Journal entries

Here's the journal entry for a common type of transaction - a purchase - with the parts labelled in red. (You can read more about each part in the manual.):

a hledger transaction entry, with parts named This entry means: "on april 10th 2018, there was a $9.19 car-related expense, paid with the Acme credit card".

A few more notes about this entry, and journal entries generally:

  1. To reduce errors, we use Double Entry Bookkeeping. This means we always record both the source and the destination of money (where it came from, and where it went).

  2. Expenses:Automotive, a spending category, is just another kind of account. It's not a physical account like your wallet (AKA assets:cash), or a bank account (like Liabilities:Acme Credit Card); it's an expense account.

  3. We also use a convenient sign notation: money leaving an account (a Credit, in bookkeeping language) is written as a negative number, and money entering an account (a Debit) is written as a positive number. Together with rule 1, this means the amounts in a transaction must always add up to zero.

  4. Why is there no amount next to Liabilities:Acme Credit Card, above ? As a convenience, we are allowed to leave one amount blank, and it will be inferred automatically (eg $-9.19 is inferred above). This is optional, just to save typing.


(Part of hledger by example.)