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84 lines
4.0 KiB
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Ledger – A Powerful Command Line Accounting Tool For Double-Entry Accounting
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Whether you are a computer geek or a normal user, keeping account of expenses is always essential. While there are many popular GUI based accounting tools available for Linux (For example – [GNUCash][1]), working on a command line accounting tool is hard to imagine for most of the users. In this article, we will discuss a powerful command line accounting tool – **Ledger**.
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**Ledger – Double-Entry Accounting Tool**
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Ledger is a powerful command line tool for double-entry accounting. For those who are new to the term “Double-Entry”, it means that for every transaction there has to be a source. In a layman’s terms, this means, for every credit made into an account, there has to be a debit from an account. So, ledger keeps track of the movement of money and helps you understand your expenses.
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Ledger does not have a database of its own, it relies on an expense sheet (a simple text file) maintained by the user. Though there is a particular format of the expense sheet that ledger understands.
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For example, here is a sample expense sheet that I prepared :
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A couple of points worth noting :
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- All the lines under a category (For example – Shopping, Leisure or EMI) are tab indented
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- Similarly, all the expense figures (including $) are also tab indented
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- Being Double-Entry accounting tool, it is important to specify both credit and debit. Ledger will give error otherwise.
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**A brief Tutorial**
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Once the expense sheet is ready, here is how you can check the overall expenses :
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So you can see that through **-f option**, you can specify your expense sheet name and **balance** is a ledger command that processes total payment records which are displayed categorically. Also, the debit payments are shown in RED while expenditure is shown in WHITE.
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As discussed earlier, ledger requires user to enter correct debit-credit details. Here is an example of error when incorrect debit-credit relationship was mentioned in the expense sheet :
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I just changed the shopping expense for shoes from $50 to $60 but did not change the payment figure. As you can see that ledger displayed error “**Transaction does not balance**“.
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Apart from balance, you can use **register** command to display all the entries corresponding to a report-query.
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For example :
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So, you can see that in the example above - **register** command was used with report-query shopping and all the transaction related to this category were displayed in output.
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This was just a tip of an iceberg, ledger provides many other options (including report generation) that are worth trying. Visit the [man page][2] for more.
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**Pros**
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- A powerful and feature rich accounting tool
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- Easy to use
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- Coloured output.
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**Cons**
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- Expense file needs to be maintained separately
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- Has a bit of learning curve
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**Download/Install**
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Here are some of the important links related to ledger command line tool :
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- [Home Page][3]
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- [Download][4]
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- [Documentation][5]
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- [A detailed review on LWN][6]
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via: http://mylinuxbook.com/ledger-command-line-accounting-tool-2/
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本文由 [LCTT][] 原创翻译，[Linux中国][] 荣誉推出
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译者：[译者ID][] 校对：[校对者ID][]
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[LCTT]:https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject
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[Linux中国]:http://linux.cn/portal.php
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[译者ID]:http://linux.cn/space/译者ID
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[校对者ID]:http://linux.cn/space/校对者ID
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[1]:http://www.gnucash.org/
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[2]:http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger.1.html
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[3]:http://www.ledger-cli.org/
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[4]:http://www.ledger-cli.org/download.html
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[5]:http://www.ledger-cli.org/2.6/ledger.pdf
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[6]:http://lwn.net/Articles/501681/ |