Journals

Prudent journals are a combination of both a daily (most often personal but not necessarily so) journal that some of us keep to record things (activities, ideas, thoughts) regularly AND a journal for transactions in the accounting or book keeping sense (this is probably the more important part).

Don't let accounting and book keeping put you off because that's what Prudent help you with. You're not expected to create any accounts or manually enter any transactions at all (coming soon)!

Also, the journal of activities, ideas and thoughts part is also COMPLETELY optional. It is there if it is useful. Otherwise, Prudent already gives you insightful views into your finances that are derived from your transactions alone.

The journal that Prudent understands is in the Ledger format. The following example shows you the syntax of a typical journal:

# Hi, this is Coby 🐿 and this is my journal of prudence...😱✌️

# Let's start with what I have

2018/01/01 *Opening
    Assets:Savings  $30000
    Assets:Property:MiCasa  $180000
    Equity

# As I am saving this, the report on Prudent will auto-refresh to reflect my latest changes

# I can define exchange rates for any commodity 

P 2018/01/02 15:50:00 USD $1.36

# This is in relations to my base currency, $, although you can define any currency as base

# Everything that has a value can be defined

P 2018/01/02 16:23:00 BTC $10800

# I can also use anything to define a commodity

P 2018/01/02 17:35:00 🐑 $1080

# I bought 2 sheeps for my farm

2018/01/03 
    Assets:Farm  2🐑
    Assets:Savings
 

Check out the getting started section of this documentation to learn more about journal syntax or download a sample journal that has a range of examples from starting a journal to buying stocks to commenting.

Remember that this journal is there for your convenient editing. You don't have to manually enter any of these transactions yourself and can rely on convenient add-ons (coming soon) or external tools that does it for you. With text files, it's easy!