ledger2beancount

A script to automatically convert Ledger-based textual ledgers to Beancount ones.

Conversion is based on (concrete) syntax, so that information that is not meaningful for accounting reasons but still valuable (e.g., comments, formatting, etc.) can be preserved.

ledger2beancount supports the file formats from:

• ledger
• hledger

Usage

ledger2beancount accepts input from stdin or from a file and will write the converted data to stdout. You can run ledger2beancount like this:

ledger2beancount test.ledger > test.beancount

Installation

Please see the installation information for dependencies and installation instructions.

Documentation

ledger2beancount comes with extensive documentation. You can also read the documentation online thanks to Read the Docs.

Features

The majority of features from ledger are supported by ledger2beancount. Here is an overview of fully supported, partly supported and unsupported features. Please refer to the user guide for more details on how to use ledger2beancount and to configure it to your needs.

Fully supported

• Accounts
  • Account declarations (account ...)
  • Conversion of invalid account names
  • Mapping of account names
  • Directive apply account
  • Account aliases (the alias directive and the alias sub-directive of account declarations)
• Balance assignments
• Balance assertions
• Comments
  • Comments in and outside of transactions
  • Directives comment and test
• Commodities
  • Commodity declarations (commodity ...)
  • Commodity symbols like $, £ and €
  • Commodities placed in front and after the amount
  • Conversion of invalid commodities
  • Mapping of commodities
• Directives
  • bucket / A
  • include
  • Year / Y, apply year
• Flags
  • State flags (posting flags)
  • Transaction state (transaction flags)
• Inline maths
• Lots
  • Lot dates
  • Lot notes
  • Per unit and total costs and prices
  • Conversion of ledger price to beancount cost
• Metadata
• Payees
  • Obtain payee from metadata
  • Split payee into payee and narration
  • Assign payee based on narration
• Tags
  • Directive apply tag
  • Mapping #tags to ^links

Partly supported

• Amounts
  • Amounts without commodities (not supported in beancount)
  • Decimal comma (not supported in beancount)
• Dates
  • Dates on posting-level (no equivalence in beancount)
  • Auxiliary dates (no equivalence in beancount)
  • Effective dates (no equivalence in beancount)
• Deferred postings (no equivalence in beancount)
• Directives
  • D (not supported in beancount)
  • define and def (no functions)
  • eval: skipped (not supported in beancount)
  • import: skipped (not supported in beancount)
  • payee: skipped (not needed in beancount)
  • python: skipped (not supported in beancount)
  • tag: skipped (not needed in beancount)
  • value: skipped (not supported in beancount)
• Fixated prices (=$10 and the fixed directive)
• Lot value expressions (no equivalence in beancount)
• Tags and links on posting-level (not supported by beancount)
• Transaction codes: stored as metadata (no equivalence in beancount)
• Virtual postings: can be skipped or converted to real postings
• Virtual posting costs: recognised but skipped (no equivalence in beancount)

Not supported

• Automated transactions
• Directives
  • assert
  • C (commodity equivalences)
  • check
  • expr
  • N
  • Timeclock (I, i, O, o, b, h)
• Periodic transactions

Supported features from hledger

• Account aliases can be regular expressions
• Amounts
  • All digit group marks (space, comma, and period) are supported
  • Number format can be specified via commodity and D directives
• Narration: support for payee | note format
• Posting dates: date and date2
• Tags: tag1:, tag2:, tag2: info
• Balance assertions
  • Sub-account balance assertions
  • Total balance assertions: recognised but no equivalent in beancount
• Directives
  • D (set default commodity)
  • end aliases

Authors

• Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@upsilon.cc>
• Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later