I’m a pretty big fan of Ledger, a command line accounting system based on the double entry bookkeeping system. One of its strengths lies in the fact that the journal file that contains your transactions is a plain text file. This makes it super easy to sync the journal using your favourite file syncing service. Of course, before putting the journal file on a remote server, you’ll probably want to encrypt it. Ledger program doesn’t support encrypted journal files but, using GPG and a shell alias, you can get the vast majority of Ledger’s functionality to work with an encrypted journal.

To read the encrypted journal, I use a simple shell alias to pipe the output of gpg into ledger, telling it to read from stdin. For the fish shell, the alias I use is:

alias eledger "gpg --batch -d -q $LEDGER_FILE | ledger -f - "

Adjust this for your shell of choice. Here I’ve assumed you’ve defined the $LEDGER_FILE env variable, which Ledger uses by default. I’m also running gpg in batch mode, which suppresses most of its output. Remove the --batch flag if you’d rather see this output (it won’t get piped into Ledger).

Use this alias like you’d use the ledger command. Any commands or arguments get added to the end of the alias and passed on to ledger. The majority of Ledger’s commands will work using this method. Only commands that rely on the journal’s path will fail.

Editing

If you edit your Ledger journal in Emacs then good news, Emacs will decrypt the journal file automatically and encrypt it when you save. Unfortunately, if you use ledger-mode, not all of the built in commands will function correctly. In particular, reports won’t work since these are generated by running the ledger command. This is probably easy to fix but I haven’t tried yet.