Beancount compatibility

The syntax of beancount is quite stable but it's expected to become slightly less restrictive as some missing features are implemented (such as posting-level tags).

ledger2beancount aims to be compatible with the latest official release of beancount, but some functionality may require an unreleased version of beancount. You can install the latest development version of beancount directly from the beancount repository:

pip3 install git+https://github.com/beancount/beancount/

Currently, there are no features that require an unreleased version of beancount.

ledger2beancount is largely compatible with Beancount 2.0. If you use the following features, you need Beancount 2.1:

• UTF-8 letters and digits in account names
• Full-line comments in transactions
• Transaction tags on multiple lines

Ledger compatibility

ledger2beancount is compatible with the latest release of ledger and supports the majority of features, as documented in the previous section.

There is one limitation, though. While ledger doesn't care about the encoding of files (as long as your operating system processes them correctly), ledger2beancount expects input to be UTF-8. This is because beancount files have to be UTF-8, so users are expected to have an environment that is compatible with UTF-8 anyway.

Modern operating systems use UTF-8 by default. On Windows, UTF-8 may need to be set explicitly for the console. If you run into encoding issues, you should run the following command before you use ledger2beancount:

chcp 65001

This sets the code page 65001, which is UTF-8 on Windows systems.