Bookkeeper

Introduction

This is a simple double-ledger bookkeeping tool for a small business, operated from the command line.

Installation

pip install pybookkeeper

Usage

Create a directory for your ledger, and run bookkeeper from there. Your directory should contain ledger-defs.txt, which defines your ledger map, and the outline of the generated statements.

The transactions for accounts are stored in data-YYYY-MM.txt files.

For example, for year 2025, you would have:

• directory 2025
• file 2025/ledger-defs.txt
• files 2025/data-2025-01.txt, 2025/data-2025-02.txt, etc.

Running

bookkeeper 2025 

will generate in directory output/, which is created if it does not exist, the files general-ledger.txt, statement.txt and journal.txt.

You can change the output directory with --output-directory, as follows

bookkeeper 2025 --output-directory 2025-books

Release process

• Update version in pyproject.toml
• Update ChangeLog
• Run tests with tox
• Tag release