Directory structure

If you are just starting with hledger, this section could overwhelm you. Skip it and return later after you've read the first couple of sections.

I prefer to keep all files in a single directory, which will contain a bunch of subdirectories to keep less frequently used files out of sight.

At the top level, there would be a number of yearly journal files, one per year (2014.journal, 2015.journal, etc).

Each of them will !include a bunch of files from import subdirectories (./import/{statement source}/journal/) and will also contain all manually-entered transactions for the given year.

Script export.sh is used to generate a bunch of reports in the ./export subdirectory. Actual generation is driven by ./export/export.hs which is a Shake build system script.

All source statements go into ./import/{statement source}/in. Each source of statements will have a small shell scripts ./import/{statement source}/convert.sh that will converted raw input files proper CSV files and put them into ./import/{statement source}/csv. These will be converted to journal files that will go into ./import/{statement source}/journal. If you need to change something in the generated report files, you never do this manually - instead, you will change CSV conversion rules and re-generate all .journal files from source files.

After a couple of years typical filesystem tree will look like this:

├── 2014.journal
├── 2015.journal
├── 2016.journal
├── 2017.journal
├── export
│   ├── 2014-all.journal
│   ├── 2014-balance-sheet.txt
│   ├── 2014-closing.journal
│   ├── 2014-income-expenses.txt
│   ├── 2015-all.journal
│   ├── 2015-balance-sheet.txt
│   ├── 2015-closing.journal
│   ├── 2015-income-expenses.txt
│   ├── 2015-opening.journal
│   ├── 2016-all.journal
│   ├── 2016-balance-sheet.txt
│   ├── 2016-closing.journal
│   ├── 2016-income-expenses.txt
│   ├── 2016-opening.journal
│   ├── 2017-all.journal
│   ├── 2017-balance-sheet.txt
│   ├── 2017-closing.journal
│   ├── 2017-income-expenses.txt
│   ├── 2017-opening.journal
│   └── export.hs
├── export.sh
└── import
    └── lloyds
        ├── convert.sh
        ├── csv
        │   ├── 12345678_20171225_0001.csv
        │   ├── 12345678_20171225_0002.csv
        │   ├── 99966633_20171223_1844.csv
        │   ├── 99966633_20171224_2041.csv
        │   ├── 99966633_20171224_2042.csv
        │   └── 99966633_20171224_2043.csv
        ├── in
        │   ├── 12345678_20171225_0001.csv
        │   ├── 12345678_20171225_0002.csv
        │   ├── 99966633_20171223_1844.csv
        │   ├── 99966633_20171224_2041.csv
        │   ├── 99966633_20171224_2042.csv
        │   └── 99966633_20171224_2043.csv
        ├── journal
        │   ├── 12345678_20171225_0001.journal
        │   ├── 12345678_20171225_0002.journal
        │   ├── 99966633_20171223_1844.journal
        │   ├── 99966633_20171224_2041.journal
        │   ├── 99966633_20171224_2042.journal
        │   └── 99966633_20171224_2043.journal
        ├── lloyds2csv.pl
        └── lloyds.rules