Features

The majority of features from ledger and hledger are supported by ledger2beancount.

Fully supported

• Accounts
  • Account declarations (account ...)
  • Conversion of invalid account names
  • Mapping of account names
  • Directive apply account
  • Account aliases (the alias directive and the alias sub-directive of account declarations)
• Balance assignments
• Balance assertions
• Comments
  • Comments in and outside of transactions
  • Directives comment and test
• Commodities
  • Commodity declarations (commodity ...)
  • Commodity symbols like $, £ and €
  • Commodities placed in front and after the amount
  • Conversion of invalid commodities
  • Mapping of commodities
• Directives
  • bucket / A
  • include
  • Year / Y, apply year
• Flags
  • Transaction state (transaction flags)
• Inline maths
  • Lots
  • Lot dates
  • Lot notes
  • Per unit and total costs and prices
  • Conversion of ledger price to beancount cost
• Metadata
• Payees
  • Obtain payee from metadata
  • Split payee into payee and narration
  • Assign payee based on narration
• Tags
  • Directive apply tag
  • Mapping #tags to ^links

Partly supported

• Amounts
  • Amounts without commodities (not supported in beancount)
  • Decimal comma (not supported in beancount)
• Dates
  • Dates on posting-level (no equivalence in beancount)
  • Auxiliary dates (no equivalence in beancount)
  • Effective dates (no equivalence in beancount)
• Deferred postings (no equivalence in beancount)
• Directives
  • define and def (no functions)
  • eval: skipped (not supported in beancount)
  • import: skipped (not supported in beancount)
  • payee: skipped (not needed in beancount)
  • python: skipped (not supported in beancount)
  • tag: skipped (not needed in beancount)
  • value: skipped (not supported in beancount)
• Fixated prices (=$10 and the fixed directive)
• Lot value expressions (no equivalence in beancount)
• Tags and links on posting-level (not supported by beancount)
• Transaction codes: stored as metadata (no equivalence in beancount)
• Virtual postings: can be skipped or converted to real postings
• Virtual posting costs: recognised but skipped (no equivalence in beancount)

Unsupported in beancount

The following features are not supported in beancount and therefore commented out during the conversion from ledger to beancount:

• Automated transactions
• Checks and assertions (check and assert)
• Commodity conversion (C AMOUNT1 = AMOUNT2)
• Commodity format (D AMOUNT)
• Commodity pricing: ignore pricing (N SYMBOL)
• Timeclock support (I, i, O, o, b, h)
• Periodic transactions

Supported features from hledger

The following syntax from hledger is supported if the hledger configuration variable is set:

• Account aliases can be regular expressions
• Amounts
  • All digit group marks (space, comma, and period) are supported
  • Number format can be specified via commodity and D directives
• Narration: support for payee | note format
• Posting dates: date and date2
• Tags: tag1:, tag2:, tag2: info
• Balance assertions
  • Sub-account balance assertions
  • Total balance assertions: recognised but no equivalent in beancount
• Directives
  • D (set default commodity)
  • end aliases