlled by the --value=TYPE[,COMMODITY] option,
but we also provide the simpler -B/-V/-X flags, and usually one of
those is all you need.
-B: Cost
The -B/--cost flag converts amounts to their cost or sale amount at
transaction time, if they have a transaction price specified.
-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 cur-
rency 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 direc-
tive, or (with the --infer-value 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 a forward chain of market prices: a synthetic price formed by com-
bining the shortest chain of "forward" (only 1 above) market prices,
leading from A to B.
4. A any chain of market prices: a chain of any market prices, includ-
ing both forward and reverse prices (1 and 2 above), leading from A
to B.
Amounts for which no applicable market price can be found, are not con-
verted.
--infer-value: 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 need-
ing P directives at all.
Adding the --infer-value flag to -V, -X or --value enables this. So
for example, hledger bs -V --infer-value will get market prices both
from P directives and from transactions.
There is a downside: value reports can sometimes be affected in confus-
ing/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-value can infer market prices from:
o multicommodity transactions with explicit prices (@/@@)
o multicommodity transactions with implicit prices (no @, two commodi-
ties, unbalanced). (With these, the order of postings matters.
hledger print -x can be useful for troubleshooting.)
o but not, currently, from "more correct" multicommodity transactions
(no @, multiple commodities, balanced).
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 suit-
able 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-value flag is used: the price commodity from the latest
transaction-inferred price for A on or before valuation date.
This means:
o If you have P directives, they determine which commodities -V will
convert, and to what.
o If you have no P directives, and use the --infer-value flag, transac-
tion prices determine it.
Amounts for which no valuation commodity can be found are not con-
verted.
Simple valuation examples
Here are some quick examples of -V:
; one euro is worth this many dollars from nov 1
P 2016/11/01 EUR $1.10
; purchase some euros on nov 3
2016/11/3
assets:euros EUR100
assets:checking
; the euro is worth fewer dollars by dec 21
P 2016/12/21 EUR $1.03
How many euros do I have ?
$ hledger -f t.j bal -N euros
EUR100 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
-B, -V and -X are special cases of the more general --value option:
--value=TYPE[,COMM] TYPE is cost, then, end, now or YYYY-MM-DD.
COMM is an optional commodity symbol.
Shows amounts converted to:
- cost commodity using transaction prices (then optionally to COMM using market prices at period end(s))
- 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=cost
Convert amounts to cost, using the prices recorded in transac-
tions.
--value=then
Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commod-
ity, using market prices on each posting's date. This is cur-
rently supported only by the print and register commands.
--value=end
Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commod-
ity, 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 commod-
ity using current market prices (as of when report is gener-
ated).
--value=YYYY-MM-DD
Convert amounts to their value in the default valuation commod-
ity 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 --value=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 re-
verse 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 specify-
ing a display style for A, 0.5A gets the default style, which shows no
decimal digits. Because the displayed amount looks like zero, the com-
modity symbol and minus sign are not displayed either. Adding a com-
modity 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
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. Re-
lated: #329, #1083.
Report type -B, -V, -X --value=then --value=end --value=DATE,
--value=cost --value=now
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
print
posting cost value at re- value at value at re- value at
amounts port end or posting date port or jour- DATE/today
today nal end
balance as- unchanged unchanged unchanged unchanged unchanged
ser-
tions/as-
signments
register
starting cost value at day not sup- value at day value at
balance before report ported before report DATE/today
(-H) or journal or journal
start start
posting cost value at re- value at value at re- value at
amounts port end or posting date port or jour- DATE/today
today nal end
summary summarised value at pe- sum of post- value at pe- value at
posting cost riod ends ings in in- riod ends DATE/today
amounts terval, val-
with report ued at in-
interval terval start
running to- sum/average sum/average sum/average sum/average sum/average
tal/average of displayed of displayed of displayed of displayed of displayed
values values values values values
balance
(bs, bse,
cf, is)
balance sums of costs value at re- not sup- value at re- value at
changes port end or ported port or jour- DATE/today of
today of sums nal end of sums of post-
of postings sums of post- ings
ings
budget like balance like balance not sup- like balances like balance
amounts changes changes ported changes
(--budget)
grand total sum of dis- sum of dis- not sup- sum of dis- sum of dis-
played values played values ported played values played values
balance
(bs, bse,
cf, is)
with report
interval
starting sums of costs value at re- not sup- value at re- sums of post-
balances of postings port start of ported port start of ings before
(-H) before report sums of all sums of all report start
start postings be- postings be-
fore report fore report
start start
balance sums of costs same as not sup- balance value at
changes of postings --value=end ported change in DATE/today of
(bal, is, in period each period, sums of post-
bs valued at pe- ings
--change, riod ends
cf
--change)
end bal- sums of costs same as not sup- period end value at
ances (bal of postings --value=end ported balances, DATE/today of
-H, is --H, from before valued at pe- sums of post-
bs, cf) report start riod ends ings
to period end
budget like balance like balance not sup- like balances like balance
amounts changes/end changes/end ported changes/end
(--budget) balances balances balances
row totals, sums, aver- sums, aver- not sup- sums, aver- sums, aver-
row aver- ages of dis- ages of dis- ported ages of dis- ages of dis-
ages (-T, played values played values played values played values
-A)
column to- sums of dis- sums of dis- not sup- sums of dis- sums of dis-
tals played values played values ported played values played values
grand to- sum, average sum, average not sup- sum, average sum, average
tal, grand of column to- of column to- ported of column to- of column to-
average tals tals tals tals
--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 subperi-
ods).
PIVOTING
Normally hledger sums amounts, and organizes them in a hierarchy, based
on account name. The --pivot FIELD option causes it to sum and orga-
nize hierarchy based on the value of some other field instead. FIELD
can be: code, description, payee, note, or the full name (case insensi-
tive) of any tag. As with account names, values containing colon:sepa-
rated: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, de-
scribed 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 pro-
vide the -o/--output-file option, which does the same thing without
needing the shell. Eg:
$ hledger print -o foo.txt
$ hledger print -o - # write to stdout (the default)
Output format
Some commands (print, register, the balance commands) offer a choice of
output format. In addition to the usual plain text format (txt), there
are CSV (csv), HTML (html), JSON (json) and SQL (sql). This is con-
trolled by the -O/--output-format option:
$ hledger print -O csv
or, by a file extension specified with -o/--output-file:
$ hledger balancesheet -o foo.html # write HTML to foo.html
The -O option can be used to override the file extension if needed:
$ hledger balancesheet -o foo.txt -O html # write HTML to foo.txt
Some notes about JSON output:
o This feature is marked experimental, and not yet much used; you
should expect our JSON to evolve. Real-world feedback is welcome.
o Our JSON is rather large and verbose, as it is quite a faithful rep-
resentation 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.
o 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)
Notes about SQL output:
o SQL output is also marked experimental, and much like JSON could use
real-world feedback.
o SQL output is expected to work with sqlite, MySQL and PostgreSQL
o SQL output is structured with the expectations that statements will
be executed in the empty database. If you already have tables cre-
ated 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.
COMMANDS
hledger provides a number of commands for producing reports and manag-
ing your data. Run hledger with no arguments to list the commands
available, and hledger CMD to run a command. CMD can be the full com-
mand name, or its standard abbreviation shown in the commands list, or
any unambiguous prefix of the name. Eg: hledger bal.
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 jour-
nal file.
o add - add transactions using guided prompts
o import - add any new transactions from other files (eg csv)
Data management:
o check - check for various kinds of issue in the data
o close (equity) - generate balance-resetting transactions
o diff - compare account transactions in two journal files
o rewrite - generate extra postings, similar to print --auto
Financial statements:
o aregister (areg) - show transactions in a particular account
o balancesheet (bs) - show assets, liabilities and net worth
o balancesheetequity (bse) - show assets, liabilities and equity
o cashflow (cf) - show changes in liquid assets
o incomestatement (is) - show revenues and expenses
o roi - show return on investments
Miscellaneous reports:
o accounts - show account names
o activity - show postings-per-interval bar charts
o balance (bal) - show balance changes/end balances/budgets in any ac-
counts
o codes - show transaction codes
o commodities - show commodity/currency symbols
o descriptions - show unique transaction descriptions
o files - show input file paths
o help - show hledger user manuals in several formats
o notes - show unique note segments of transaction descriptions
o payees - show unique payee segments of transaction descriptions
o prices - show market price records
o print - show transactions (journal entries)
o print-unique - show only transactions with unique descriptions
o register (reg) - show postings in one or more accounts & running to-
tal
o register-match - show a recent posting that best matches a descrip-
tion
o stats - show journal statistics
o tags - show tag names
o 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. Two of
these are maintained and released with hledger:
o ui - an efficient terminal interface (TUI) for hledger
o web - a simple web interface (WUI) for hledger
And these add-ons are maintained separately:
o iadd - a more interactive alternative for the add command
o interest - generates interest transactions according to various
schemes
o stockquotes - downloads market prices for your commodities from Al-
phaVantage (experimental)
Next, the detailed command docs, in alphabetical order.
accounts
accounts
Show account names.
This command lists account names, either declared with account direc-
tives (--declared), posted to (--used), or both (the default). With
query arguments, only matched account names and account names refer-
enced by matched postings are shown. It shows a flat list by default.
With --tree, it uses indentation to show the account hierarchy. In
flat mode you can add --drop N to omit the first few account name com-
ponents. Account names can be depth-clipped with depth:N or --depth N
or -N.
Examples:
$ hledger accounts
assets:bank:checking
assets:bank:saving
assets:cash
expenses:food
expenses:supplies
income:gifts
income:salary
liabilities:debts
activity
activity
Show an ascii barchart of posting counts per interval.
The activity command displays an ascii histogram showing transaction
counts by day, week, month or other reporting interval (by day is the
default). With query arguments, it counts only matched transactions.
Examples:
$ hledger activity --quarterly
2008-01-01 **
2008-04-01 *******
2008-07-01
2008-10-01 **
add
add
Prompt for transactions and add them to the journal. Any arguments
will be used as default inputs for the first N prompts.
Many hledger users edit their journals directly with a text editor, or
generate them from CSV. For more interactive data entry, there is the
add command, which prompts interactively on the console for new trans-
actions, and appends them to the journal file (if there are multiple -f
FILE options, the first file is used.) Existing transactions are not
changed. This is the only hledger command that writes to the journal
file.
To use it, just run hledger add and follow the prompts. You can add as
many transactions as you like; when you are finished, enter . or press
control-d or control-c to exit.
Features:
o add tries to provide useful defaults, using the most similar (by de-
scription) recent transaction (filtered by the query, if any) as a
template.
o You can also set the initial defaults with command line arguments.
o Readline-style edit keys can be used during data entry.
o The tab key will auto-complete whenever possible - accounts, descrip-
tions, dates (yesterday, today, tomorrow). If the input area is
empty, it will insert the default value.
o If the journal defines a default commodity, it will be added to any
bare numbers entered.
o A parenthesised transaction code may be entered following a date.
o Comments and tags may be entered following a description or amount.
o If you make a mistake, enter < at any prompt to go one step backward.
o Input prompts are displayed in a different colour when the terminal
supports it.
Example (see the tutorial for a detailed explanation):
$ hledger add
Adding transactions to journal file /src/hledger/examples/sample.journal
Any command line arguments will be used as defaults.
Use tab key to complete, readline keys to edit, enter to accept defaults.
An optional (CODE) may follow transaction dates.
An optional ; COMMENT may follow descriptions or amounts.
If you make a mistake, enter < at any prompt to go one step backward.
To end a transaction, enter . when prompted.
To quit, enter . at a date prompt or press control-d or control-c.
Date [2015/05/22]:
Description: supermarket
Account 1: expenses:food
Amount 1: $10
Account 2: assets:checking
Amount 2 [$-10.0]:
Account 3 (or . or enter to finish this transaction): .
2015/05/22 supermarket
expenses:food $10
assets:checking $-10.0
Save this transaction to the journal ? [y]:
Saved.
Starting the next transaction (. or ctrl-D/ctrl-C to quit)
Date [2015/05/22]: <CTRL-D> $
On Microsoft Windows, the add command makes sure that no part of the
file path ends with a period, as that would cause problems (#1056).
aregister
aregister, areg
Show transactions affecting a particular account, and the account's
running balance.
aregister shows the transactions affecting a particular account (and
its subaccounts), from the point of view of that account. Each line
shows:
o the transaction's (or posting's, see below) date
o the names of the other account(s) involved
o the net change to this account's balance
o the account's historical running balance (including balance from
transactions before the report start date).
With aregister, each line represents a whole transaction - as in
hledger-ui, hledger-web, and your bank statement. By contrast, the
register command shows individual postings, across all accounts. You
might prefer aregister for reconciling with real-world asset/liability
accounts, and register for reviewing detailed revenues/expenses.
An account must be specified as the first argument, which should be the
full account name or an account pattern (regular expression). aregis-
ter will show transactions in this account (the first one matched) and
any of its subaccounts.
Any additional arguments form a query which will filter the transac-
tions shown.
Transactions making a net change of zero are not shown by default; add
the -E/--empty flag to show them.
This command also supports the output destination and output format op-
tions The output formats supported are txt, csv, and json.
aregister and custom posting dates
Transactions whose date is outside the report period can still be
shown, if they have a posting to this account dated inside the report
period. (And in this case it's the posting date that is shown.) This
ensures that aregister can show an accurate historical running balance,
matching the one shown by register -H with the same arguments.
To filter strictly by transaction date instead, add the --txn-dates
flag. If you use this flag and some of your postings have custom
dates, it's probably best to assume the running balance is wrong.
Examples:
Show all transactions and historical running balance in the first ac-
count whose name contains "checking":
$ hledger areg checking
Show transactions and historical running balance in all asset accounts
during july:
$ hledger areg assets date:jul
balance
balance, bal
Show accounts and their balances.
The balance command is hledger's most versatile command. Note, despite
the name, it is not always used for showing real-world account bal-
ances; the more accounting-aware balancesheet and incomestatement may
be more convenient for that.
By default, it displays all accounts, and each account's change in bal-
ance during the entire period of the journal. Balance changes are cal-
culated by adding up the postings in each account. You can limit the
postings matched, by a query, to see fewer accounts, changes over a
different time period, changes from only cleared transactions, etc.
If you include an account's complete history of postings in the report,
the balance change is equivalent to the account's current ending bal-
ance. For a real-world account, typically you won't have all transac-
tions in the journal; instead you'll have all transactions after a cer-
tain date, and an "opening balances" transaction setting the correct
starting balance on that date. Then the balance command will show
real-world account balances. In some cases the -H/--historical flag is
used to ensure this (more below).
This command also supports the output destination and output format op-
tions The output formats supported are (in most modes): txt, csv, html,
and json.
The balance command can produce several styles of report:
Classic balance report
This is the original balance report, as found in Ledger. It usually
looks like this:
$ hledger balance
$-1 assets
$1 bank:saving
$-2 cash
$2 expenses
$1 food
$1 supplies
$-2 income
$-1 gifts
$-1 salary
$1 liabilities:debts
--------------------
0
By default, accounts are displayed hierarchically, with subaccounts in-
dented below their parent, with accounts at each level of the tree
sorted by declaration order if declared, then by account name.
"Boring" accounts, which contain a single interesting subaccount and no
balance of their own, are elided into the following line for more com-
pact output. (Eg above, the "liabilities" account.) Use --no-elide to
prevent this.
Account balances are "inclusive" - they include the balances of any
subaccounts.
Accounts which have zero balance (and no non-zero subaccounts) are
omitted. Use -E/--empty to show them.
A final total is displayed by default; use -N/--no-total to suppress
it, eg:
$ hledger balance -p 2008/6 expenses --no-total
$2 expenses
$1 food
$1 supplies
Customising the classic balance report
You can customise the layout of classic balance reports with --format
FMT:
$ hledger balance --format "%20(account) %12(total)"
assets $-1
bank:saving $1
cash $-2
expenses $2
food $1
supplies $1
income $-2
gifts $-1
salary $-1
liabilities:debts $1
---------------------------------
0
The FMT format string (plus a newline) specifies the formatting applied
to each account/balance pair. It may contain any suitable text, with
data fields interpolated like so:
%[MIN][.MAX](FIELDNAME)
o MIN pads with spaces to at least this width (optional)
o MAX truncates at this width (optional)
o FIELDNAME must be enclosed in parentheses, and can be one of:
o depth_spacer - a number of spaces equal to the account's depth, or
if MIN is specified, MIN * depth spaces.
o account - the account's name
o total - the account's balance/posted total, right justified
Also, FMT can begin with an optional prefix to control how multi-com-
modity amounts are rendered:
o %_ - render on multiple lines, bottom-aligned (the default)
o %^ - render on multiple lines, top-aligned
o %, - render on one line, comma-separated
There are some quirks. Eg in one-line mode, %(depth_spacer) has no ef-
fect, instead %(account) has indentation built in. Experimentation may
be needed to get pleasing results.
Some example formats:
o %(total) - the account's total
o %-20.20(account) - the account's name, left justified, padded to 20
characters and clipped at 20 characters
o %,%-50(account) %25(total) - account name padded to 50 characters,
total padded to 20 characters, with multiple commodities rendered on
one line
o %20(total) %2(depth_spacer)%-(account) - the default format for the
single-column balance report
Colour support
In terminal output, when colour is enabled, the balance command shows
negative amounts in red.
Flat mode
To see a flat list instead of the default hierarchical display, use
--flat. In this mode, accounts (unless depth-clipped) show their full
names and "exclusive" balance, excluding any subaccount balances. In
this mode, you can also use --drop N to omit the first few account name
components.
$ hledger balance -p 2008/6 expenses -N --flat --drop 1
$1 food
$1 supplies
Depth limited balance reports
With --depth N or depth:N or just -N, balance reports show accounts
only to the specified numeric depth. This is very useful to summarise
a complex set of accounts and get an overview.
$ hledger balance -N -1
$-1 assets
$2 expenses
$-2 income
$1 liabilities
Flat-mode balance reports, which normally show exclusive balances, show
inclusive balances at the depth limit.
Percentages
With -% or --percent, balance reports show each account's value ex-
pressed as a percentage of the column's total. This is useful to get
an overview of the relative sizes of account balances. For example to
obtain an overview of expenses:
$ hledger balance expenses -%
100.0 % expenses
50.0 % food
50.0 % supplies
--------------------
100.0 %
Note that --tree does not have an effect on -%. The percentages are
always relative to the total sum of each column, they are never rela-
tive to the parent account.
Since the percentages are relative to the columns sum, it is usually
not useful to calculate percentages if the signs of the amounts are
mixed. Although the results are technically correct, they are most
likely useless. Especially in a balance report that sums up to zero
(eg hledger balance -B) all percentage values will be zero.
This flag does not work if the report contains any mixed commodity ac-
counts. If there are mixed commodity accounts in the report be sure to
use -V or -B to coerce the report into using a single commodity.
Sorting by amount
With -S/--sort-amount, accounts with the largest (most positive) bal-
ances are shown first. For example, hledger bal expenses -MAS shows
your biggest averaged monthly expenses first.
Revenues and liability balances are typically negative, however, so -S
shows these in reverse order. To work around this, you can add --in-
vert to flip the signs. Or, use one of the sign-flipping reports like
balancesheet or incomestatement, which also support -S. Eg: hledger is
-MAS.
Multicolumn balance report
Multicolumn or tabular balance reports are a very useful hledger fea-
ture, and usually the preferred style. They share many of the above
features, but they show the report as a table, with columns represent-
ing time periods. This mode is activated by providing a reporting in-
terval.
There are three types of multicolumn balance report, showing different
information:
1. By default: each column shows the sum of postings in that period, ie
the account's change of balance in that period. This is useful eg
for a monthly income statement:
$ hledger balance --quarterly income expenses -E
Balance changes in 2008:
|| 2008q1 2008q2 2008q3 2008q4
===================++=================================
expenses:food || 0 $1 0 0
expenses:supplies || 0 $1 0 0
income:gifts || 0 $-1 0 0
income:salary || $-1 0 0 0
-------------------++---------------------------------
|| $-1 $1 0 0
2. With --cumulative: each column shows the ending balance for that pe-
riod, accumulating the changes across periods, starting from 0 at
the report start date:
$ hledger balance --quarterly income expenses -E --cumulative
Ending balances (cumulative) in 2008:
|| 2008/03/31 2008/06/30 2008/09/30 2008/12/31
===================++=================================================
expenses:food || 0 $1 $1 $1
expenses:supplies || 0 $1 $1 $1
income:gifts || 0 $-1 $-1 $-1
income:salary || $-1 $-1 $-1 $-1
-------------------++-------------------------------------------------
|| $-1 0 0 0
3. With --historical/-H: each column shows the actual historical ending
balance for that period, accumulating the changes across periods,
starting from the actual balance at the report start date. This is
useful eg for a multi-period balance sheet, and when you are showing
only the data after a certain start date:
$ hledger balance ^assets ^liabilities --quarterly --historical --begin 2008/4/1
Ending balances (historical) in 2008/04/01-2008/12/31:
|| 2008/06/30 2008/09/30 2008/12/31
======================++=====================================
assets:bank:checking || $1 $1 0
assets:bank:saving || $1 $1 $1
assets:cash || $-2 $-2 $-2
liabilities:debts || 0 0 $1
----------------------++-------------------------------------
|| 0 0 0
Note that --cumulative or --historical/-H disable --row-total/-T, since
summing end balances generally does not make sense.
Multicolumn balance reports display accounts in flat mode by default;
to see the hierarchy, use --tree.
With a reporting interval (like --quarterly above), the report
start/end dates will be adjusted if necessary so that they encompass
the displayed report periods. This is so that the first and last peri-
ods will be "full" and comparable to the others.
The -E/--empty flag does two things in multicolumn balance reports:
first, the report will show all columns within the specified report pe-
riod (without -E, leading and trailing columns with all zeroes are not
shown). Second, all accounts which existed at the report start date
will be considered, not just the ones with activity during the report
period (use -E to include low-activity accounts which would otherwise
would be omitted).
The -T/--row-total flag adds an additional column showing the total for
each row.
The -A/--average flag adds a column showing the average value in each
row.
Here's an example of all three:
$ hledger balance -Q income expenses --tree -ETA
Balance changes in 2008:
|| 2008q1 2008q2 2008q3 2008q4 Total Average
============++===================================================
expenses || 0 $2 0 0 $2 $1
food || 0 $1 0 0 $1 0
supplies || 0 $1 0 0 $1 0
income || $-1 $-1 0 0 $-2 $-1
gifts || 0 $-1 0 0 $-1 0
salary || $-1 0 0 0 $-1 0
------------++---------------------------------------------------
|| $-1 $1 0 0 0 0
(Average is rounded to the dollar here since all journal amounts are)
The --transpose flag can be used to exchange the rows and columns of a
multicolumn report.
When showing multicommodity amounts, multicolumn balance reports will
elide any amounts which have more than two commodities, since otherwise
columns could get very wide. The --no-elide flag disables this. Hid-
ing totals with the -N/--no-total flag can also help reduce the width
of multicommodity reports.
When the report is still too wide, a good workaround is to pipe it into
less -RS (-R for colour, -S to chop long lines). Eg: hledger bal -D
--color=yes | less -RS.
Budget report
With --budget, extra columns are displayed showing budget goals for
each account and period, if any. Budget goals are defined by periodic
transactions. This is very useful for comparing planned and actual in-
come, expenses, time usage, etc. --budget is most often combined with
a report interval.
For example, you can take average monthly expenses in the common ex-
pense categories to construct a minimal monthly budget:
;; Budget
~ monthly
income $2000
expenses:food $400
expenses:bus $50
expenses:movies $30
assets:bank:checking
;; Two months worth of expenses
2017-11-01
income $1950
expenses:food $396
expenses:bus $49
expenses:movies $30
expenses:supplies $20
assets:bank:checking
2017-12-01
income $2100
expenses:food $412
expenses:bus $53
expenses:gifts $100
assets:bank:checking
You can now see a monthly budget report:
$ hledger balance -M --budget
Budget performance in 2017/11/01-2017/12/31:
|| Nov Dec
======================++====================================================
assets || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
assets:bank || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
assets:bank:checking || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
expenses || $495 [ 103% of $480] $565 [ 118% of $480]
expenses:bus || $49 [ 98% of $50] $53 [ 106% of $50]
expenses:food || $396 [ 99% of $400] $412 [ 103% of $400]
expenses:movies || $30 [ 100% of $30] 0 [ 0% of $30]
income || $1950 [ 98% of $2000] $2100 [ 105% of $2000]
----------------------++----------------------------------------------------
|| 0 [ 0] 0 [ 0]
This is different from a normal balance report in several ways:
o Only accounts with budget goals during the report period are shown,
by default.
o In each column, in square brackets after the actual amount, budget
goal amounts are shown, and the actual/goal percentage. (Note: bud-
get goals should be in the same commodity as the actual amount.)
o All parent accounts are always shown, even in flat mode. Eg assets,
assets:bank, and expenses above.
o Amounts always include all subaccounts, budgeted or unbudgeted, even
in flat mode.
This means that the numbers displayed will not always add up! Eg above,
the expenses actual amount includes the gifts and supplies transac-
tions, but the expenses:gifts and expenses:supplies accounts are not
shown, as they have no budget amounts declared.
This can be confusing. When you need to make things clearer, use the
-E/--empty flag, which will reveal all accounts including unbudgeted
ones, giving the full picture. Eg:
$ hledger balance -M --budget --empty
Budget performance in 2017/11/01-2017/12/31:
|| Nov Dec
======================++====================================================
assets || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
assets:bank || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
assets:bank:checking || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-2665 [ 107% of $-2480]
expenses || $495 [ 103% of $480] $565 [ 118% of $480]
expenses:bus || $49 [ 98% of $50] $53 [ 106% of $50]
expenses:food || $396 [ 99% of $400] $412 [ 103% of $400]
expenses:gifts || 0 $100
expenses:movies || $30 [ 100% of $30] 0 [ 0% of $30]
expenses:supplies || $20 0
income || $1950 [ 98% of $2000] $2100 [ 105% of $2000]
----------------------++----------------------------------------------------
|| 0 [ 0] 0 [ 0]
You can roll over unspent budgets to next period with --cumulative:
$ hledger balance -M --budget --cumulative
Budget performance in 2017/11/01-2017/12/31:
|| Nov Dec
======================++====================================================
assets || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-5110 [ 103% of $-4960]
assets:bank || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-5110 [ 103% of $-4960]
assets:bank:checking || $-2445 [ 99% of $-2480] $-5110 [ 103% of $-4960]
expenses || $495 [ 103% of $480] $1060 [ 110% of $960]
expenses:bus || $49 [ 98% of $50] $102 [ 102% of $100]
expenses:food || $396 [ 99% of $400] $808 [ 101% of $800]
expenses:movies || $30 [ 100% of $30] $30 [ 50% of $60]
income || $1950 [ 98% of $2000] $4050 [ 101% of $4000]
----------------------++----------------------------------------------------
|| 0 [ 0] 0 [ 0]
For more examples and notes, see Budgeting.
Budget report start date
This might be a bug, but for now: when making budget reports, it's a
good idea to explicitly set the report's start date to the first day of
a reporting period, because a periodic rule like ~ monthly generates
its transactions on the 1st of each month, and if your journal has no
regular transactions on the 1st, the default report start date could
exclude that budget goal, which can be a little surprising. Eg here
the default report period is just the day of 2020-01-15:
~ monthly in 2020
(expenses:food) $500
2020-01-15
expenses:food $400
assets:checking
$ hledger bal expenses --budget
Budget performance in 2020-01-15:
|| 2020-01-15
==============++============
<unbudgeted> || $400
--------------++------------
|| $400
To avoid this, specify the budget report's period, or at least the
start date, with -b/-e/-p/date:, to ensure it includes the budget goal
transactions (periodic transactions) that you want. Eg, adding -b
2020/1/1 to the above:
$ hledger bal expenses --budget -b 2020/1/1
Budget performance in 2020-01-01..2020-01-15:
|| 2020-01-01..2020-01-15
===============++========================
expenses:food || $400 [80% of $500]
---------------++------------------------
|| $400 [80% of $500]
Nested budgets
You can add budgets to any account in your account hierarchy. If you
have budgets on both parent account and some of its children, then bud-
get(s) of the child account(s) would be added to the budget of their
parent, much like account balances behave.
In the most simple case this means that once you add a budget to any
account, all its parents would have budget as well.
To illustrate this, consider the following budget:
~ monthly from 2019/01
expenses:personal $1,000.00
expenses:personal:electronics $100.00
liabilities
With this, monthly budget for electronics is defined to be $100 and
budget for personal expenses is an additional $1000, which implicitly
means that budget for both expenses:personal and expenses is $1100.
Transactions in expenses:personal:electronics will be counted both to-
wards its $100 budget and $1100 of expenses:personal , and transactions
in any other subaccount of expenses:personal would be counted towards
only towards the budget of expenses:personal.
For example, let's consider these transactions:
~ monthly from 2019/01
expenses:personal $1,000.00
expenses:personal:electronics $100.00
liabilities
2019/01/01 Google home hub
expenses:personal:electronics $90.00
liabilities $-90.00
2019/01/02 Phone screen protector
expenses:personal:electronics:upgrades $10.00
liabilities
2019/01/02 Weekly train ticket
expenses:personal:train tickets $153.00
liabilities
2019/01/03 Flowers
expenses:personal $30.00
liabilities
As you can see, we have transactions in expenses:personal:electron-
ics:upgrades and expenses:personal:train tickets, and since both of
these accounts are without explicitly defined budget, these transac-
tions would be counted towards budgets of expenses:personal:electronics
and expenses:personal accordingly:
$ hledger balance --budget -M
Budget performance in 2019/01:
|| Jan
===============================++===============================
expenses || $283.00 [ 26% of $1100.00]
expenses:personal || $283.00 [ 26% of $1100.00]
expenses:personal:electronics || $100.00 [ 100% of $100.00]
liabilities || $-283.00 [ 26% of $-1100.00]
-------------------------------++-------------------------------
|| 0 [ 0]
And with --empty, we can get a better picture of budget allocation and
consumption:
$ hledger balance --budget -M --empty
Budget performance in 2019/01:
|| Jan
========================================++===============================
expenses || $283.00 [ 26% of $1100.00]
expenses:personal || $283.00 [ 26% of $1100.00]
expenses:personal:electronics || $100.00 [ 100% of $100.00]
expenses:personal:electronics:upgrades || $10.00
expenses:personal:train tickets || $153.00
liabilities || $-283.00 [ 26% of $-1100.00]
----------------------------------------++-------------------------------
|| 0 [ 0]
balancesheet
balancesheet, bs
This command displays a balance sheet, showing historical ending bal-
ances of asset and liability accounts. (To see equity as well, use the
balancesheetequity command.) Amounts are shown with normal positive
sign, as in conventional financial statements.
The asset and liability accounts shown are those accounts declared with
the Asset or Cash or Liability type, or otherwise all accounts under a
top-level asset or liability account (case insensitive, plurals al-
lowed).
(This report is essentially similar to "hledger balance --historical
assets liabilities", with liabilities sign-flipped.)
Example:
$ hledger balancesheet
Balance Sheet
Assets:
$-1 assets
$1 bank:saving
$-2 cash
--------------------
$-1
Liabilities:
$1 liabilities:debts
--------------------
$1
Total:
--------------------
0
With a reporting interval, multiple columns will be shown, one for each
report period. As with multicolumn balance reports, you can alter the
report mode with --change/--cumulative/--historical. Normally bal-
ancesheet shows historical ending balances, which is what you need for
a balance sheet; note this means it ignores report begin dates (and
-T/--row-total, since summing end balances generally does not make
sense). Instead of absolute values percentages can be displayed with
-%.
This command also supports the output destination and output format op-
tions The output formats supported are txt, csv, html, and (experimen-
tal) json.
balancesheetequity
balancesheetequity, bse
This command displays a balance sheet, showing historical ending bal-
ances of asset, liability and equity accounts. Amounts are shown with
normal positive sign, as in conventional financial statements.
The asset, liability and equity accounts shown are those accounts de-
clared with the Asset, Cash, Liability or Equity type, or otherwise all
accounts under a top-level asset, liability or equity account (case in-
sensitive, plurals allowed).
(This report is essentially similar to "hledger balance --historical
assets liabilities equity", with liabilities and equity sign-flipped.)
Example:
$ hledger balancesheetequity
Balance Sheet With Equity
Assets:
$-2 assets
$1 bank:saving
$-3 cash
--------------------
$-2
Liabilities:
$1 liabilities:debts
--------------------
$1
Equity:
$1 equity:owner
--------------------
$1
Total:
--------------------
0
This command also supports the output destination and output format op-
tions The output formats supported are txt, csv, html, and (experimen-
tal) json.
cashflow
cashflow, cf
This command displays a cashflow statement, showing the inflows and
outflows affecting "cash" (ie, liquid) assets. Amounts are shown with
normal positive sign, as in conventional financial statements.
The "cash" accounts shown are those accounts declared with the Cash
type, or otherwise all accounts under a top-level asset account (case
insensitive, plural allowed) which do not have fixed, investment, re-
ceivable or A/R in their name.
(This report is essentially similar to "hledger balance --change assets
not:fixed not:investment not:receivable".)
Example:
$ hledger cashflow
Cashflow Statement
Cash flows:
$-1 assets
$1 bank:saving
$-2 cash
--------------------
$-1
Total:
--------------------
$-1
With a reporting interval, multiple columns will be shown, one for each
report period. Normally cashflow shows changes in assets per period,
though as with multicolumn balance reports you can alter the report
mode with --change/--cumulative/--historical. Instead of absolute val-
ues percentages can be displayed with -%.
This command also supports the output destination and output format op-
tions The output formats supported are txt, csv, html, and (experimen-
tal) json.
check
check
Check for various kinds of errors in your data. experimental
hledger provides a number of built-in error checks to help prevent
problems in your data. Some of these are run automatically; or, you
can use this check command to run them on demand, with no output and a
zero exit code if all is well. Some examples:
hledger check # basic checks
hledger check -s # basic + strict checks
hledger check ordereddates uniqueleafnames # basic + specified checks
Here are the checks currently available:
Basic checks
These are always run by this command and other commands:
o parseable - data files are well-formed and can be successfully parsed
o autobalanced - all transactions are balanced, inferring missing
amounts where necessary, and possibly converting commodities using
transaction prices or automatically-inferred transaction prices
o assertions - all balance assertions in the journal are passing.
(This check can be disabled with -I/--ignore-assertions.)
Strict checks
These are always run by this and other commands when -s/--strict is
used (strict mode):
o accounts - all account names used by transactions have been declared
o commodities - all commodity symbols used have been declared
Other checks
These checks can be run by specifying their names as arguments to the
check command:
o ordereddates - transactions are ordered by date (similar to the old
check-dates command)
o uniqueleafnames - all account leaf names are unique (similar to the
old check-dupes command)
Add-on checks
Some checks are not yet integrated with this command, but are available
as add-on commands in https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/tree/mas-
ter/bin:
o hledger-check-tagfiles - all tag values containing / (a forward
slash) exist as file paths
o hledger-check-fancyassertions - more complex balance assertions are
passing
You could make your own similar scripts to perform custom checks; Cook-
book -> Scripting may be helpful.
close
close, equity
Prints a "closing balances" transaction and an "opening balances"
transaction that bring account balances to and from zero, respectively.
These can be added to your journal file(s), eg to bring asset/liability
balances forward into a new journal file, or to close out revenues/ex-
penses to retained earnings at the end of a period.
You can print just one of these transactions by using the --close or
--open flag. You can customise their descriptions with the --close-
desc and --open-desc options.
One amountless posting to "equity:opening/closing balances" is added to
balance the transactions, by default. You can customise this account
name with --close-acct and --open-acct; if you specify only one of
these, it will be used for both.
With --x/--explicit, the equity posting's amount will be shown. And if
it involves multiple commodities, a posting for each commodity will be
shown, as with the print command.
With --interleaved, the equity postings are shown next to the postings
they balance, which makes troubleshooting easier.
By default, transaction prices in the journal are ignored when generat-
ing the closing/opening transactions. With --show-costs, this cost in-
formation is preserved (balance -B reports will be unchanged after the
transition). Separate postings are generated for each cost in each
commodity. Note this can generate very large journal entries, if you
have many foreign currency or investment transactions.
close usage
If you split your journal files by time (eg yearly), you will typically
run this command at the end of the year, and save the closing transac-
tion as last entry of the old file, and the opening transaction as the
first entry of the new file. This makes the files self contained, so
that correct balances are reported no matter which of them are loaded.
Ie, if you load just one file, the balances are initialised correctly;
or if you load several files, the redundant closing/opening transac-
tions cancel each other out. (They will show up in print or register
reports; you can exclude them with a query like not:desc:'(open-
ing|closing) balances'.)
If you're running a business, you might also use this command to "close
the books" at the end of an accounting period, transferring income
statement account balances to retained earnings. (You may want to
change the equity account name to something like "equity:retained earn-
ings".)
By default, the closing transaction is dated yesterday, the balances
are calculated as of end of yesterday, and the opening transaction is
dated today. To close on some other date, use: hledger close -e OPEN-
INGDATE. Eg, to close/open on the 2018/2019 boundary, use -e 2019.
You can also use -p or date:PERIOD (any starting date is ignored).
Both transactions will include balance assertions for the closed/re-
opened accounts. You probably shouldn't use status or realness filters
(like -C or -R or status:) with this command, or the generated balance
assertions will depend on these flags. Likewise, if you run this com-
mand with --auto, the balance assertions will probably always require
--auto.
Examples:
Carrying asset/liability balances into a new file for 2019:
$ hledger close -f 2018.journal -e 2019 assets liabilities --open
# (copy/paste the output to the start of your 2019 journal file)
$ hledger close -f 2018.journal -e 2019 assets liabilities --close
# (copy/paste the output to the end of your 2018 journal file)
Now:
$ hledger bs -f 2019.journal # one file - balances are correct
$ hledger bs -f 2018.journal -f 2019.journal # two files - balances still correct
$ hledger bs -f 2018.journal not:desc:closing # to see year-end balances, must exclude closing txn
Transactions spanning the closing date can complicate matters, breaking
balance assertions:
2018/12/30 a purchase made in 2018, clearing the following year
expenses:food 5
assets:bank:checking -5 ; [2019/1/2]
Here's one way to resolve that:
; in 2018.journal:
2018/12/30 a purchase made in 2018, clearing the following year
expenses:food 5
liabilities:pending
; in 2019.journal:
2019/1/2 clearance of last year's pending transactions
liabilities:pending 5 = 0
assets:checking
codes
codes
List the codes seen in transactions, in the order parsed.
This command prints the value of each transaction's code field, in the
order transactions were parsed. The transaction code is an optional
value written in parentheses between the date and description, often
used to store a cheque number, order number or similar.
Transactions aren't required to have a code, and missing or empty codes
will not be shown by default. With the -E/--empty flag, they will be
printed as blank lines.
You can add a query to select a subset of transactions.
Examples:
1/1 (123)
(a) 1
1/1 ()
(a) 1
1/1
(a) 1
1/1 (126)
(a) 1
$ hledger codes
123
124
126
$ hledger codes -E
123
124
126
commodities
commodities
List all commodity/currency symbols used or declared in the journal.
descriptions
descriptions
List the unique descriptions that appear in transactions.
This command lists the unique descriptions that appear in transactions,
in alphabetic order. You can add a query to select a subset of trans-
actions.
Example:
$ hledger descriptions
Store Name
Gas Station | Petrol
Person A
diff
diff
Compares a particular account's transactions in two input files. It
shows any transactions to this account which are in one file but not in
the other.
More precisely, for each posting affecting this account in either file,
it looks for a corresponding posting in the other file which posts the
same amount to the same account (ignoring date, description, etc.)
Since postings not transactions are compared, this also works when mul-
tiple bank transactions have been combined into a single journal entry.
This is useful eg if you have downloaded an account's transactions from
your bank (eg as CSV data). When hledger and your bank disagree about
the account balance, you can compare the bank data with your journal to
find out the cause.
Examples:
$ hledger diff -f $LEDGER_FILE -f bank.csv assets:bank:giro
These transactions are in the first file only:
2014/01/01 Opening Balances
assets:bank:giro EUR ...
...
equity:opening balances EUR -...
These transactions are in the second file only:
files
files
List all files included in the journal. With a REGEX argument, only
file names matching the regular expression (case sensitive) are shown.
help
help
Show the hledger user manual in one of several formats, optionally po-
sitioned at a given TOPIC (if possible). TOPIC is any heading, or
heading prefix, in the manual. Some examples: commands, print, 'auto
postings', periodic.
This command shows the user manual built in to this hledger version.
It can be useful if the correct version of the hledger manual, or the
usual viewing tools, are not installed on your system.
By default it uses the best viewer it can find in $PATH, in this order:
info, man, $PAGER (unless a topic is specified), less, or stdout. When
run non-interactively, it always uses stdout. Or you can select a par-
ticular viewer with the -i (info), -m (man), or -p (pager) flags.
import
import
Read new transactions added to each FILE since last run, and add them
to the main journal file. Or with --dry-run, just print the transac-
tions that would be added. Or with --catchup, just mark all of the
FILEs' transactions as imported, without actually importing any.
The input files are specified as arguments - no need to write -f before
each one. So eg to add new transactions from all CSV files to the main
journal, it's just: hledger import *.csv
New transactions are detected in the same way as print --new: by assum-
ing transactions are always added to the input files in increasing date
order, and by saving .latest.FILE state files.
The --dry-run output is in journal format, so you can filter it, eg to
see only uncategorised transactions:
$ hledger import --dry ... | hledger -f- print unknown --ignore-assertions
Importing balance assignments
Entries added by import will have their posting amounts made explicit
(like hledger print -x). This means that any balance assignments in
imported files must be evaluated; but, imported files don't get to see
the main file's account balances. As a result, importing entries with
balance assignments (eg from an institution that provides only balances
and not posting amounts) will probably generate incorrect posting
amounts. To avoid this problem, use print instead of import:
$ hledger print IMPORTFILE [--new] >> $LEDGER_FILE
(If you think import should leave amounts implicit like print does,
please test it and send a pull request.)
Commodity display styles
Imported amounts will be formatted according to the canonical commodity
styles (declared or inferred) in the main journal file.
incomestatement
incomestatement, is
This command displays an income statement, showing revenues and ex-
penses during one or more periods. Amounts are shown with normal posi-
tive sign, as in conventional financial statements.
The revenue and expense accounts shown are those accounts declared with
the Revenue or Expense type, or otherwise all accounts under a top-
level revenue or income or expense account (case insensitive, plurals
allowed).
(This report is essentially similar to "hledger balance --change rev-
enues expenses", with revenues sign-flipped.)
Example:
$ hledger incomestatement
Income Statement
Revenues:
$-2 income
$-1 gifts
$-1 salary
--------------------
$-2
Expenses:
$2 expenses
$1 food
$1 supplies
--------------------
$2
Total:
--------------------
0
With a reporting interval, multiple columns will be shown, one for each
report period. Normally incomestatement shows revenues/expenses per
period, though as with multicolumn balance reports you can alter the
report mode with --change/--cumulative/--historical. Instead of abso-
lute values percentages can be displayed with -%.
This command also supports the output destination and output format op-
tions The output formats supported are txt, csv, html, and (experimen-
tal) json.
notes
notes
List the unique notes that appear in transactions.
This command lists the unique notes that appear in transactions, in al-
phabetic order. You can add a query to select a subset of transac-
tions. The note is the part of the transaction description after a |
character (or if there is no |, the whole description).
Example:
$ hledger notes
Petrol
Snacks
payees
payees
List the unique payee/payer names that appear in transactions.
This command lists the unique payee/payer names that appear in transac-
tions, in alphabetic order. You can add a query to select a subset of
transactions. The payee/payer is the part of the transaction descrip-
tion before a | character (or if there is no |, the whole description).
Example:
$ hledger payees
Store Name
Gas Station
Person A
prices
prices
Print market price directives from the journal. With --costs, also
print synthetic market prices based on transaction prices. With --in-
verted-costs, also print inverse prices based on transaction prices.
Prices (and postings providing prices) can be filtered by a query.
Price amounts are always displayed with their full precision.
print
print
Show transaction journal entries, sorted by date.
The print command displays full journal entries (transactions) from the
journal file, sorted by date (or with --date2, by secondary date).
Amounts are shown right-aligned within each transaction (but not across
all transactions). Directives and inter-transaction comments are not
shown. Eg:
$ hledger print
2008/01/01 income
assets:bank:checking $1
income:salary $-1
2008/06/01 gift
assets:bank:checking $1
income:gifts $-1
2008/06/02 save
assets:bank:saving $1
assets:bank:checking $-1
2008/06/03 * eat & shop
expenses:food $1
expenses:supplies $1
assets:cash $-2
2008/12/31 * pay off
liabilities:debts $1
assets:bank:checking $-1
print's output is usually a valid hledger journal, and you can process
it again with a second hledger command. This can be useful for certain
kinds of search, eg:
# Show running total of food expenses paid from cash.
# -f- reads from stdin. -I/--ignore-assertions is sometimes needed.
$ hledger print assets:cash | hledger -f- -I reg expenses:food
There are some situations where print's output can become unparseable:
o Rounding amounts according to commodity display styles can cause
transactions to appear unbalanced.
o Valuation affects posting amounts but not balance assertion or bal-
ance assignment amounts, potentially causing those to fail.
o Auto postings can generate postings with too many missing amounts.
Normally, the journal entry's explicit or implicit amount style is pre-
served. For example, when an amount is omitted in the journal, it will
not appear in the output. Similarly, when a transaction price is im-
plied but not written, it will not appear in the output. You can use
the -x/--explicit flag to make all amounts and transaction prices ex-
plicit, which can be useful for troubleshooting or for making your
journal more readable and robust against data entry errors. -x is also
implied by using any of -B,-V,-X,--value.
Note, -x/--explicit will cause postings with a multi-commodity amount
(these can arise when a multi-commodity transaction has an implicit
amount) to be split into multiple single-commodity postings, keeping
the output parseable.
With -B/--cost, amounts with transaction prices are converted to cost
using that price. This can be used for troubleshooting.
With -m/--match and a STR argument, print will show at most one trans-
action: the one one whose description is most similar to STR, and is
most recent. STR should contain at least two characters. If there is
no similar-enough match, no transaction will be shown.
With --new, for each FILE being read, hledger reads (and writes) a spe-
cial state file (.latest.FILE in the same directory), containing the
latest transaction date(s) that were seen last time FILE was read.
When this file is found, only transactions with newer dates (and new
transactions on the latest date) are printed. This is useful for ig-
noring already-seen entries in import data, such as downloaded CSV
files. Eg:
$ hledger -f bank1.csv print --new
(shows transactions added since last print --new on this file)
This assumes that transactions added to FILE always have same or in-
creasing dates, and that transactions on the same day do not get re-
ordered. See also the import command.
This command also supports the output destination and output format op-
tions The output formats supported are txt, csv, and (experimental)
json and sql.
Here's an example of print's CSV output:
$ hledger print -Ocsv
"txnidx","date","date2","status","code","description","comment","account","amount","commodity","credit","debit","posting-status","posting-comment"
"1","2008/01/01","","","","income","","assets:bank:checking","1","$","","1","",""
"1","2008/01/01","","","","income","","income:salary","-1","$","1","","",""
"2","2008/06/01","","","","gift","","assets:bank:checking","1","$","","1","",""
"2","2008/06/01","","","","gift","","income:gifts","-1","$","1","","",""
"3","2008/06/02","","","","save","","assets:bank:saving","1","$","","1","",""
"3","2008/06/02","","","","save","","assets:bank:checking","-1","$","1","","",""
"4","2008/06/03","","*","","eat & shop","","expenses:food","1","$","","1","",""
"4","2008/06/03","","*","","eat & shop","","expenses:supplies","1","$","","1","",""
"4","2008/06/03","","*","","eat & shop","","assets:cash","-2","$","2","","",""
"5","2008/12/31","","*","","pay off","","liabilities:debts","1","$","","1","",""
"5","2008/12/31","","*","","pay off","","assets:bank:checking","-1","$","1","","",""
o There is one CSV record per posting, with the parent transaction's
fields repeated.
o The "txnidx" (transaction index) field shows which postings belong to
the same transaction. (This number might change if transactions are
reordered within the file, files are parsed/included in a different
order, etc.)
o The amount is separated into "commodity" (the symbol) and "amount"
(numeric quantity) fields.
o The numeric amount is repeated in either the "credit" or "debit" col-
umn, for convenience. (Those names are not accurate in the account-
ing sense; it just puts negative amounts under credit and zero or
greater amounts under debit.)
print-unique
print-unique
Print transactions which do not reuse an already-seen description.
Example:
$ cat unique.journal
1/1 test
(acct:one) 1
2/2 test
(acct:two) 2
$ LEDGER_FILE=unique.journal hledger print-unique
(-f option not supported)
2015/01/01 test
(acct:one) 1
register
register, reg
Show postings and their running total.
The register command displays matched postings, across all accounts, in
date order, with their running total or running historical balance.
(See also the aregister command, which shows matched transactions in a
specific account.)
register normally shows line per posting, but note that multi-commodity
amounts will occupy multiple lines (one line per commodity).
It is typically used with a query selecting a particular account, to
see that account's activity:
$ hledger register checking
2008/01/01 income assets:bank:checking $1 $1
2008/06/01 gift assets:bank:checking $1 $2
2008/06/02 save assets:bank:checking $-1 $1
2008/12/31 pay off assets:bank:checking $-1 0
With --date2, it shows and sorts by secondary date instead.
The --historical/-H flag adds the balance from any undisplayed prior
postings to the running total. This is useful when you want to see
only recent activity, with a historically accurate running balance:
$ hledger register checking -b 2008/6 --historical
2008/06/01 gift assets:bank:checking $1 $2
2008/06/02 save assets:bank:checking $-1 $1
2008/12/31 pay off assets:bank:checking $-1 0
The --depth option limits the amount of sub-account detail displayed.
The --average/-A flag shows the running average posting amount instead
of the running total (so, the final number displayed is the average for
the whole report period). This flag implies --empty (see below). It
is affected by --historical. It works best when showing just one ac-
count and one commodity.
The --related/-r flag shows the other postings in the transactions of
the postings which would normally be shown.
The --invert flag negates all amounts. For example, it can be used on
an income account where amounts are normally displayed as negative num-
bers. It's also useful to show postings on the checking account to-
gether with the related account:
$ hledger register --related --invert assets:checking
With a reporting interval, register shows summary postings, one per in-
terval, aggregating the postings to each account:
$ hledger register --monthly income
2008/01 income:salary $-1 $-1
2008/06 income:gifts $-1 $-2
Periods with no activity, and summary postings with a zero amount, are
not shown by default; use the --empty/-E flag to see them:
$ hledger register --monthly income -E
2008/01 income:salary $-1 $-1
2008/02 0 $-1
2008/03 0 $-1
2008/04 0 $-1
2008/05 0 $-1
2008/06 income:gifts $-1 $-2
2008/07 0 $-2
2008/08 0 $-2
2008/09 0 $-2
2008/10 0 $-2
2008/11 0 $-2
2008/12 0 $-2
Often, you'll want to see just one line per interval. The --depth op-
tion helps with this, causing subaccounts to be aggregated:
$ hledger register --monthly assets --depth 1h
2008/01 assets $1 $1
2008/06 assets $-1 0
2008/12 assets $-1 $-1
Note when using report intervals, if you specify start/end dates these
will be adjusted outward if necessary to contain a whole number of in-
tervals. This ensures that the first and last intervals are full
length and comparable to the others in the report.
Custom register output
register uses the full terminal width by default, except on windows.
You can override this by setting the COLUMNS environment variable (not
a bash shell variable) or by using the --width/-w option.
The description and account columns normally share the space equally
(about half of (width - 40) each). You can adjust this by adding a de-
scription width as part of --width's argument, comma-separated: --width
W,D . Here's a diagram (won't display correctly in --help):
<--------------------------------- width (W) ---------------------------------->
date (10) description (D) account (W-41-D) amount (12) balance (12)
DDDDDDDDDD dddddddddddddddddddd aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa AAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAA
and some examples:
$ hledger reg # use terminal width (or 80 on windows)
$ hledger reg -w 100 # use width 100
$ COLUMNS=100 hledger reg # set with one-time environment variable
$ export COLUMNS=100; hledger reg # set till session end (or window resize)
$ hledger reg -w 100,40 # set overall width 100, description width 40
$ hledger reg -w $COLUMNS,40 # use terminal width, & description width 40
This command also supports the output destination and output format op-
tions The output formats supported are txt, csv, and (experimental)
json.
register-match
register-match
Print the one posting whose transaction description is closest to DESC,
in the style of the register command. If there are multiple equally
good matches, it shows the most recent. Query options (options, not
arguments) can be used to restrict the search space. Helps ledger-au-
tosync detect already-seen transactions when importing.
rewrite
rewrite
Print all transactions, rewriting the postings of matched transactions.
For now the only rewrite available is adding new postings, like print
--auto.
This is a start at a generic rewriter of transaction entries. It reads
the default journal and prints the transactions, like print, but adds
one or more specified postings to any transactions matching QUERY. The
posting amounts can be fixed, or a multiplier of the existing transac-
tion's first posting amount.
Examples:
$ hledger-rewrite.hs ^income --add-posting '(liabilities:tax) *.33 ; income tax' --add-posting '(reserve:gifts) $100'
$ hledger-rewrite.hs expenses:gifts --add-posting '(reserve:gifts) *-1"'
$ hledger-rewrite.hs -f rewrites.hledger
rewrites.hledger may consist of entries like:
= ^income amt:<0 date:2017
(liabilities:tax) *0.33 ; tax on income
(reserve:grocery) *0.25 ; reserve 25% for grocery
(reserve:) *0.25 ; reserve 25% for grocery
Note the single quotes to protect the dollar sign from bash, and the
two spaces between account and amount.
More:
$ hledger rewrite -- [QUERY] --add-posting "ACCT AMTEXPR" ...
$ hledger rewrite -- ^income --add-posting '(liabilities:tax) *.33'
$ hledger rewrite -- expenses:gifts --add-posting '(budget:gifts) *-1"'
$ hledger rewrite -- ^income --add-posting '(budget:foreign currency) *0.25 JPY; diversify'
Argument for --add-posting option is a usual posting of transaction
with an exception for amount specification. More precisely, you can
use '*' (star symbol) before the amount to indicate that that this is a
factor for an amount of original matched posting. If the amount in-
cludes a commodity name, the new posting amount will be in the new com-
modity; otherwise, it will be in the matched posting amount's commod-
ity.
Re-write rules in a file
During the run this tool will execute so called "Automated Transac-
tions" found in any journal it process. I.e instead of specifying this
operations in command line you can put them in a journal file.
$ rewrite-rules.journal
Make contents look like this:
= ^income
(liabilities:tax) *.33
= expenses:gifts
budget:gifts *-1
assets:budget *1
Note that '=' (equality symbol) that is used instead of date in trans-
actions you usually write. It indicates the query by which you want to
match the posting to add new ones.
$ hledger rewrite -- -f input.journal -f rewrite-rules.journal > rewritten-tidy-output.journal
This is something similar to the commands pipeline:
$ hledger rewrite -- -f input.journal '^income' --add-posting '(liabilities:tax) *.33' \
| hledger rewrite -- -f - expenses:gifts --add-posting 'budget:gifts *-1' \
--add-posting 'assets:budget *1' \
> rewritten-tidy-output.journal
It is important to understand that relative order of such entries in
journal is important. You can re-use result of previously added post-
ings.
Diff output format
To use this tool for batch modification of your journal files you may
find useful output in form of unified diff.
$ hledger rewrite -- --diff -f examples/sample.journal '^income' --add-posting '(liabilities:tax) *.33'
Output might look like:
--- /tmp/examples/sample.journal
+++ /tmp/examples/sample.journal
@@ -18,3 +18,4 @@
2008/01/01 income
- assets:bank:checking $1
+ assets:bank:checking $1
income:salary
+ (liabilities:tax) 0
@@ -22,3 +23,4 @@
2008/06/01 gift
- assets:bank:checking $1
+ assets:bank:checking $1
income:gifts
+ (liabilities:tax) 0
If you'll pass this through patch tool you'll get transactions contain-
ing the posting that matches your query be updated. Note that multiple
files might be update according to list of input files specified via
--file options and include directives inside of these files.
Be careful. Whole transaction being re-formatted in a style of output
from hledger print.
See also:
https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/99
rewrite vs. print --auto
This command predates print --auto, and currently does much the same
thing, but with these differences:
o with multiple files, rewrite lets rules in any file affect all other
files. print --auto uses standard directive scoping; rules affect
only child files.
o rewrite's query limits which transactions can be rewritten; all are
printed. print --auto's query limits which transactions are printed.
o rewrite applies rules specified on command line or in the journal.
print --auto applies rules specified in the journal.
roi
roi
Shows the time-weighted (TWR) and money-weighted (IRR) rate of return
on your investments.
This command assumes that you have account(s) that hold nothing but
your investments and whenever you record current appraisal/valuation of
these investments you offset unrealized profit and loss into account(s)
that, again, hold nothing but unrealized profit and loss.
Any transactions affecting balance of investment account(s) and not
originating from unrealized profit and loss account(s) are assumed to
be your investments or withdrawals.
At a minimum, you need to supply a query (which could be just an ac-
count name) to select your investments with --inv, and another query to
identify your profit and loss transactions with --pnl.
This command will compute and display the internalized rate of return
(IRR) and time-weighted rate of return (TWR) for your investments for
the time period requested. Both rates of return are annualized before
display, regardless of the length of reporting interval.
Note, in some cases this report can fail, for these reasons:
o Error (NotBracketed): No solution for Internal Rate of Return (IRR).
Possible causes: IRR is huge (>1000000%), balance of investment be-
comes negative at some point in time.
o Error (SearchFailed): Failed to find solution for Internal Rate of
Return (IRR). Either search does not converge to a solution, or con-
verges too slowly.
Examples:
o Using roi to report unrealised gains: https://github.com/simon-
michael/hledger/blob/master/examples/roi-unrealised.ledger
More background:
"ROI" stands for "return on investment". Traditionally this was com-
puted as a difference between current value of investment and its ini-
tial value, expressed in percentage of the initial value.
However, this approach is only practical in simple cases, where invest-
ments receives no in-flows or out-flows of money, and where rate of
growth is fixed over time. For more complex scenarios you need differ-
ent ways to compute rate of return, and this command implements two of
them: IRR and TWR.
Internal rate of return, or "IRR" (also called "money-weighted rate of
return") takes into account effects of in-flows and out-flows.
Naively, if you are withdrawing from your investment, your future gains
would be smaller (in absolute numbers), and will be a smaller percent-
age of your initial investment, and if you are adding to your invest-
ment, you will receive bigger absolute gains (but probably at the same
rate of return). IRR is a way to compute rate of return for each pe-
riod between in-flow or out-flow of money, and then combine them in a
way that gives you an annual rate of return that investment is expected
to generate.
As mentioned before, in-flows and out-flows would be any cash that you
personally put in or withdraw, and for the "roi" command, these are
transactions that involve account(s) matching --inv argument and NOT
involve account(s) matching --pnl argument.
Presumably, you will also record changes in the value of your invest-
ment, and balance them against "profit and loss" (or "unrealized
gains") account. Note that in order for IRR to compute the precise ef-
fect of your in-flows and out-flows on the rate of return, you will
need to record the value of your investement on or close to the days
when in- or out-flows occur.
Implementation of IRR in hledger should match the XIRR formula in Ex-
cel.
Second way to compute rate of return that roi command implements is
called "time-weighted rate of return" or "TWR". Like IRR, it will also
break the history of your investment into periods between in-flows and
out-flows to compute rate of return per each period and then a compound
rate of return. However, internal workings of TWR are quite different.
In technical terms, IRR uses the same approach as computation of net
present value, and tries to find a discount rate that makes net present
value of all the cash flows of your investment to add up to zero. This
could be hard to wrap your head around, especially if you haven't done
discounted cash flow analysis before.
TWR represents your investment as an imaginary "unit fund" where in-
flows/ out-flows lead to buying or selling "units" of your investment
and changes in its value change the value of "investment unit". Change
in "unit price" over the reporting period gives you rate of return of
your investment.
References: * Explanation of rate of return * Explanation of IRR * Ex-
planation of TWR * Examples of computing IRR and TWR and discussion of
the limitations of both metrics
More examples:
Lets say that we found an investment in Snake Oil that is proising to
give us 10% annually:
2019-01-01 Investing in Snake Oil
assets:cash -$100
investment:snake oil
2019-12-24 Recording the growth of Snake Oil
investment:snake oil = $110
equity:unrealized gains
For now, basic computation of the rate of return, as well as IRR and
TWR, gives us the expected 10%:
$ hledger roi -Y --inv investment --pnl "unrealized"
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+-----++--------+--------+
| || Begin | End || Value (begin) | Cashflow | Value (end) | PnL || IRR | TWR |
+===++============+============++===============+==========+=============+=====++========+========+
| 1 || 2019-01-01 | 2019-12-31 || 0 | 100 | 110 | 10 || 10.00% | 10.00% |
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+-----++--------+--------+
However, lets say that shorty after investing in the Snake Oil we
started to have second thoughs, so we prompty withdrew $90, leaving
only $10 in. Before Christmas, though, we started to get the "fear of
mission out", so we put the $90 back in. So for most of the year, our
investment was just $10 dollars, and it gave us just $1 in growth:
2019-01-01 Investing in Snake Oil
assets:cash -$100
investment:snake oil
2019-01-02 Buyers remorse
assets:cash $90
investment:snake oil
2019-12-30 Fear of missing out
assets:cash -$90
investment:snake oil
2019-12-31 Recording the growth of Snake Oil
investment:snake oil = $101
equity:unrealized gains
Now IRR and TWR are drastically different:
$ hledger roi -Y --inv investment --pnl "unrealized"
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+-----++-------+-------+
| || Begin | End || Value (begin) | Cashflow | Value (end) | PnL || IRR | TWR |
+===++============+============++===============+==========+=============+=====++=======+=======+
| 1 || 2019-01-01 | 2019-12-31 || 0 | 100 | 101 | 1 || 9.32% | 1.00% |
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+-----++-------+-------+
Here, IRR tells us that we made close to 10% on the $10 dollars that we
had in the account most of the time. And TWR is ... just 1%? Why?
Based on the transactions in our journal, TWR "think" that we are buy-
ing back $90 worst of Snake Oil at the same price that it had at the
beginning of they year, and then after that our $100 investment gets $1
increase in value, or 1% of $100. Let's take a closer look at what is
happening here by asking for quarterly reports instead of annual:
$ hledger roi -Q --inv investment --pnl "unrealized"
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+-----++--------+-------+
| || Begin | End || Value (begin) | Cashflow | Value (end) | PnL || IRR | TWR |
+===++============+============++===============+==========+=============+=====++========+=======+
| 1 || 2019-01-01 | 2019-03-31 || 0 | 10 | 10 | 0 || 0.00% | 0.00% |
| 2 || 2019-04-01 | 2019-06-30 || 10 | 0 | 10 | 0 || 0.00% | 0.00% |
| 3 || 2019-07-01 | 2019-09-30 || 10 | 0 | 10 | 0 || 0.00% | 0.00% |
| 4 || 2019-10-01 | 2019-12-31 || 10 | 90 | 101 | 1 || 37.80% | 4.03% |
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+-----++--------+-------+
Now both IRR and TWR are thrown off by the fact that all of the growth
for our investment happens in Q4 2019. This happes because IRR compu-
tation is still yielding 9.32% and TWR is still 1%, but this time these
are rates for three month period instead of twelve, so in order to get
an annual rate they should be multiplied by four!
Let's try to keep a better record of how Snake Oil grew in value:
2019-01-01 Investing in Snake Oil
assets:cash -$100
investment:snake oil
2019-01-02 Buyers remorse
assets:cash $90
investment:snake oil
2019-02-28 Recording the growth of Snake Oil
investment:snake oil
equity:unrealized gains -$0.25
2019-06-30 Recording the growth of Snake Oil
investment:snake oil
equity:unrealized gains -$0.25
2019-09-30 Recording the growth of Snake Oil
investment:snake oil
equity:unrealized gains -$0.25
2019-12-30 Fear of missing out
assets:cash -$90
investment:snake oil
2019-12-31 Recording the growth of Snake Oil
investment:snake oil
equity:unrealized gains -$0.25
Would our quartery report look better now? Almost:
$ hledger roi -Q --inv investment --pnl "unrealized"
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+------++--------+--------+
| || Begin | End || Value (begin) | Cashflow | Value (end) | PnL || IRR | TWR |
+===++============+============++===============+==========+=============+======++========+========+
| 1 || 2019-01-01 | 2019-03-31 || 0 | 10 | 10.25 | 0.25 || 9.53% | 10.53% |
| 2 || 2019-04-01 | 2019-06-30 || 10.25 | 0 | 10.50 | 0.25 || 10.15% | 10.15% |
| 3 || 2019-07-01 | 2019-09-30 || 10.50 | 0 | 10.75 | 0.25 || 9.79% | 9.78% |
| 4 || 2019-10-01 | 2019-12-31 || 10.75 | 90 | 101.00 | 0.25 || 8.05% | 1.00% |
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+------++--------+--------+
Something is still wrong with TWR computation for Q4, and if you have
been paying attention you know what it is already: big $90 buy-back is
recorded prior to the only transaction that captures the change of
value of Snake Oil that happened in this time period. Lets combine
transactions from 30th and 31st of Dec into one:
2019-12-30 Fear of missing out and growth of Snake Oil
assets:cash -$90
investment:snake oil
equity:unrealized gains -$0.25
Now growth of investment properly affects its price at the time of buy-
back:
$ hledger roi -Q --inv investment --pnl "unrealized"
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+------++--------+--------+
| || Begin | End || Value (begin) | Cashflow | Value (end) | PnL || IRR | TWR |
+===++============+============++===============+==========+=============+======++========+========+
| 1 || 2019-01-01 | 2019-03-31 || 0 | 10 | 10.25 | 0.25 || 9.53% | 10.53% |
| 2 || 2019-04-01 | 2019-06-30 || 10.25 | 0 | 10.50 | 0.25 || 10.15% | 10.15% |
| 3 || 2019-07-01 | 2019-09-30 || 10.50 | 0 | 10.75 | 0.25 || 9.79% | 9.78% |
| 4 || 2019-10-01 | 2019-12-31 || 10.75 | 90 | 101.00 | 0.25 || 8.05% | 9.57% |
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+------++--------+--------+
And for annual report, TWR now reports the exact profitability of our
investment:
$ hledger roi -Y --inv investment --pnl "unrealized"
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+------++-------+--------+
| || Begin | End || Value (begin) | Cashflow | Value (end) | PnL || IRR | TWR |
+===++============+============++===============+==========+=============+======++=======+========+
| 1 || 2019-01-01 | 2019-12-31 || 0 | 100 | 101.00 | 1.00 || 9.32% | 10.00% |
+---++------------+------------++---------------+----------+-------------+------++-------+--------+
stats
stats
Show some journal statistics.
The stats command displays summary information for the whole journal,
or a matched part of it. With a reporting interval, it shows a report
for each report period.
Example:
$ hledger stats
Main journal file : /src/hledger/examples/sample.journal
Included journal files :
Transactions span : 2008-01-01 to 2009-01-01 (366 days)
Last transaction : 2008-12-31 (2333 days ago)
Transactions : 5 (0.0 per day)
Transactions last 30 days: 0 (0.0 per day)
Transactions last 7 days : 0 (0.0 per day)
Payees/descriptions : 5
Accounts : 8 (depth 3)
Commodities : 1 ($)
Market prices : 12 ($)
This command also supports output destination and output format selec-
tion.
tags
tags
List the unique tag names used in the journal. With a TAGREGEX argu-
ment, only tag names matching the regular expression (case insensitive)
are shown. With QUERY arguments, only transactions matching the query
are considered.
With the --values flag, the tags' unique values are listed instead.
With --parsed flag, all tags or values are shown in the order they are
parsed from the input data, including duplicates.
With -E/--empty, any blank/empty values will also be shown, otherwise
they are omitted.
test
test
Run built-in unit tests.
This command runs the unit tests built in to hledger and hledger-lib,
printing the results on stdout. If any test fails, the exit code will
be non-zero.
This is mainly used by hledger developers, but you can also use it to
sanity-check the installed hledger executable on your platform. All
tests are expected to pass - if you ever see a failure, please report
as a bug!
This command also accepts tasty test runner options, written after a --
(double hyphen). Eg to run only the tests in Hledger.Data.Amount, with
ANSI colour codes disabled:
$ hledger test -- -pData.Amount --color=never
For help on these, see https://github.com/feuerbach/tasty#options (--
--help currently doesn't show them).
About add-on commands
Add-on commands are programs or scripts in your PATH
o whose name starts with hledger-
o whose name ends with a recognised file extension: .bat,.com,.exe,
.hs,.lhs,.pl,.py,.rb,.rkt,.sh or none
o 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 en-
tries in hledger journal format. This file represents a standard ac-
counting 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 get-
ting.
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 configura-
tion 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 refer-
ence, 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 sim-
ple date in column 0. This can be followed by any of the following op-
tional fields, separated by spaces:
o a status character (empty, !, or *)
o a code (any short number or text, enclosed in parentheses)
o a description (any remaining text until end of line or a semicolon)
o a comment (any remaining text following a semicolon until end of
line, and any following indented lines beginning with a semicolon)
o 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 cur-
rent 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 aux-
iliary date or effective date). Note: we support this for compatibil-
ity, 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 re-
ports, 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 de-
scription or posting account name, separated from it by a space, indi-
cating 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 un-
marked for clarity.
To replicate Ledger and old hledger's behaviour of also matching pend-
ing, 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 short-
cuts 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 reconcil-
iation)
cleared complete, reconciled as far as possible, and considered cor-
rect
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 un-
cashed checks), and no flags to see the most up-to-date state of your
finances.
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 sub-
divide the description into separate fields for payee/payer name on the
left (up to the first |) and an additional note field on the right (af-
ter the first |). This may be worthwhile if you need to do more pre-
cise 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 de-
scription 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. Transac-
tion 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 new-
lines. 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,
o "a comment containing" is just comment text, not a tag
o "tag1" is a tag with no value
o "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:
o (optional) a status character (empty, !, or *), followed by a space
o (required) an account name (any text, optionally containing single
spaces, until end of line or a double space)
o (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 con-
venience, 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 spa-
ces. 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, income, expenses, and equity.
Account names may contain single spaces, eg: assets:accounts receiv-
able. 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: be-
tween 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 "quan-
tity"):
1
..and usually a currency or commodity name (the "commodity"). This is
a symbol, word, or phrase, to the left or right of the quantity, with
or without a separating space:
$1
4000 AAPL
If the commodity name contains spaces, numbers, or punctuation, it must
be enclosed in double quotes:
3 "no. 42 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 com-
modity 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
A decimal mark can be written as a period or a comma:
1.23
1,23456780000009
Digit group marks
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 group mark and no decimal mark is
ambiguous. Are these group marks or decimal marks ?
1,000
1.000
hledger will treat them both as decimal marks by default (cf #793). If
you use digit group marks, to prevent confusion and undetected typos we
recommend you write commodity directives at the top of the file to ex-
plicitly declare the decimal mark (and optionally a digit group mark).
Note, these formats ("amount styles") are specific to each commodity,
so if your data uses multiple formats, hledger can handle it:
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. (Excluding price amounts, which are always displayed as writ-
ten). The display style is chosen as follows:
o If there is a commodity directive (or default commodity directive)
for the commodity, its style is used (see examples above).
o Otherwise the style is inferred from the amounts in that commodity
seen in the journal.
o Or if there are no such amounts in the journal, a default style is
used (like $1000.00).
A style is inferred from the journal amounts in a commodity as follows:
o Use the general style (decimal mark, symbol placement) of the first
amount
o Use the first-seen digit group style (digit group mark, digit group
sizes), if any
o Use the maximum number of decimal places of all.
Transaction price amounts don't affect the commodity display style di-
rectly, but occasionally they can do so indirectly (eg when a posting's
amount is inferred using a transaction price). If you find this caus-
ing problems, use a commodity directive to fix the display style.
In summary, each commodity's amounts will be normalised to
o the style declared by a commodity directive
o or, 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 to set the commod-
ity's display style. For example:
# declare euro, dollar and bitcoin commodities and set their display styles:
commodity EUR 1.000,
commodity $1000.00
commodity 1000.00000000 BTC
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 commod-
ity. 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 cer-
tain 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 EUR100 @ $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 EUR100 @@ $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 EUR100 ; one hundred euros purchased
assets:dollars $-135 ; for $135
4. Like 1, but the @ is parenthesised, i.e. (@); this is for compati-
bility with Ledger journals (Virtual posting costs), and is equiva-
lent 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
EUR100 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 EUR100 ; for 100 euros
$ hledger bal -N --flat -B
EUR-100 assets:dollars # <- the dollars' selling price
EUR100 assets:euros
Lot prices, lot dates
Ledger allows another kind of price, lot price (four variants: {UNIT-
PRICE}, {{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 pro-
tect 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 dif-
ferent from Ledger, which sorts assertions only by parse order. (Also,
Ledger assertions do not see the accumulated effect of repeated post-
ings 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 included files
With included files, things are a little more complicated. Including
preserves the ordering of postings and assertions. If you have multi-
ple postings to an account on the same day, split across different
files, and you also want to assert the account's balance on the same
day, you'll have to put the assertion in the right file.
Assertions and multiple -f options
Balance assertions don't work well across files specified with multiple
-f options. Use include or concatenate the files instead.
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
unasserted commodities in the account (or, that their balance is 0).
2013/1/1
a $1
a 1EUR
b $-1
c -1EUR
2013/1/2 ; These assertions succeed
a 0 = $1
a 0 = 1EUR
b 0 == $-1
c 0 == -1EUR
2013/1/3 ; This assertion fails as 'a' also contains 1EUR
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 1EUR
b
2013/1/2
a 0 == 0
a:usd 0 == $1
a:euro 0 == 1EUR
Assertions and prices
Balance assertions ignore transaction prices, and should normally be
written without one:
2019/1/1
(a) $1 @ EUR1 = $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 assign-
ments 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 are checked against all postings, both real and vir-
tual. They are not affected by the --real/-R flag or real: query.
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 asser-
tions. 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 assign-
ment). 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 @ EUR2
$ hledger print --explicit
2019-01-01
(a) $1 @ EUR2 = $1 @ EUR2
Directives
A directive is a line in the journal beginning with a special keyword,
that influences how the journal is processed. hledger's directives are
based on a subset of Ledger's, but there are many differences (and also
some differences between hledger versions).
Directives' behaviour and interactions can get a little bit complex, so
here is a table summarising the directives and their effects, with
links to more detailed docs. Note part of this table is hidden when
viewed in a web browser - scroll it sideways to see more.
direc- end di- subdi- purpose can affect (as of
tive rective rec- 2018/06)
tives
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
account any document account names, de- all entries in all
text clare account types & dis- files, before or
play order after
alias end rewrite account names following entries
aliases until end of cur-
rent file or end
directive
apply end apply prepend a common parent to following entries
account account account names until end of cur-
rent file or end
directive
comment end com- ignore part of journal following entries
ment until end of cur-
rent file or end
directive
commod- format declare a commodity and its number notation:
ity number notation & display following entries
style in that commodity
in all files ; dis-
play style: amounts
of that commodity
in reports
D declare a commodity to be default commodity:
used for commodityless following commod-
amounts, and its number no- ityless entries un-
tation & display style til end of current
file; number nota-
tion: following en-
tries in that com-
modity until end of
current file; dis-
play style: amounts
of that commodity
in reports
include include entries/directives what the included
from another file directives affect
P declare a market price for a amounts of that
commodity commodity in re-
ports, when -V is
used
Y declare a year for yearless following entries
dates until end of cur-
rent file
= declare an auto posting all entries in par-
rule, adding postings to ent/current/child
other transactions files (but not sib-
ling files, see
#1212)
And some definitions:
subdi- optional indented directive line immediately following a parent
rec- directive
tive
number how to interpret numbers when parsing journal entries (the iden-
nota- tity of the decimal separator character). (Currently each com-
tion modity can have its own notation, even in the same file.)
dis- how to display amounts of a commodity in reports (symbol side
play and spacing, digit groups, decimal separator, decimal places)
style
direc- which entries and (when there are multiple files) which files
tive are affected by a directive
scope
As you can see, directives vary in which journal entries and files they
affect, and whether they are focussed on input (parsing) or output (re-
ports). Some directives have multiple effects.
Directives and multiple files
If you use multiple -f/--file options, or the include directive,
hledger will process multiple input files. But note that directives
which affect input (see above) typically last only until the end of the
file in which they occur.
This may seem inconvenient, but it's intentional; it makes reports sta-
ble 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 direc-
tives 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 re-
quired) 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, overrid-
ing the file extension (as described in hledger.1 -> Input files): in-
clude 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 commodities
The commodity directive has several functions:
1. It declares commodities which may be used in the journal. This is
currently not enforced, but can serve as documentation.
2. It declares what 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).
3. It declares a commodity's display style in output - decimal and
digit group marks, number of decimal places, symbol placement etc.
You are likely to run into one of the problems solved by commodity di-
rectives, sooner or later, so it's a good idea to just always use them
to declare your commodities.
A commodity directive is just the word commodity followed by an amount.
It may be written on a single line, like this:
; commodity EXAMPLEAMOUNT
; display AAAA amounts with the symbol on the right, space-separated,
; using period as decimal point, with four decimal places, and
; separating thousands with comma.
commodity 1,000.0000 AAAA
or on multiple lines, using the "format" subdirective. (In this case
the commodity symbol appears twice and should be the same in both
places.):
; commodity SYMBOL
; format EXAMPLEAMOUNT
; 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
The quantity of the amount does not matter; only the format is signifi-
cant. The number must include a decimal mark: either a period or a
comma, followed by 0 or more decimal digits.
Note hledger normally uses banker's rounding, so 0.5 displayed with
zero decimal digits is "0". (More at Commodity display style.)
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.
Default commodity
The D directive sets a default commodity, to be used for amounts with-
out a commodity symbol (ie, plain numbers). This commodity will be ap-
plied to all subsequent commodity-less amounts, or until the next D di-
rective. (Note, this is different from Ledger's D.)
For compatibility/historical reasons, D also acts like a commodity di-
rective, setting the commodity's display style (for output) and decimal
mark (for parsing input). As with commodity, the amount must always be
written with a decimal mark (period or comma). If both directives are
used, commodity's style takes precedence.
The syntax is D AMOUNT. 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
Declaring market prices
The P directive declares a market price, which is an exchange rate be-
tween 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.
Here is the format:
P DATE COMMODITYA COMMODITYBAMOUNT
o DATE is a simple date
o COMMODITYA is the symbol of the commodity being priced
o COMMODITYBAMOUNT is an amount (symbol and quantity) in a second com-
modity, giving the price in commodity B of one unit of commodity A.
These two market price directives say that one euro was worth 1.35 US
dollars during 2009, and $1.40 from 2010 onward:
P 2009/1/1 EUR $1.35
P 2010/1/1 EUR $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 dec-
larations can provide several benefits:
o They can document your intended chart of accounts, providing a refer-
ence.
o They can help hledger know your accounts' types (asset, liability,
equity, revenue, expense), useful for reports like balancesheet and
incomestatement.
o They control account display order in reports, allowing non-alpha-
betic sorting (eg Revenues to appear above Expenses).
o They can store extra information about accounts (account numbers,
notes, etc.)
o They help with account name completion in the add command, hledger-
iadd, hledger-web, ledger-mode etc.
o 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:check-
ing 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 incor-
rect 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 de-
clared by an account directive. Some notes:
o The declaration is case-sensitive; transactions must use the correct
account name capitalisation.
o The account directive's scope is "whole file and below" (see direc-
tives). This means it affects all of the current file, and any files
it includes, but not parent or sibling files. The position of ac-
count directives within the file does not matter, though it's usual
to put them at the top.
o Accounts can only be declared in journal files (but will affect in-
cluded files in other formats).
o 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:
o on the same line, after two or more spaces (because ; is allowed in
account names)
o on the next lines, indented
An example of both:
account assets:bank:checking ; same-line comment, note 2+ spaces before ;
; next-line comment
; another with tag, acctno:12345 (not used yet)
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 [ACCTTYPE] [;COMMENT]
[;COMMENTS]
[LEDGER-STYLE SUBDIRECTIVES, IGNORED]
Account types
hledger recognises five main types of account, corresponding to the ac-
count classes in the accounting equation:
Asset, Liability, Equity, Revenue, Expense.
These account types are important for controlling which accounts appear
in the balancesheet, balancesheetequity, incomestatement reports (and
probably for other things in future).
Additionally, we recognise the Cash type, which is also an Asset, and
which causes accounts to appear in the cashflow report. ("Cash" here
means liquid assets, eg bank balances but typically not investments or
receivables.)
Declaring account types
Generally, to make these reports work you should declare your top-level
accounts and their types, using account directives with type: tags.
The tag's value should be one of: Asset, Liability, Equity, Revenue,
Expense, Cash, A, L, E, R, X, C (all case insensitive). The type is
inherited by all subaccounts except where they override it. Here's a
complete example:
account assets ; type: Asset
account assets:bank ; type: Cash
account assets:cash ; type: Cash
account liabilities ; type: Liability
account equity ; type: Equity
account revenues ; type: Revenue
account expenses ; type: Expense
Auto-detected account types
If you happen to use common english top-level account names, you may
not need to declare account types, as they will be detected automati-
cally using the following rules:
If name matches regular account type is:
expression:
----------------------------------------------
^assets?(:|$) Asset
^(debts?|lia- Liability
bilit(y|ies))(:|$)
^equity(:|$) Equity
^(income|revenue)s?(:|$) Revenue
^expenses?(:|$) Expense
If account type is Asset and name does not contain regu- account type
lar expression: is:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
(investment|receivable|:A/R|:fixed) Cash
Even so, explicit declarations may be a good idea, for clarity and pre-
dictability.
Interference from auto-detected account types
If you assign any account type, it's a good idea to assign all of them,
to prevent any confusion from mixing declared and auto-detected types.
Although it's unlikely to happen in real life, here's an example: with
the following journal, balancesheetequity shows "liabilities" in both
Liabilities and Equity sections. Declaring another account as type:Li-
ability would fix it:
account liabilities ; type:Equity
2020-01-01
assets 1
liabilities 1
equity -2
Old account type syntax
In some hledger journals you might instead see this old syntax (the
letters ALERX, separated from the account name by two or more spaces);
this is deprecated and may be removed soon:
account assets A
account liabilities L
account equity E
account revenues R
account expenses X
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 alphabet-
ically:
$ 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:
o you will sometimes declare parent accounts (eg account other above)
that you don't intend to post to, just to customize their display or-
der
o 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:
o expanding shorthand account names to their full form, allowing easier
data entry and a less verbose journal
o adapting old journals to your current chart of accounts
o experimenting with new account organisations, like a new hierarchy or
combining two accounts into one
o 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.
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. 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 re-
place any occurrence of the old account name with the new one. Subac-
counts 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 the forward slashes:
alias /REGEX/ = REPLACEMENT
or --alias '/REGEX/=REPLACEMENT'.
REGEX is a case-insensitive regular expression. Anywhere it matches
inside an account name, the matched part will be replaced by REPLACE-
MENT. If REGEX contains parenthesised match groups, these can be ref-
erenced by the usual numeric backreferences in REPLACEMENT. Eg:
alias /^(.+):bank:([^:]+):(.*)/ = \1:\2 \3
; rewrites "assets:bank:wells fargo:checking" to "assets:wells fargo checking"
Also note that REPLACEMENT continues to the end of line (or on command
line, to end of option argument), so it can contain trailing white-
space.
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:
o the nearest alias declaration before/above the entry is applied first
o the next alias before/above that will be be applied next, and so on
o aliases defined after/below the entry do not affect it.
This gives nearby aliases precedence over distant ones, and helps pro-
vide semantic stability - aliases will keep working the same way inde-
pendent 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. In-
cluding 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 with the end
aliases directive:
end aliases
Default parent account
You can specify a parent account which will be prepended to all ac-
counts 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 sup-
ported.
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 al-
low 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-fore-
casted 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 im-
provement, 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.
Partial or relative dates (M/D, D, tomorrow, last week) in the period
expression can work (useful or not). They will be relative to today's
date, unless a Y default year directive is in effect, in which case
they will be relative to Y/1/1.
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 acciden-
tally 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,
o Do write two spaces between your period expression and your transac-
tion description, if any.
o Don't accidentally write two spaces in the middle of your period ex-
pression.
Forecasting with periodic transactions
The --forecast flag activates any periodic transaction rules in the
journal. They will generate temporary recurring transactions, which
are not saved in the journal, but will appear in all reports (eg
print). This can be useful for estimating balances into the future, or
experimenting with different scenarios. Or, it can be used as a data
entry aid: describe recurring transactions, and every so often copy the
output of print --forecast into the journal.
These transactions will have an extra tag indicating which periodic
rule generated them: generated-transaction:~ PERIODICEXPR. And a simi-
lar, hidden tag (beginning with an underscore) which, because it's
never displayed by print, can be used to match transactions generated
"just now": _generated-transaction:~ PERIODICEXPR.
Periodic transactions are generated within some forecast period. By
default, this
o begins on the later of
o the report start date if specified with -b/-p/date:
o the day after the latest normal (non-periodic) transaction in the
journal, or today if there are no normal transactions.
o ends on the report end date if specified with -e/-p/date:, or 6
months (180 days) from today.
This means that periodic transactions will begin only after the latest
recorded transaction. And a recorded transaction dated in the future
can prevent generation of periodic transactions. (You can avoid that
by writing the future transaction as a one-time periodic rule instead -
put tilde before the date, eg ~ YYYY-MM-DD ...).
Or, you can set your own arbitrary "forecast period", which can overlap
recorded transactions, and need not be in the future, by providing an
option argument, like --forecast=PERIODEXPR. Note the equals sign is
required, a space won't work. PERIODEXPR is a period expression, which
can specify the start date, end date, or both, like in a date: query.
(See also hledger.1 -> Report start & end date). Some examples:
--forecast=202001-202004, --forecast=jan-, --forecast=2020.
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 com-
pared 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, de-
fined 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 match-
ing), followed by a query (which matches existing postings), and each
"posting" line describes a posting to be generated, and the posting
amounts can be:
o a normal amount with a commodity symbol, eg $2. This will be used
as-is.
o a number, eg 2. The commodity symbol (if any) from the matched post-
ing will be added to this.
o 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.
o 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 asser-
tions
Currently, auto postings are added:
o after missing amounts are inferred, and transactions are checked for
balancedness,
o 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.
Auto posting tags
Automated postings will have some extra tags:
o generated-posting:= QUERY - shows this was generated by an auto post-
ing rule, and the query
o _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:
o modified: - this transaction was modified
o _modified: - a hidden tag not appearing in the comment; this transac-
tion 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 be-
low, after the examples:
skip skip one or more header lines or matched
CSV records
fields name CSV fields, assign them to hledger
fields
field assignment assign a value to one hledger field,
with interpolation
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 col-
lection 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 neces-
sary 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 read-
ing 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 gener-
ate 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 when-
ever 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
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.
It does two things:
1. it names the CSV fields. This is optional, but can be convenient
later for interpolating them.
2. when you use a standard hledger field name, it assigns the CSV value
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
Field names may not contain whitespace. Fields you don't care about
can be left unnamed. Currently there must be least two items (there
must be at least one comma).
Note, always use comma in the fields list, even if your CSV uses an-
other separator character.
Here are the standard hledger field/pseudo-field names. For more about
the transaction parts they refer to, see the manual for hledger's jour-
nal format.
Transaction field names
date, date2, status, code, description, comment can be used to form the
transaction's first line.
Posting field names
account
accountN, where N is 1 to 99, causes a posting to be generated, with
that account name.
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
amountN sets posting N's amount. If the CSV uses separate fields for
inflows and outflows, you can use amountN-in and amountN-out instead.
By assigning to amount1, amount2, ... etc. you can generate anywhere
from 0 to 99 postings.
There is also an older, unnumbered form of these names, suitable for
2-posting transactions, which sets both posting 1's and (negated) post-
ing 2's amount: amount, or amount-in and amount-out. This is still
supported because it keeps pre-hledger-1.17 csv rules files working,
and because it can be more succinct, and because it converts posting
2's amount to cost if there's a transaction price, which can be useful.
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 con-
flicts.
currency
If the CSV has the currency symbol in a separate field (ie, not part of
the amount field), you can use currencyN to prepend it to posting N's
amount. Or, currency with no number affects all postings.
balance
balanceN sets a balance assertion amount (or if the posting amount is
left empty, a balance assignment) on posting N.
Also, for compatibility with hledger <1.17: balance with no number is
equivalent to balance1.
You can adjust the type of assertion/assignment with the balance-type
rule (see below).
comment
Finally, commentN sets a comment on the Nth posting. Comments can also
contain tags, as usual.
See TIPS below for more about setting amounts and currency.
field assignment
HLEDGERFIELDNAME FIELDVALUE
Instead of or in addition to a fields list, you can use a "field as-
signment" rule to set the value of a single hledger field, by writing
its name (any of the standard hledger field names above) followed by a
text value. The value may contain interpolated 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
Interpolation strips outer whitespace (so a CSV value like " 1 " be-
comes 1 when interpolated) (#1051). See TIPS below for more about ref-
erencing other fields.
separator
You can use the separator rule to read other kinds of character-sepa-
rated 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 automat-
ically, 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 which 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
https://hledger.org/hledger.html#regular-expressions doc.
Important note: the record that is matched is not the original record,
but a synthetic one, with any enclosing double quotes (but not enclos-
ing 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 ac-
tually 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 multi-
ple matchers can be written on the following lines, non-indented. Mul-
tiple 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 in-
dented by at least one space. Three kinds of rule are allowed in con-
ditional blocks:
o field assignments (to set a hledger field)
o skip (to skip the matched CSV record)
o 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 ta-
ble) or if blocks could override the effect of any rule.
Instead of ',' you can use a variety of other non-alphanumeric charac-
ters as a separator. First character after if is taken to be the sepa-
rator 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-For-
mat.html#v:formatTime
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:
o the CSV might sometimes contain just one day of data (all records
having the same date)
o the CSV records are normally in reverse chronological order (newest
at the top)
o 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 http://eradman.com/entr-
project :
$ 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 en-
closed in quotes, note:
o they must be double quotes (not single quotes)
o 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 gen-
erated 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 as-
sertions 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:
o https://hledger.org -> sidebar -> real world setups
o https://plaintextaccounting.org -> data import/conversion
Setting amounts
A posting amount can be set in one of these ways:
o by assigning (with a fields list or field assignment) to amountN
(posting N's amount) or amount (posting 1's amount)
o by assigning to amountN-in and amountN-out (or amount-in and amount-
out). For each CSV record, whichever of these has a non-zero value
will be used, with appropriate sign. If both contain a non-zero
value, this may not work.
o by assigning to balanceN (or balance) instead of the above, setting
the amount indirectly via a balance assignment. If you do this the
default account name may be wrong, so you should set that explicitly.
There is some special handling for an amount's sign:
o If an amount value is parenthesised, it will be de-parenthesised and
sign-flipped.
o If an amount value begins with a double minus sign, those cancel out
and are removed.
o If an amount value begins with a plus sign, that will be removed
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.
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 lit-
eral "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,
o 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 re-
peated, the last one wins:
o skip (at top level)
o date-format
o newest-first
o fields - names the CSV fields, optionally sets up initial assignments
to hledger fields
Then for each CSV record in turn:
o test all if blocks. If any of them contain a end rule, skip all re-
maining 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.
o 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.
o compute a value for each hledger field - either the one that was as-
signed to it (and interpolate the %CSVFIELDNAME references), or a de-
fault
o 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:
o use emacs and the built-in timeclock.el, or the extended timeclock-
x.el and perhaps the extras in ledgerutils.el
o 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"
o 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
hledger's human-friendly time logging format.
Timedot is a plain text format for logging dated, categorised quanti-
ties (of time, usually), supported by hledger. It is convenient for
approximate and retroactive time logging, eg when the real-time clock-
in/out required with a timeclock file is too precise or too interrup-
tive. It can be formatted like a bar chart, making clear at a glance
where time was spent.
Though called "timedot", this format is read by hledger as commodity-
less quantities, so it could be used to represent dated quantities
other than time. In the docs below we'll assume it's time.
A timedot file contains a series of day entries. A day entry begins
with a non-indented hledger-style simple date (Y-M-D, Y/M/D, Y.M.D..)
Any additional text on the same line is used as a transaction descrip-
tion for this day.
This is followed by optionally-indented timelog items for that day, one
per line. Each timelog item is a note, usually a hledger:style:ac-
count:name representing a time category, followed by two or more spa-
ces, and a quantity. Each timelog item generates a hledger transac-
tion.
Quantities can be written as:
o dots: a sequence of dots (.) representing quarter hours. Spaces may
optionally be used for grouping. Eg: .... ..
o an integral or decimal number, representing hours. Eg: 1.5
o an integral or decimal number immediately followed by a unit symbol
s, m, h, d, w, mo, or y, representing seconds, minutes, hours, days
weeks, months or years respectively. Eg: 90m. The following equiva-
lencies are assumed, currently: 1m = 60s, 1h = 60m, 1d = 24h, 1w =
7d, 1mo = 30d, 1y=365d.
There is some flexibility allowing notes and todo lists to be kept
right in the time log, if needed:
o Blank lines and lines beginning with # or ; are ignored.
o Lines not ending with a double-space and quantity are parsed as items
taking no time, which will not appear in balance reports by default.
(Add -E to see them.)
o Org mode headlines (lines beginning with one or more * followed by a
space) can be used as date lines or timelog items (the stars are ig-
nored). Also all org headlines before the first date line are ig-
nored. This means org users can manage their timelog as an org out-
line (eg using org-mode/orgstruct-mode in Emacs), for organisation,
faster navigation, controlling visibility etc.
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 t.timedot print date:2016/2/2
2016-02-02 *
(inc:client1) 2.00
2016-02-02 *
(biz:research) 0.25
$ hledger -f t.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
I prefer to use period for separating account components. We can make
this work with an account alias:
2016/2/4
fos.hledger.timedot 4
fos.ledger ..
$ hledger -f t.timedot --alias /\\./=: bal date:2016/2/4 --tree
4.50 fos
4.00 hledger:timedot
0.50 ledger
--------------------
4.50
Here is a sample.timedot.
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 --man # show the journal manual as a man page
$ hledger help --help # show more detailed help for the help command
Find more docs, chat, mail list, reddit, issue tracker:
https://hledger.org#help-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 hap-
pens, here are some tips that may help:
o command-specific options must go after the command (it's fine to put
all options there) (hledger CMD OPTS ARGS)
o running add-on executables directly simplifies command line parsing
(hledger-ui OPTS ARGS)
o enclose "problematic" args in single quotes
o if needed, also add a backslash to hide regular expression metachar-
acters from the shell
o 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 re-
cent starting date, like today or the start of the week. You can al-
ways 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 bal-
ances on this date. Here are two ways to do it:
o 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.
o 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 bal-
ances 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 dis-
crepancies.
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 al-
ready-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 check-
ing -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 trans-
action history and running balance from your bank with the one re-
ported by hledger reg checking -C. This will be easier if you gen-
erally record transaction dates quite similar to your bank's clear-
ing dates.
3. Repeat for other asset/liability accounts.
Tip: instead of the register command, use hledger-ui to see a live-up-
dating register while you edit the journal: hledger-ui --watch --regis-
ter 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 com-
mit:
$ 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 re-
member 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 argu-
ment (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 sup-
ports 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/De-
bian:
$ 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 differ-
ence 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
REPORTING BUGS
Report bugs at http://bugs.hledger.org (or on the #hledger IRC channel
or hledger mail list)
AUTHORS
Simon Michael <simon@joyful.com> and contributors
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2007-2020 Simon Michael.
Released under GNU GPL v3 or later.
SEE ALSO
hledger(1), hledger-ui(1), hledger-web(1), ledger(1)
hledger-1.20.99 December 2020 HLEDGER(1)
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