My very manual hledger reconciliation flow

I've [been using hledger](/?q=hledger) to manage and track my personal finances. One thing that I must do, which I think most people who track their finances also must do, is reconcile my journal. I am writing this post as I reconcile my hledger journal, so excuse me if it is a little messy.

First, I printed all posts/transactions in my hledger journal that recur monthly. I separate them from regular transactions by tagging them 'monthly'.

    hledger print tag:monthly -b this\ year --pager=no

I normally do my reconciliation session remotely on my T470 using tmux, and to make copying easier, I turned off the pager.

And then, I copied and pasted my yet-to-be-inserted posts at the bottom of my journal. I also changed their dates accordingly. The usual changes I make to the date are incrementing the month and swapping the day (e.g., 30 with 31, or vice versa).

Then I ran `watch -n1 ./snippets/unreconciled_bs`, a simple program that shows the balance of my unreconciled accounts.

```sh
#!/bin/sh
IFS='
'
hledger bs $(hledger accounts --used -U ^asset ^liab)
```

Now, I ran through every account in the output, matching the balance to my m-banking app, my cash in my wallet, or the friend I owe some cash to. If something is not right, it's usually just a missing transaction, the wrong account, the wrong sign, or typos.

Finally, after everything looked good, I cleared all transactions using the '*' [mark](https://hledger.org/1.52/hledger.html#status). Thanks to [vim-ledger](https://github.com/ledger/vim-ledger), I can do this without the slightest hassle. I am still waiting for support for the ['Reconcile' command in hledger](https://github.com/ledger/vim-ledger/issues/123), though.

Overall, I enjoyed the entire reconciliation process. It's quite a manual process, but it strikes me as rewarding because, in the end, it helped me feel secure about my finances, knowing that it's accurate and that I saw it myself.

NB: This article is written wholly by me, with the help of Grammarly Pro (trial hehe) to help me learn English grammar. In the future, I plan to deploy [LanguageTool](https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool), but I'm not quite sure yet.