Hey y'all,

I want to introduce hledger-btc: a tool to manage your Bitcoin data in Hledger. Hledger is an existing plain-text accounting (PTA) tool, made for double-entry bookkeeping on your filesystem. Its simplicity makes it extremely flexible. It's designed to be extended and your data is managed as you would any other file. With hledger-btc, you can fetch your Bitcoin transactions and merge them with external feeds, such as a CSV exported from an exchange, to produce double-entry records.

In a fiat world, I believe personal accounting is massively underrated, and PTA is a good match for Bitcoiners who want to privately manage their own books. For Bitcoin purposes, having an accounting system is extremely useful for providing a holistic view of your holdings. I personally use Hledger to label all my transactions, track the flow of UTXOs between wallets & exchanges, tag cost basis', and as a contractor, track invoices and calculate income. I use rclone to create encrypted cloud backups, git to manage version history (e.g easy rollbacks), and tailscale to read/write from all my devices. It takes some learning and experimentation, but well worth it from my experience.

If you are interested in trying it out, the README has usage instructions. Currently, only electrum servers can be used to scan addresses from the blockchain. I've added a few feeds (e.g River, Cashapp, Coinbase, Phoenix), but the plan is to make it extensible so that people can maintain their own feeds. To get started, I would recommend configuring a couple wallets, running a scan, importing BIP329 labels, and then just experimenting with the hledger commands (e.g balance, areg, print, etc).

Feel free to reach out if you have questions or are interested in contributing.