ledger-config: parse gets a sourced spec. A fiscal year starts on the first of a month (IRS Pub. 538); tax_classification is read by whole words (Treas. Reg. 301.7701-3, Schedule C instructions; "business corp" no longer reads as an S corp, "corporation or S corporation" is refused); duplicate or blank members and shared capital accounts are refused; a negative or non-grammatical receipt threshold is refused; codes trimmed. tests/spec_config.rs (65 spec-blind tests, 14 properties), fuzz target fuzz_config_parse (weekly). Mutation: 55 of 55 viable caught (from 25/38). The receipt policy moves to ledger-config, with one loader (effective_receipt_policy) and one decimal grammar, so the server and the viewer enforce and show the same rule (the viewer had its own: only expense-like debits, a silent $25 default, and no config.json). ledger-mcp: a module spec (MCP 2025-06-18 tools, JSON-RPC 2.0, the operating contract). Amounts in are exactly -?digits[.digits]; a number that is one account's code and another's id (vendors, classes alike) is refused, not guessed; the threshold is validated at startup. Fixed: add_line with a bad class journaled the line before refusing; profit_and_loss_by_class ignored `class`; aging buckets said "0". A wire in front of rmcp answers malformed JSON with -32700 and invalid requests with -32600 and their id (rmcp dropped the first, omitted the id). tests/spec_mcp.rs (26 spec-blind tests: every tool's result against its own outputSchema, a random-call state machine checking the journal is untouched by every refusal, amount grammar, previews, the receipt policy). ledger-gui: money, accounting, and dollars never round (they rounded to cents, banker's style); export file names avoid Windows device names, trailing dots and spaces, empty names, and 255-byte overflow; specs on attention, history, fuzzy search, and axis ticks. ledger-core: the lifetime profit_and_loss is renamed unclosed_earnings (docs/testing.md #3). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GWVo7x3UHw5kwCUaWxiejX
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Architecture
The one big idea: engine-first, everything is a command
ledger-core owns all accounting knowledge. Every state change is a method
on Ledger:
add_account— extend the chart of accountscreate_entry/add_line— build a draft journal entrypost_entry— validate and apply (one-way)reverse_entry— correct via reversal (one-way)
Each command validates before it applies, and each failure is a typed
LedgerError variant. There is no other mutation path: struct fields are
private, and constructors are pub(crate) where it matters. This is what
makes the ledger auditable and what will make the future oracle harness
trustworthy — the harness only needs to drive the command surface.
Reports (trial_balance, balance_sheet, unclosed_earnings, snapshot)
are free functions: pure, total, and deterministic. Same ledger in, same
report out, every time, on every platform. That determinism is the entire
basis of docs/oracle.md.
Current crate layout
crates/ledger-core/
src/
lib.rs # crate docs, re-exports, design rules
money.rs # Currency + Money (Decimal, checked arithmetic)
account.rs # AccountType, Side, Account, ChartOfAccounts
journal.rs # JournalLine, JournalEntry, validate()
ledger.rs # Ledger: the command surface, append-only log
reports.rs # trial_balance, unclosed_earnings, balance_sheet, snapshot
tests/
invariants.rs # accounting-law tests + randomized property test
golden/ # hand-verified expected report snapshots
Dependency rules
ledger-core may depend only on:
rust_decimal— exact decimal arithmeticthiserror— the error typechrono— dates (NaiveDate; no wall-clock reads in the core)serde/serde_json— the oracle interchange format
New dependencies need justification in the commit message. In particular: no I/O, no networking, no async runtime, no logging framework in the core. The core is a pure domain library and stays that way.
Future crates (do not create until the roadmap says so)
| Crate | Purpose | Depends on |
|---|---|---|
ledger-store |
Journal (hash-chained JSONL) + SQLite projection, blob store | ledger-core |
ledger-import |
QuickBooks CSV read-only import (bank transactions, chart of accounts) | ledger-core |
ledger-export |
Format renderers: CSV, XLSX, IIF journal entries (QuickBooks Desktop) | ledger-core |
ledger-oracle |
Cross-check harness: our engine vs other implementations (GnuCash first) on fixture books; diffs are adjudicated, not obeyed | ledger-core, ledger-import |
Dependency direction is always inward toward ledger-core. Nothing in the
core may depend on a future crate. UI concerns (formatting, locale, widgets)
never leak into the core; the core speaks Decimal and ISO codes.
Why Rust
Exact decimal semantics, exhaustive pattern matching on the five account types, and a type system that makes invalid states (mutable posted entries, float money) unrepresentable. The storytold pipeline this project is modeled on is Rust + egui for the same reasons; when the UI crate arrives it will be one codebase compiling to native and WASM.
The GUI (ledger-gui)
Read-only by construction: it opens a ledger_store::Snapshot (journal
verified and replayed into its own Ledger, projected into a private
in-memory SQLite, blobs read through the verifying store) and never writes
to the data directory. A loader thread watches the directory and applies
appended journal lines; the UI renders an immutable view model rebuilt per
change. Statements and series come from ledger-core (reports,
analysis); the GUI only arranges them. See plan/gui.md.