Skip to content
hledger-flow

Manual journals

Not every transaction in your life comes with CSV statements.

Sometimes you just need to add a transaction for that time you loaned a friend some money.

hledger-flow independently discovers _manual_/YYYY/pre-import.journal and _manual_/YYYY/post-import.journal during import. You can place _manual_ directly under import, an owner, a bank, or an account. Either file establishes that year’s include files, even when there are no statements for that year or no statements anywhere in the ledger.

Put a transaction shared by the whole household in a root journal such as import/_manual_/2019/post-import.journal. After hledger-flow import, run hledger-flow report. The annual and monthly income statements and the balance sheet under reports/all/2019/ include that transaction, even with a single owner or a ledger made up entirely of root manual entries. If an owner is named all (in any letter case), the aggregate reports go under reports/_all_/2019/.

For a transaction that belongs to John alone, use import/john/_manual_/2019/ so it appears in both John’s reports and the aggregate reports.

You can run hledger-flow import --verbose to see exactly which files are being looked for.

As an example, assuming that the relevant year is 2019 and one or both of the following files will cause import/john/2019-include.journal to be generated and included in the root ledger:

  1. import/john/_manual_/2019/pre-import.journal
  2. import/john/_manual_/2019/post-import.journal

The pre-import.journal will be included just before the other included entries, while the post-import.journal will be included just after the other entries in that include file.

An include file may look like this:

Terminal window
cat import/john/2019-include.journal
### Generated by hledger-flow - DO NOT EDIT ###


include _manual_/2019/pre-import.journal
include mybank/2019-include.journal
include otherbank/2019-include.journal
include _manual_/2019/post-import.journal

Stability

Section titled “Stability”

It works, but the naming of _manual_ looks a bit weird. Should it be changed?