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Zhang Accounting

Introduction

Zhang (账, “ledger” in Chinese) is a plain text, double-entry accounting tool. You keep your books in text files that you own, and Zhang serves a web UI on top of them. It reads beancount ledgers directly, so you can point it at an existing beancount ledger without converting anything.

Zhang is for people who want to track their personal or household finances precisely, keep the data in a format they can read, diff and back up, and still have dashboards, reports and a form to record a purchase from the browser. You run it yourself, on your computer or on a server.

Try the online demo

Section titled “Try the online demo”

Open the online demo to explore the web UI before installing Zhang. It uses a fictional, read-only ledger, so changes to the shared ledger and attachment uploads cannot be saved.

  • Start with Overview and Journals to explore income, expenses, multi-currency transactions, tags and links.
  • Open Commodities to inspect investment lots and their costs, then Budget to see monthly allocations, spending and carry-over.
  • Browse Documents for sample receipts and statements. In Query, choose Saved, run a saved query and export its result as CSV.

To record your own transactions, continue with installation and your first ledger.

Core concepts

Section titled “Core concepts”

Ledger files. A ledger is one or more text files made of directives: entries that start with a date and say what happened, such as opening an account or recording a transaction. Zhang starts from a main file (main.zhang by default) and follows its include directives into other files. The order of the directives does not matter, Zhang sorts them by date. Files ending in .bean, .beancount or .bc are read as beancount. The others use the Zhang format, which is close to beancount’s and adds a few directives, such as budgets.

Accounts. Amounts live in accounts with hierarchical names such as Assets:Bank:Checking. The first part of the name is one of the five account types:

  • Assets: what you own, such as cash, bank accounts and investments.
  • Liabilities: what you owe, such as credit cards and loans.
  • Equity: where your starting balances come from.
  • Income: where money comes from, such as a salary or interest.
  • Expenses: where money goes, such as food or rent.

An account must be opened before it is used, and can be closed later.

Commodities. Every amount has a commodity: a currency such as USD, or anything else you count, such as shares or air miles. You declare them with the commodity directive and record their value over time with price.

Transactions and postings. A transaction moves amounts between accounts. Each account line of a transaction is a posting. The postings of a transaction must sum to zero, which is what double-entry means: money always comes from somewhere and goes somewhere. One posting may leave its amount out, and Zhang fills it in.

Assertions. A balance directive states what an account holds on a date, for example the balance printed on a bank statement. Zhang checks it and reports an error when the books disagree. An assertion is exact unless you give it an explicit tolerance.

The web UI reads the files. Zhang loads the ledger into memory and serves the web UI from it. What you record in the UI is written back to the files as ordinary directives, and when you edit a file yourself, Zhang reloads the ledger (see Local File System for when this happens). Problems in the books, such as an unbalanced transaction or a failed assertion, appear in the error list of the web UI.

How these docs are organized

Section titled “How these docs are organized”