ledger-cli/doc/GLOSSARY.md

ACCOUNTING GLOSSARY

Accounting and bookkeeping represent an entire field of human effort and has evolved its own specialized vocabulary. Accounting hopes to summarize and add understanding to where the money is going.

Account: A category for grouping together amounts from similar transactions. Each account has a name, which is usually capitalized, and an account type. Accounts are often organized into a hierarchy when it helps understanding. For example, a coffee shop might have Coffee, Merchandise, and Equipment as accounts but arranged under an Inventory account because different decisions are made on the total inventory rather than just coffee. A hierarchy can be part of the account name in Ledger, e.g., "Assets:Inventory:Coffee". Note that the Ledger software usually creates the list of accounts on the fly: accounts are created when transactions use them.

Account Type: Each account has a type of Asset, Liability, Equity, Income, or Expense. Assets represent something owned, e.g., Cash or Inventory. Liabilities represent sometime owed, e.g., a Loan or Mortgage. Equity, also called capital, is everything owned minus everything owed (Assets - Liabilities). It is the financial measure of how much you are ahead. Income is money earned somewhere, which puts you more ahead. Expenses is money spent somewhere, which puts you less ahead. The type of account determines if a debit represents an increase or decrease in an account. For example, Inventory is an asset so a transaction debiting Inventory would increase its value. Assets and Expenses increase with debits and decrease with credits; Liabilities, Equity, and Expenses increase with credits and decrease with debits.

Journal: A record of all the financial transactions of a person or firm. This data of where money goes can be collated into reports. This used to be done with a physical book, called a ledger, where each account was on one page. Each debit or credit in the journal was transferred to the appropriate account page and the pages were totaled to produce reports. This process is now done with the Ledger software which creates reports from the journal. A journal is sometimes called a register.

Posting: A single debit or credit line of a transaction. A posting comprises an account and the debit or credit amount. It also inherits the shared description and date from the transaction. In the Ledger software, a posting may also have metadata and an account state.

Report: A summary made from a journal of transactions. Each transaction affects accounts and those effects are collated and totaled. The two most common reports are the balance sheet, which shows what is owned and owed on a specific date, and the cash flow statement, which shows how money was earned and spent over a period. The cash flow statement is also called a profit and loss statement or an income statement.

Transaction: Our financial lives are recorded as a series of transactions. Each transaction has a specific date, an equal total of debits and credits affecting accounts, and some sort of description. For example, "On January 1, pay $100 with check #243 from Checking to Utilities for my Verizon phone bill" is a transaction. A credit of $100 decreases my Checking asset, while a balancing debit of $100 increases my Utility expense. A transaction needs at least two postings, meaning account debits or credits, but can be as complicated as humans can make finances.

LEDGER GLOSSARY

The Ledger software also has its own terms.

Automated Transaction: a command directive that modifies subsequent transactions that match an expression. An automated transaction can add additional postings to a transaction, add metadata, or change transaction amounts. Reports can be filter postings modified or generated by an automated transaction. § Automated Transactions; § Concrete Example of Automated Transactions

Command Directive: a command in a journal file to change how subsequent lines and transactions in a journal file are processed. Command directives control processing, set default values for subsequent accounts and transactions, or override parts of subsequent transactions. A directive line begins with name of the directive and may have additional arguments or additional indented lines. The single letters AbCDhIiNOoY are aliased to other command directives, providing compatibility with the ancient past. The characters '=' and '-' are command directives for a automatic transactions and periodic transactions, respectively. § Command Directives

Commodity: any currency, stock, time or resource to be tracked numerically. While many people only track money in Ledger, Ledger can track different resources and manage rules to convert between them. The system is flexible enough for the needs of very different users. Some track billable time, converting minutes and hours into dollars. Others track multiple currencies. Still others track the purchase and sale of stocks. Each commodity is separate unless a conversion rule is given. § Commodities and Currencies; § Currencies and Commodities; § Accounts and Inventories; § Posting Cost (and next ten sections); § Commodity Reporting

Effective Date: an optional, second date information item in for a posting or transaction. Some use the effective date for when work is billed or when a check has cleared. The --effective-date option causes the effective date to override the transaction's initial date for that report. § Effective Dates;

Journal File: the text input file for ledger, sometimes called a register file. A journal file is a series of transactions, command directives, and comments. Command directives start with the single word name of the directive at the beginning of the line and include any following indented lines. Transactions start with a date a the beginning of the line and include any indented lines following. The journal file is expected to be encoded as ASCII or UTF-8 text.

Periodic Transaction: the estimate of a transaction that would occur periodically, e.g., a monthly expense. These estimates are only used in budgeting and forecasting reports using the --budget, --forecast, or --unbudgeted options. § Budgeting and Forecasting

Transaction Code: an optional item in a transaction or posting often used to record a check number or bank code. Certain custom reports can report this code. § Codes; § Format Expressions

Transaction Metadata: a term for comments and tags annotating a transaction. Comments indented with a transaction will be stored with each posting of a transaction. Tags are words in comments followed by colons. Tags can be used as filters in reports and certain tags, "Payee" or "Value", may affect fields of the transaction. § Metadata, § Applying Metadata to every matched posting, § Applying Metadata to the generated posting

Transaction State: a state of cleared, pending, or uncleared on each posting. The state is usually set for an entire transaction at once with a mark after the date. The marks are * (cleared), ! (pending), or no mark (uncleared). The interpretation of this state is up to the user, but is typically used in bank reconciliations or differentiating time worked versus billed. Ledger supports reports and filters based on state. § Transaction State; § Cleared Report

Virtual Posting: an annotation posting in a transaction, similar in form as a regular posting but not required to balance debits and credits. It is often used to support Fund Accounting and various reports will collate and summarize virtual postings. Virtual postings should not be confused with virtual posting costs. § Virtual Postings § Working with Multiple Funds and Accounts