Ledger is a command-line based
double-entry bookkeeping application. Accounting data is stored in a
plain text file, using a simple format, which the users prepare themselves using other tools. Ledger does not write or modify data, it only parses the input data and produces reports.
Reviews
Linux Weekly News editor Jonathan Corbet found Ledger to be a "powerful tool", particularly for generating reports, but that the software lacked many of the features necessary to scale to the needs of a small business. Joe Barr writing for
Linux.com
Linux.com is a website owned by the Linux Foundation. The goal of the site is to provide information about the developments and changes in Linux and related products. Linux.com offers free Linux tutorials, news and blogs, discussion forums and ...
commented "If you're an MBA who groks Emacs and regular expressions, or a kernel hacker who appreciates tax deferred accruals, you'll love this application."
FLOSS Weekly interviewed John Wiegley in 2011. It noted reading of
GnuCash files, scriptability, an
Emacs
Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...
interface and automated transactions as strong features as well as the
Common Lisp
Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fro ...
port and the
Haskell port of the system.
Ports
The Ledger system and file format have been quite influential, reimplemented in several other languages and inspiring similar tools. Actively developed ports
include Abandon
in
Scala, Beancount
in
Python, and hledger
in
Haskell. Actively developed projects inspired by ledger include penny.
See also
*
Comparison of accounting software
External links
Ledger homepageLedger and Text based Accounting
2009 presentation by Russell Adams
References
{{Personal finance software
Free accounting software
Free software programmed in C++
Cross-platform software
Software using the BSD license