penny-bin-0.2.0.0: samplePennyFile
# Sample Penny file. Penny is a double-entry accounting
# system. Penny uses traditional accounting terminology,
# which means that every transaction will have "debits"
# and "credits". In every single transaction, debits
# must equal credits, or this file will not parse
# and Penny will quit with an error.
# Penny has no concept of negative numbers. All numbers
# are positive or zero.
# To learn double-entry accounting, pick up a used accounting
# textbook at your favorite online used book retailer.
# They can be had for under 10 U.S. dollars, as college
# students cast aside old editions that are perfectly good.
# This website is also excellent and is free:
# http://www.principlesofaccounting.com/
# As you can see, single line comments begin with
# a hash mark, like a shell script. Currently there
# is no way to make a multi-line comment.
# Here is a sample transaction to start things off.
2011/12/15 Salts Deluxe
Assets:Checking Dr $2000.00
'Payday
Income:Salary Cr $1500.00
Expenses:Taxes Cr $500.00
; This is a transaction memo. It is associated
; with the transaction, and the penny program lets you
; search their contents. Transaction memos appear immediately
; before a transaction and their lines begin with
; semicolons.
2012/01/01 Payee Name
Assets:Checking Cr $5.00
Expenses:Food
# Tags are only one word. Precede each tag with an asterisk.
# Postings can have one or more "tags". These allow you to
# classify postings by tag as well as by account. For example
# you might take a vacation. Various postings might be scattered
# across multiple accounts (Expenses:Food, Expenses:Gas, etc.)
# but you can give them all a *vacation tag.
# Transactions and postings can have an optional flag.
# The flag is one or more letters.
# It is wrapped in square brackets.
# For instance, this can be used to indicate a posting
# is cleared.
# Penny uses spaces to separate different parts of the
# transaction. If you want to include spaces in the name
# of an account, you must enclose it in curly braces
# as shown in the next transaction.
2012/01/02 [C] (302) GreenGas
{Liabilities:Credit Card} Cr $5.00
Expenses:Car *gas *trips
# Though the posting lines in this file are nicely indented for
# readability, Penny does not require this.
; This transaction has a posting with a different payee.
; You can do this by enclosing the payee in greater than
; and less than signs as shown.
; The last posting has a memo.
; These begin with an apostrophe. As with posting lines, the
; indentation is nice for readability, but it is not required.
; (It does have to be on a new line though.)
2012/01/03 Flathead
[R] (905) <Luvapet Vet> Expenses:Pet Dr $10.00
Assets:Checking Cr $5.00
[*] (2313) {Liabilities:Credit Card} Cr $5.00
'This interest rate is too high
# Flags can be more than one letter. Actually they can include
# any character except ']'.
2012/01/06 [Flagger] Flagged Up Transaction
Expenses:Flags Dr $200.00
Assets:Checking Cr $200.00
# By default, the digit grouping character is the comma and
# the radix point character is the period. You can configure these
# (somewhat) easily by making changes to the source code (not
# as bad as it sounds, believe it or not.) The digit grouping
# character is really for your benefit; Penny mostly ignores
# it. The radix point is of course quite significant.
# Commodity names may be before or after the commodity amount.
# They can be separated from the amount by one optional space.
# To use multiple commodities, use a trading account.
# The best explanation of trading accounts is here:
# http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.html
# For this transaction, the debits and credits all add up to zero,
# as they always must. If they do not, parsing of the ledger
# file will fail.
2012/01/05 Stockbroker
Assets:Brokerage Dr 1,000 LUV
Assets:Current:Checking Cr $ 2,000.00
{Income:Brokerage Trading Account} Cr 1,000 LUV
{Income:Brokerage Trading Account} Dr $ 2,000.00
# Prices allow you to specify how to convert one commodity
# to another. Prices do not affect the way any of your
# transactions are parsed. Even if you specify prices,
# you still must ensure that the debits equal the credits
# in every transaction; if they do not, the parser will fail.
# The balance report uses price information for the --convert and -c
# options. This allows you to convert all commodities in the file to a
# single commodity. Typically you would use this to see what the
# balance of all your accounts is in your home currency.
# Prices specify that ONE unit of the given commodity
# equals the given quantity of the other commodity. Here
# are some examples.
@ 2012/01/05 17:55:55 -0500 LUV $9.62
@ 2012/01/05 Gold $1738.35
# Prices only work one way. For instance the first
# price tells you how many dollars one euro is worth, and allows
# reports to convert from euro to dollars. To convert from
# dollars to euro, you must specify another price.
@ 2012/01/05 € $1.3207
@ 2012/01/05 $ €0.7572
@ 2012/01/05 ¥ 0.6418 INR
; Commodities can have several components in their names,
; just as accounts can. Subsequent parts can be viewed as
; sub-commodities. This can be handy if different commodities
; have something in common and you want to group them together.
; For example, let's say you bought shares in T in
; 2007 and in 2012. For tax purposes you want to track them separately
; in your reports (this can matter for capital gains taxes) yet
; shares in T have the same price whether you bought them in 2007
; or in 2012. So you can have two different symbols, as the following
; two transactions show:
2007/02/01 Bought stock
Assets:Brokerage Dr 100 T:2007
'$37.75 per share
Assets:Checking Cr $3775
{Income:Brokerage Trading} Cr 100 T:2007
{Income:Brokerage Trading} Dr $3775
2012/01/12 Bought stock
Assets:Brokerage Dr 100 T:2012
'$30.12 per share
Assets:Checking Cr $3012
{Income:Brokerage Trading} Cr 100 T:2012
{Income:Brokerage Trading} Dr $3012
# and some prices to go along with the T example. Because no
# different prices are specified for T:2012 and for T:2007,
# the balance report will use the price for T for both these
# commodities if you use the --convert or -c options.
@ 2007/06/01 T $40.53
@ 2012/01/27 T $29.16
# As the examples above show with the currency symbols,
# Penny works fine with Unicode.
# Your ledger file should be encoded in your system's default
# encoding. On my system this is UTF-8, as it is on most
# recent Linux systems, but some systems use other encodings.
# I know that Slackware was recently using ISO-8859-1. Non-Unicode
# encodings should work fine as well, as Penny will convert them
# to Unicode internally.
# If your ledger file is encoded in UTF-8
# and you still have Unicode problems,
# it is a bug. Please report it to me.
# If you have no idea what all this encoding stuff is about,
# the first thing to remember is that there is no such thing
# as plain text. Read this:
# http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
# The Penny program will not change your input file. It cannot
# change your input file as it is opened read-only.
##############################################################
# Dates - as one example with the prices suggested, dates
# need not be just a date. They can also include a time.
# Internally, Penny records all dates as both dates and times.
# If you give a date but do not give a time, the time is assumed
# to be midnight.
# Of course you cannot have times without timezones. Penny
# assumes each time is in the DefaultTimeZone, which you can configure
# or which you can configure as being in whatever time zone your
# system is set to use. Or of course you can specify the time
# zone by specifying the number of hours and minutes the
# time differs from UTC. To specify UTC, use +0000 or -0000. In the
# default configuration, the DefaultTimeZone is UTC.
; Transaction that specifies a time. The time zone is the
; DefaultTimeZone, which you can configure. Times must be specified
; using 24 hour time. Leading zeroes are optional for the hours;
; they are mandatory for the minutes and seconds.
2012/01/28 09:58 King Arthur Flour
Expenses:Food Dr $5.25
'Sourdough starter!
Assets:Current:Checking
; Transaction specifying a local time zone
2012/01/28 17:26:44 -0500 Exactamundo
Expenses:Amusements Dr $400
{Liabilities:Credit Card} Cr $300
Assets:Current:Checking Cr $100
; Transaction specifying UTC. Also, you can always
; spell out "Debit" or "Credit" if you want to.
2012/01/28 23:30 +0000 Pacific Dispatch
Expenses:Newspapers Debit $1.25
Assets:Cash Credit $1.25
# There are many different ways to write an amount. First, some
# terminology. Some of these terms are specific to Penny; if these
# terms are inconsistent with usual accounting terminology or if
# they don't make sense, please let me know.
#
# A commodity is a thing of value you track in Penny. Typically this
# will be a currency (like $ or €, but it can be whatever you like,
# such as a ticker symbol or some letters to represent your house.
# A quantity is a number, such as 3 or 65.2 or 33.80. Notice that
# it does not have a commodity.
# An amount is a quantity and a commodity.
# An entry is an amount combined with an indication of Debit
# or Credit.
# You can write commodities and quantities in one of four ways:
#
# * Commodity first, without a separating space. E.g. $100, F25, €59,
# In this case the commodity name CANNOT have any digits.
#
# * Commodity first, with a separating space. E.g. $ 100, € 59.
#
# * Commodity last, without separating space. E.g. 59€.
#
# * Commodity last, with separating space. E.g. 59 €.
#
# In the last three cases, the commodity name can include digits.
# If you want to include spaces in the name of a commodity, surround
# it with "quotes".
# In all cases the commodity name can use sub-commodities by
# using colons.
# A commodity's identity is determined by the characters you use
# when you type the commodity. Thus EUR 100 and 100 EUR mean the
# same thing, except for the fact that they are formatted differently.
# The Penny parser does remember the order in which you specified
# the commodity and the quantity for every posting, but currently
# nothing is done with this information. For instance, in the
# postings report, the commodity is always shown first.
# Here's an example. Note that the transaction balances
# because the commodity is the same whether written before or after
# the quantity.
2012/01/30 Benny Broker
Assets:Brokerage Dr MSFT100
Assets:Current:Checking Cr 2959 $
{Income:Stock Trading Account} Cr 100 MSFT
{Income:Stock Trading Acccount} Dr $2959
# What's the difference between transaction memos, posting
# memos, and comments? Here I will draw a distinction between
# penny (lower case), which is the command-line executable
# program, and the Penny parser (upper case), which is the Haskell
# module that parses your Penny ledger file. Thus penny lower-case
# is the binary; Penny is broader and encompasses the library
# as well as the program.
# So, the Penny parser does see and remember transaction memos,
# posting memos, and comments. However, it does not pass
# comments along to the rest of the penny command-line program.
# The penny command-line program only deals with transactions
# and postings; transactions and postings can have
# memos associated with them.
# Therefore, using the penny command-line program, you can only
# search memos, not comments. However, the fact that the Penny
# parser does see comments might be useful if you are going to
# write your own Haskell code using the parser. For instance,
# you might want to transform your Penny ledger (maybe to
# automatically reconcile your checking account statement).
# By writing your own code using the Penny parser, you can
# do transformations like this while still keeping your comments
# intact. Pretty neat.