ledger-pyreport

ledger-pyreport is a lightweight Flask webapp for generating interactive and printable accounting reports from ledger-cli data.

Reports

• Trial balance, and comparative trial balance
• Balance sheet, and comparative balance sheet
• Income statement, and comparative income statement
• Cash flow statement, and comparative cash flow statement (direct and indirect methods)
• General ledger
• Account transactions, with or without itemisation of commodities
• Transaction detail, with or without itemisation of commodities

Features

• Correctly values:
  • assets/liabilities at fair market value (cf. AASB/IFRS 9 ¶4.1.4, AASB 121/IAS 21 ¶23) or historical cost (cf. AASB 102/IAS 2 ¶9), as applicable
  • income/expenses at historical cost (cf. AASB 121/IAS 21 ¶21)
• Correctly computes unrealised gains (even when Ledger does not)
• Accounts for both profit and loss, and other comprehensive income
• Simulates annual closing of books, with presentation of income/expenses on the balance sheet as retained earnings and current year earnings
• Can simulate cash basis accounting, using FIFO methodology to recode transactions involving liabilities and non-cash assets

Background, demo and screenshots

See https://yingtongli.me/blog/2020/03/31/ledger-pyreport.html for further discussion.

Usage

Install the dependencies from PyPI, optionally in a virtual environment: (Commands presented for Linux/Mac)

virtualenv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Copy config.example.yml to config.yml (or set the LEDGER_PYREPORT_CONFIG environment variable to the path to the config file).

Run as per a usual Flask app, for example:

FLASK_APP=ledger_pyreport python -m flask run

Notes on Ledger setup

ledger-pyreport expects each of assets, liabilities, equity, income and expenses to be setup in Ledger as a separate top-level account. These accounts should contain a zero balance, with all transactions in child accounts.

Additionally, ledger-pyreport expects the next level of assets and liabilities to be categories of asset and liability (e.g. Assets:Current, Liabilities:Non-current). These, too, should contain a zero balance.

Ledger-pyreport by default observes the convention that positive amounts in Ledger represent debits, and negative amounts in Ledger represent credits.

A commodity which has any price data in Ledger (including those specified through @ or @@, or explicitly through P) will be regarded as a commodity measured at fair market value, and automatically revalued accordingly. A commodity which has no price data in Ledger (i.e. lot prices through {…} or {{…}} only) will be regarded as a commodity measured at historical cost, and will not be subsequently revalued.