Beancount Example Ledger

A comprehensive, self-contained personal-finance ledger demonstrating everyday Beancount usage: banking, credit cards, employer payroll and benefits, taxes, and multi-asset investing — generated with Beancount's own bean-example tool. Part of the Open Ledger project on beancount.io, which also publishes real public-company financial ledgers reconstructed from SEC/regulatory filings.

Quick Start

bash
uvx --from beancount bean-check main.bean

Zero output means the ledger is internally consistent — every transaction balances to zero.

What's Inside

main.bean spans January 2015 through September 2017 for a single simulated household, covering:

• Banking — checking/savings accounts, monthly fees, interest income
• Credit cards — recurring spend categories (dining, shopping, travel, utilities, etc.)
• Employer — paycheck deposits, employer 401(k)/IRA contributions, vacation-hour accrual
• Taxes — payroll tax withholding
• Investing — commodity/price directives for ETFs and mutual funds (index funds, bond funds, gold, sector funds), with cost-basis tracking

This is the same demo content Beancount's documentation uses to teach double-entry plain-text accounting from first principles — useful as a reference for account naming, price directives, and everyday transaction patterns before modeling something more specialized (a company, a crypto portfolio, a real-estate holding).

About Open Ledger

This repository is part of a growing library of ledgers published at beancount.io/ledger — plain-text, git-versioned, and fully auditable, spanning both general-purpose examples like this one and real public-company financial histories reconstructed from their own filings. Read more on the beancount.io blog.