Ledger Balance
Total a ledger-cli / hledger plain-text journal into the balance of every account and sub-account — the balance report, with no install. Filter by account, date range or status, fold the tree to any depth, and export as text, CSV, JSON or Markdown. Runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
About this tool
Ledger Balance runs the balance report — the most-used command in plain-text
accounting — on a journal you paste in. It reads the plain-text format shared by
ledger-cli and hledger, sums
every posting into its account, and rolls those totals up the : hierarchy, so
Expenses:Food:Coffee also feeds Expenses:Food and Expenses.
Everything runs locally in your browser through WebAssembly. Your books never leave the page — nothing is uploaded to a server — and the output is fully deterministic: the same journal and settings always produce the same report.
What the parser understands
- Transactions and postings. A dated header (with an optional
*cleared or!pending flag, a(code), and a payee) followed by postings indented under it. The account name is separated from its amount by two or more spaces or a tab — one space is part of the account name, exactly as in ledger. - One amount-less posting per transaction is inferred, so the common
Assets:Bank:Checkingline with no number balances the entry for you. - Multiple commodities.
$,€,USD,AAPL,"my fund"— prefixed or suffixed, quoted or bare. Accounts holding several commodities print one line per commodity. Both1,234.56and1.234,56are read correctly. - Prices.
10 AAPL @ $50.00(unit price) and4 VTI @@ $800.00(total price) are parsed; tick Convert @ / @@ priced postings to their cost to report them in the price's commodity instead of the original one. - Virtual postings in
(…)or[…], and balance assertions (= $100.00), which are parsed so they can never be mistaken for an amount, then ignored. - Directives:
account,alias,commodity,D,Y,P,apply account/end apply account, andcomment/end commentblocks.
Amounts are summed as fixed-point integers, so thousands of postings add up with no floating-point drift, and each commodity is printed back with the number of decimals it was written with.
Worked example
Input:
2024-01-05 * Groceries
Expenses:Food:Groceries $45.20
Assets:Bank:Checking
2024-01-10 Salary
Assets:Bank:Checking $2,000.00
Income:Salary $-2,000.00
2024-02-01 ! Coffee
Expenses:Food:Coffee $4.80
Assets:Bank:Checking $-4.80
Output (tree layout, grand total on):
$1950.00 Assets
$1950.00 Bank
$1950.00 Checking
$50.00 Expenses
$50.00 Food
$4.80 Coffee
$45.20 Groceries
$-2000.00 Income
$-2000.00 Salary
---------
$0.00
The first transaction leaves Assets:Bank:Checking blank, so it is inferred as
$-45.20. Checking then nets -45.20 + 2000.00 - 4.80 = $1950.00, and the
grand total is $0.00 because the journal is balanced — that zero is the
quickest check that nothing was mistyped.
Switch Layout to flat for full account names with no roll-up, set
Depth to 1 for a top-level summary, or pick a machine-readable Output
format: csv (account,commodity,amount), json (accounts, totals and the
transaction/posting counts), or markdown (a table to paste into notes).
Limits
Up to 5,000 transactions per run — this is a paste tool, not a repository-scale
reporter. The depth fold accepts 0–10 levels. include FILE lines are skipped
(there is no filesystem in the browser) and reported in the notes under the
report. Market-value conversion (-V / -X), multi-period column reports
(-M, -Y), budget reports, and checking that balance assertions actually hold
are out of scope here. Beancount-dialect journals parse only where their posting
syntax overlaps; open/close/balance directives are not supported.
FAQ
Does it read ledger-cli or hledger journals?
Both. The two tools share the same core journal syntax — dated transactions,
indented postings, :-separated account names, */! status flags, an
inferred blank posting — and this parser targets that shared surface, so a file
written for either one works. The output matches the ledger balance /
hledger balance shape: amounts right-aligned in a column, sub-accounts
indented under their parent, and a dashed rule above the grand total.
Why is my grand total zero, and how do I turn it off?
In double-entry bookkeeping every transaction sums to zero, so totalling all
accounts also gives zero — a balanced-books check rather than a bug. Untick
Show the grand-total row to hide it, or narrow the report with the account
filter (for example assets) so the total covers only the accounts you care
about. The % of top-level account column is measured against each row's own
top-level account for the same reason, so the percentages stay meaningful on a
balanced journal.
How do the account filter and date range work?
The filter takes comma-separated, case-insensitive substrings: expenses
keeps every account containing that text. Prefix a pattern with not: or - to
exclude instead, and mix the two — expenses, not:coffee reports expenses
without the coffee sub-account. Dates are YYYY-MM-DD; Start date is
inclusive and End date is exclusive, matching -b/-e in both CLIs, so
January alone is 2024-01-01 to 2024-02-01.
What does the cost-basis option do with @ and @@ prices?
A posting like Assets:Broker:Stocks 10 AAPL @ $50.00 records ten shares
bought at fifty dollars each. By default the account is reported in its own
commodity (10 AAPL). With cost basis on, the posting is reported at what it
cost — $500.00 — so share and cash accounts total in one currency. @@ states
the total rather than the unit price, so 4 VTI @@ $800.00 costs $800.00.
Prices declared separately with P directives are parsed but not applied;
converting to a market value at a date is out of scope.
Are my books uploaded anywhere?
No. The parsing and totalling run entirely in your browser via WebAssembly — the journal you paste is processed on your own machine and never sent to a server, so nothing is stored or transmitted. That also makes the report deterministic and available offline once the page has loaded.
Something failed to parse — what does the error mean?
Errors name the line number, so line 12: '$12x.00' is not a number points
straight at the typo. The most common causes are an account and its amount
separated by only one space (two or more are required, or a tab), more than
one posting in a transaction left without an amount (only one can be inferred),
and a comment block that was never closed with end comment. If the report
comes back empty, the account filter, date range or status filter excluded
everything — loosen one of them.
Developer & Automation Access
Run it from the terminal
Same engine as this page, headless — via the gizza CLI:
gizza tool ledger-balance '2024-01-05 * Groceries
Expenses:Food:Groceries $45.20
Assets:Bank:Checking
2024-01-10 Salary
Assets:Bank:Checking $2,000.00
Income:Salary $-2,000.00'New to the CLI? Get gizza →
Open it by URL
Pre-fill and auto-run this tool with query parameters — the names match the API/CLI:
https://gizza.ai/tools/ledger-balance/?journal=2024-01-05%20%2A%20Groceries%0A%20%20%20%20Expenses%3AFood%3AGroceries%20%20%20%2445.20%0A%20%20%20%20Assets%3ABank%3AChecking%0A%0A2024-01-10%20Salary%0A%20%20%20%20Assets%3ABank%3AChecking%20%20%20%20%20%20%242%2C000.00%0A%20%20%20%20Income%3ASalary%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%24-2%2C000.00&account_filter=expenses%2C%20not%3Acoffee&depth=0&layout=tree&sort=account&begin=2024-01-01&end=2024-03-01&status=all&include_empty=true&real_only=true&cost_basis=true&show_total=true&percent=true&output_format=textMachine-readable descriptor: tool.json — title + parameters JSON Schema for agents.