Ledger-CLI

John Wiegley's 'Ledger' program (http://ledger-cli.org/) is intended for those who want to keep their transactions in an easy plain-text format. You just create a list of them in text files, and then run the utility to produce reports, balance sheets, budgets etc. All very cool, but entering stuff in an editor can be very tedious which is why I switched to GnuCash.

However…

Ledger can read GnuCash files, as an alternative to its own text format. At least, it can if:

a) You use Ledger 2.x - The GnuCash support has not yet been ported to the newer Ledger 3.0.

b) Your GnuCash file is not compressed XML. So you either need to turn off compression in your preferences, or gunzip your file before feeding it to Ledger.

As a quick example, here's how I can produce a crude CSV file of the entries in my Expenses:Travel account:

ledger -f myfile.gnucash --register-format "%D,%P,%A,%t\n" register Expenses:Travel

That format string is (roughly) "date,description,account,amount".

If you want to see what your GnuCash file would look like as a Ledger file you can do:

ledger -f myfile.gnucash print

Now, one thing you should know if reading the Ledger documentation: GnuCash files have an implicit 'Root Account', which Ledger is not expecting. So if you try to run the default Ledger commands to get top-level reports, some of them won't work, because they will be expecting an 'Expenses' account, when it will actually be found under 'Root Account:Expenses'. The 'balance' command will be remarkably quiet, for example.

Commands which are explicit about the account names will work fine, though.

The easiest way to strip out the root account is probably to convert your GnuCash file to Ledger text as shown above, do a global replace of 'Root Account:', and then feed the result into Ledger again to get the report you actually want. You can do this all in one command line/script.

Here's an example

ledger -f myfile.gnucash print \
        | sed -e 's/Root Account://g' \
        | ledger -f - -s balance

Hope that's useful to someone!

Quentin

from the Mailinglist.