GhostLedger

GhostLedger is a reusable double-entry plain-text accounting AI skill for managing company books.

GhostLedger

Reusable double-entry plain-text accounting AI skill to manage books for any company.

GhostLedger depends on Ledger CLI (ledger): https://github.com/ledger/ledger

Purpose

  • Keep books in double-entry plain-text journals.
  • Separate raw source files from normalized ledger postings.
  • Generate financial reports from one source of truth.
  • Keep tax/compliance working papers organized by country and year.

Installation

Recommended: let Claude Code, Codex, or another coding agent perform setup for you.

Use a prompt like:

Install GhostLedger https://github.com/yborunov/ghostledger into a new repo for my company.

Alternatively, execute this command in a terminal:

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yborunov/ghostledger/main/install.sh | bash

The setup flow will:

  • Prompt for your company name
  • Prompt for target directory path
  • Verify Ledger CLI is installed (and try auto-install on supported systems)
  • Download and set up the boilerplate with current year
  • Replace all placeholders automatically

Quick Start

  1. Upload receipts / invoices to transaction-imports/
  2. Open the repository root in your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Pi).
  3. Ask you agent:
import transactions into the ledger and generate balance sheet and P&L statement for the year

Prompting Guide for Claude Code / Codex

Keep prompts minimal. Agents should read repository docs and skill files for the full workflow.

Day-to-day prompt examples:

Generate a balance sheet for <period>.

Generate the reports I need for <period> from this ledger.

Add these new transactions to the books and update reports.

Updating GhostLedger

Use your coding agent to run update.sh and summarize changed files.

Prompt template:

Update this repo from the latest GhostLedger boilerplate and summarize changes.

Alternatively, run this command from your working directory in terminal:

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yborunov/ghostledger/main/update.sh | bash

The updater will:

  • Create .bak backups of any files it modifies
  • Update boilerplate core files (skills, docs, templates)
  • Auto-replace <COMPANY_NAME> and <YEAR> placeholders with your detected values
  • Add any new files from the latest boilerplate
  • Never touch your transaction data, reports, or actual ledger entries

After updating, review any .bak files if you need to restore previous versions.

Repository Structure

  • main.ledger - root ledger file with include statements.
  • imports/<YEAR>/ - normalized .ledger files.
  • transaction-imports/<YEAR>/ - raw CSV/XLS exports from banks/providers.
  • expenses/<YEAR>/ - invoices and receipts.
  • reports/<YEAR>/ - generated P&L, balance sheet, and working notes.
  • tax/<YEAR>/ - annual tax/compliance working papers.
  • skills/accounting/SKILL.md - global bookkeeping workflow.
  • skills/tax-us/SKILL.md - US tax workflow and form mapping.
  • skills/tax-ca/SKILL.md - Canada tax workflow and form mapping.

Notes

  • This repository is an operational bookkeeping and working-paper framework.
  • It does not replace legal, tax, or accounting advice.