wanderbooks/docs/verification.md

Formal verification: the accounting laws, proved

Tests check the examples someone thought of. Proofs check every case. wanderbooks proves the fundamental laws of double-entry bookkeeping three ways, each covering what the others can't:

Layer	Tool	What it proves	Scope
Code	Kani (bounded model checking)	The engine's own Rust kernel is correct and never panics or overflows	Every input within the bounds: up to 4 lines, 3 accounts, amounts to 2^40
Laws	Lean 4 (machine-checked proof)	The laws hold for books of any size, after any sequence of commands	Unbounded: any number of entries, accounts, periods, steps
Bridge	proptest	The kernel on Decimal (what the engine runs) agrees with the kernel on i64 (what Kani proves)	2,000 random cases per property

Run all of it with just prove (after mise install; see the end).

The kernel

Every invariant rests on a little arithmetic: signing a line, summing sides, grouping by account, flipping for a reversal, reading a balance on its normal side, splitting a movement into trial-balance columns, closing an account, plugging the last share of an allocation. That arithmetic lives in one place, crates/ledger-core/src/kernel.rs. Its functions are small, pure, and generic over an Amount trait with checked operations. The engine calls them on Decimal: JournalEntry::validate, movements, reverse_entry, account_balance, account_movement, period closing, periods::allocate, and the trial balance. There is no second copy of the arithmetic for proofs to drift from.

Kani compiles the same functions at i64 (exact integer money in the smallest unit) and explores every input in the bounds. (Grouping by account is proved through movements_into, the allocation-free core that movements wraps: symbolic heap growth is beyond what the model checker explores in reasonable time.) The Lean model in verify/lean restates each function over Int and proves the laws with no bounds at all.

The laws

Each law, and what proves it. Kani harnesses are in crates/ledger-core/src/proofs.rs; Lean theorems are in verify/lean/Wanderbooks/.

Entries

1. An entry is accepted exactly when it has two or more lines, every amount is positive and in range, and debits equal credits, to the unit.
   • Kani check_lines_is_exact (both directions: no bad entry gets in, no good one is refused), out_of_range_is_rejected
   • Lean Accepted
2. An accepted entry nets to zero.
   • Kani accepted_entry_nets_to_zero · Lean Accepted.net_zero
3. Grouping by account loses and invents nothing: each account's movement is the net of its own lines, and the movements sum to the entry's net.
   • Kani movements_are_per_account, movements_sum_to_the_net · Lean sum_movements
4. Sums are exact and never overflow for in-range lines.
   • Kani sums_are_exact (every harness also fails on any panic or arithmetic overflow)

Reversals

5. A reversal is accepted exactly when the original is, and the two together net every account to zero.
   • Kani reversal_mirrors, reversal_cancels, flip_negates
   • Lean accepted_reversal_iff, movement_with_reversal

Balances and statements

6. Normal sides: a line on an account's normal side raises its balance by the amount; the other side lowers it.
   • Kani normal_side_increases · Lean balance_after_line
7. The trial balance balances, and it balances only if the books net to zero: it is a complete check of the arithmetic.
   • Kani trial_balance_columns · Lean trial_balance_iff, Reachable.trial_balance, Reachable.trial_balance_through (as of any date)
8. The accounting equation: Assets = Liabilities + Equity + (Revenue − Expenses), always and as of any date.
   • Kani normal_balance_is_signed (the fact it rests on, every type and amount) and accounting_equation (end to end, up to three accounts: regrouping signed 64-bit sums is hard for a SAT solver) · Lean accounting_equation, Reachable.accounting_equation, Reachable.accounting_equation_through (any number of accounts)
9. Period statements add up: a year's P&L is the sum of its months'.
   • Lean statements_add_up
10. The statement of cash flows foots (rules.md B-14, plan P3 defect 1): each entry's cash is applied to the sections moving against it, operating, investing, financing, each up to its own movement; what a member or a lender paid or received for the entry, with no cash account moving (rule 11, D-42), is added as a constructive receipt and disbursement that nets to zero within the entry; so each entry's flows sum to its cash and what neither settled sums to zero, and operating + investing + financing is exactly the change in the cash accounts, over any entries, for any tagging whose cash tag follows the account. A reversal's flows, constructive ones included, are its original's negated (so an entry and its reversal in one period drop out together), and net income plus the reconciling items (gains and losses on investing assets, the noncash operating parts, the changes in operating balances) is the operating section, whenever revenue and expense lines are only operating or investing. The engine checks the same identities at runtime and refuses (CashFlowDoesNotFoot) rather than show a statement that doesn't foot.
    • Kani entry_flows_sum_to_cash, entry_flows_pure_are_movements, entry_flows_are_bounded, entry_flows_of_a_reversal_mirror, no_cash_no_flow (end to end on entries of up to three lines, each in any of the four places: four lines ran past half an hour per harness; at three, the reversal's mirror is the slowest harness in the suite, about 14 minutes on the development laptop, the others seconds to 6 minutes), take_is_odd_and_bounded, apply_cash_mirrors (the parts, for any amounts), apply_cash_spends_exactly (how a section's cash splits among its kinds, operating's classes included), exchanged_is_bounded (the exchange inside investing and financing that is disclosed, given the cash in and out of the two sections), constructive_nets_to_zero and constructive_mirrors (what a member or lender paid or received for the company, either way, for any amounts: the parts net to zero, settle their own movements toward zero and no further, leave no source beside a use it could settle, and mirror under a reversal)
    • Lean net_splits_by_flow, applyCash_conserves, applyCash_exhausts, applyCash_neg, entry_flows_sum, flows_reversal, constructive_nets, constructive_neg, constructive_sections_net (the kernel's constructive modelled as it is written: two passes of applyCash; its parts by section net to zero), stmt_flows_sum, stmt_flows_reversal (an entry's statement flows, its cash flows plus any constructive triple that nets to zero, and mirrors for a reversal), and over them cashflow_sections_sum_to_cash_change, secNet_cash_is_movement, operating_reconciliation_ties, operating_reconciliation_ties_all, cashflow_reversal_nets; Reachable.cashflow_foots and Reachable.cashflow_is_change_in_cash (in every reachable state: the sections over the entries between two days are the cash accounts' ending balance less their beginning)
    • bridge entry_flows_agree, apply_cash_and_exchanged_agree, constructive_agrees; properties prop_cash_flow_laws, prop_pure_entries_sections_are_movements (5,000 cases each)

The books over time

The Lean model (Ledger.lean) describes the engine as a state machine: add an account, start a draft, post, reverse, open a period, close one, and record how the books are kept (a setting, convention, decision, open item or approval: one step, record, each record abstracted to a number). Each step carries the checks the engine makes before it mutates. These theorems hold in every state reachable from empty books, by any sequence of commands, of any length:

11. The invariant holds: chart codes are unique, every posted entry is acceptable and on known accounts, and no draft is dated in a closed period. (That last one is why the store can journal a post before applying it: a post can never then fail on a closed period.)
    • Lean Step.inv, Reachable.inv
12. The books always net to zero. · Lean Reachable.books_net_zero
13. Posted is forever: posting only appends. After any sequence of commands the old log is a prefix of the new one. Nothing is edited, reordered, or removed.
    • Lean Step.extends, Steps.extends
14. Closed periods are frozen: once a period is closed, no sequence of commands adds, removes, or changes an entry dated in it, and it stays closed.
    • Lean Step.frozen, Steps.frozen 14a. How the books are kept changes no entry: in the model, a record (a setting, convention, decision, open item or approval) leaves the chart, every posted entry, every draft and every period exactly as they were, and any number of them keeps a reachable state reachable. The model's record step touches only the records by definition, so the proof says the model is sound, not the engine; the engine's side is checked by settings_replay_is_pure, which snapshots every figure and entry around each record (rules.md B-29). Settings that change how the same entries are presented (the fiscal year, cash flow roles, members) are outside this law by design. A rename (rename_account, P3, rules.md B-31) is a record too: the model's chart is (code, type) (Ledger.lean), names are not modelled, so a rename is the identity on the model and needs no new Step (plan I-13 is met as P1 met it for records). The engine's side is the property prop_rename_changes_no_figure (ledger-store tests/store.rs: every statement amount, entry and earlier journal line unchanged, live equals replay, the projection unchanged but accounts.name), and the stateful model tests/model.rs keeps a name per account so engine and model agree on every rename's refusal and nothing else moves.
    • Lean Step.record_changes_no_figure, Reachable.records (no axioms at all) · property settings_replay_is_pure · prop_rename_changes_no_figure · model Cmd::Rename

Closing

15. A closing line zeroes its account, and a closing entry balances and zeroes every revenue and expense account through the period's last day, whether the net goes to one account or is split among members.
    • Kani closing_line_zeroes, credit_line_credits, closing_entry_balances
    • Lean closingEntry_net, closingEntry_zeroes, closingEntry_accepted, close_zeroes
16. A close credits equity with exactly the net income: revenue minus expenses through the period's last day.
    • Lean net_closings_is_net_income, close_credits_net_income
17. An allocation's parts sum to the whole, to the unit, however the other shares were rounded, and only the last share changes.
    • Kani plug_last_sums_exactly · Lean plugLast_total, plugLast_keeps
18. A run of member closes telescopes: each member's total from a run of cumulative closes is their allocation of everything the run closed (so its rounding is one allocation's, never a sum of them), and each close hands out exactly its net, for any allocation whose parts sum to the whole (rules.md B-13). Since P3 this is the run rule closes journaled "cumulative" replay under (CloseTo::MembersRun).
    • Lean runPart_telescopes, closePart_total · property each_member_stays_within_a_cent_of_their_share

The P3 odd cent (defect 17; rules.md B-13; D-10, D-38) adds three laws; their numbers are assigned when P3 lands:

• A cumulative members close hands out exactly its net, and leaves each member's running total one allocation of everything the count closed, whatever rule the count's earlier closes were made under, as long as they handed out what they closed. The run rule is the special case where they gave exactly the allocation. A refusal leaves the parts as they were.
  • Kani apportion_cumulative_is_exact, cumulative_closing_entry_balances (the closing entry nets to zero whatever the true-up)
  • Lean trueUp_total, trueUp_running, closePart_eq_trueUp, Apportion.allocW_sum, Apportion.allocW_cumulative_total
  • properties apportion_cumulative_agrees, allocate_cumulative_agrees_with_the_integer_model
• Bounded drift: no member's running total is ever a minor unit from their exact share. With shares w_i / W (exact decimals) and every amount a whole number of minor units (B-3), after every cumulative close |(given_i + part_i)·W − T·w_i| < W, whatever earlier closes gave. The precondition is the code's: periods::allocate_cumulative refuses a product Decimal would round, so the remainders it ranks are exact, and they sum to whole units (the Lean hypothesis of rem_pos_of_rank_lt).
  • Kani cumulative_close_never_drifts_a_unit_at_halves, _at_tenths and _at_near_thirds (two members at 50/50, three at 20/30/50%, three at 33.33/33.33/33.34%; every running total, net and earlier split to 2^12 units)
  • Lean Apportion.rem_pos_of_rank_lt (a member given a unit had a positive remainder), Apportion.apportion_drift (one apportionment is within a unit), Apportion.allocW_drift (the model of allocate_cumulative, gain or loss), cumulative_drift (any allocation within a unit stays so under the true-up), Apportion.allocW_cumulative_drift (the two together): any number of members, any amounts
  • property members_capital_never_drifts_a_cent_from_their_share
• A member's capital on a day never moves when its period is closed. The statement of members' equity gives each member, of the earnings not yet closed, what the count's next close would give them; closing moves those earnings into capital without changing the sum. When the count's earlier closes gave something else (closes under an earlier rule), the figure moves by exactly the true-up the close posts, never before.
  • Lean statement_after_close, statement_unmoved_by_close
  • property each_members_capital_chains_and_holds_through_closes; three_members_at_a_third_each_over_twelve_months (every day of a year, closed and never closed), the viewer's a_members_page_shows_the_same_capital_before_and_after_a_close

Parties

19. A party's part of an entry is signed as its own account would be, with a direction that is its sign: paid exactly when what counts is positive, received when negative, neither exactly when nothing counts; the money and property in it each carry the whole's sign and never exceed it; a money target is all cash; a contribution counts all of itself; a distribution counts no more money than it paid and no more property than it gave, the rest still owed (rules.md B-35).
    • Kani party_target_direction_is_its_sign · bridge party_target_agrees
20. A reversal is the exact opposite of what it reverses: the target is odd (negating the lines' capital movement, money and own-account movement gives the original's reverse, but for the debits fallback and a member's entry whose cash isn't exactly its money: an expense booked straight to capital, a debt converted, a distribution still owed; the engine never reads those off a reversal's lines: its reversal arm takes the original's target), reversing twice gives the original back, and a reversal's movement over any accounts is the original's negated (B-9).
    • Kani party_target_is_odd, reverse_target_is_an_involution · Lean partyTarget_odd, capitalTarget_odd (with cashIsMoney shown satisfiable), reverseTarget_involutive, sumOver_movement_reversal · property a_reversal_is_the_exact_opposite

What the proofs found

The engine already had 190+ tests, property tests, mutation testing, and 11.5M fuzz executions with zero crashes. Writing the laws down precisely still turned up three gaps in it, now closed:

• Negative line amounts were accepted. Only the MCP layer refused them. The engine now rejects them (NegativeAmountLine): direction is the side's job.
• A huge amount could crash the engine. Summing lines near Decimal::MAX panicked instead of returning an error. Lines are now limited to one quadrillion and ten decimal places (AmountOutOfRange), and the kernel's sums are checked.
• Foreign-currency conversion could crash the same way (foreign_amount * fx_rate). It is now a checked multiply.

And three things besides bugs:

• A soundness bug in the verifier. Kani reported a reversal that doesn't net to zero. Tracing it took a native replay of the counterexample (it passed) and a 15-line repro crate: Kani 0.68 mis-models symbolic-length slice copies. See "Trusting the checker" below. Taking every red result seriously is the method.
• Simpler code. credit_line and closing_line are the same function. The model made that obvious, and the code now says so.
• A load-bearing invariant, made explicit. No draft can exist in a closed period (Inv.draftsOpen). That is why the store can journal a post before applying it: the closed-period check can never fail after the journal write. It was true by accident of the checks' design. Now it is a theorem, and breaking it breaks the build.

Each of these shipped past every test we had. That is the case for formal methods here: tests sample, proofs exhaust. AGENTS.md makes growing this coverage part of every change.

Trusting the checker

A model checker is a program too. While building these proofs, Kani reported that an entry plus its reversal could leave an account nonzero. That was not a bookkeeping bug. Kani's own counterexample passes when replayed natively. We narrowed it to a 15-line crate with no wanderbooks code: Kani 0.68 (CBMC 6.11) mis-models copy_from_slice whenever the length is symbolic. It is the known bug model-checking/kani#4904, closed as a duplicate and unfixed in 0.68. It is unsound in both directions: it can also prove false claims. So:

• No harness copies a slice of symbolic length. They write element by element (reversal_cancels says why), and the kernel functions under proof contain no bulk copies.
• A canary watches for the fix. kani_symbolic_copy_canary runs the faulty copy and is marked should_panic. When a Kani upgrade fixes the bug, the canary starts failing, and the workaround can go.
• The proofs are not vacuous. kani::cover! statements make Kani show that the interesting cases are reachable: an accepted four-line entry, a reversal on one account with several lines, three distinct accounts, a balanced three-account chart, a close to two members, a part-cash part-noncash investing entry, cash settling two sections at once, a mixed entry reversed, property contributed for capital. just prove fails if any cover is unsatisfiable.

What is and isn't proved

Be precise about the claims:

• Kani is bounded. It proves the kernel for every input up to 4 lines over 3 accounts and amounts to 2^40 units (the accounting equation end to end: up to 3 accounts; the cash flow entry harnesses: up to 3 lines, each tagged any of 4 ways). Lean proves the laws for any size, but of a model. The model is a direct restatement of the kernel, and the bridge property test ties the Decimal instantiation to the i64 one Kani checked.
• Decimal itself is trusted. rust_decimal is exact for these sizes: 96-bit integers scaled by a power of ten. With lines capped at one quadrillion and ten decimal places, every sum is exact while the total of all amounts stays below 7.9 × 10^18. Kani can't explore Decimal arithmetic directly: a single symbolic add runs for more than ten minutes.
• The state machine is a model of Ledger's checks, not a proof about ledger.rs line by line. Its correspondence to the code is checked by review and by the end-to-end property tests in tests/properties.rs (trial balance, balance sheet, reversals, immutability) and the golden files.
• Out of scope: currency (the ledger is single-currency, enforced structurally), A/R and A/P documents, payroll, depreciation schedules (those have their own property tests), and persistence (the journal store's hash chain is tested in ledger-store).
• The cash flow model tags lines per entry with any function meeting the engine's guarantees (the cash tag follows the account; revenue and expense lines are operating or investing; a reversal takes its original's tags); which tag the engine picks for a line (rule 4's disposals, the bill split, the chain root) is checked by the property and example tests, not proved. A line the engine splits between two sections is two lines in the model, the entry's net unchanged.
• Closing entries and the cash balance. The engine leaves closing entries out of the sections but not out of the cash accounts' balances; the two agree because a close moves only revenue, expense and equity (Ledger::validate_close_to) and cash accounts must be assets (rules.md B-14 rule 2). The Lean model's close step lets a target be any balance-sheet account, so Reachable.cashflow_foots takes any selection of entries with the cash over the same selection, and Reachable.cashflow_is_change_in_cash counts every entry, closes included. That a close never moves cash is checked by tests (closing_entries_never_appear, prop_cash_flow_laws law 7), not proved.

P0 guard rails (2026-10-16)

P0 (plan/served.md) added no kernel arithmetic and no new law about balances, so it added no Kani harness and no Lean theorem; nothing here was weakened. What it added is checked by tests and properties (listed in docs/testing.md, "P0 guard rails"): the journal format gate (newer is never called corrupt, damage always is; the envelope and its hash are frozen across formats, rules.md B-27), the server failing closed after a panic, the import roots' lockdown (a property over generated paths, and a component walk that refuses a folder swapped for a link; removed with the import roots in P2 slice 5), files with full TINs kept out of the books (B-26), and the agent text lint. Out of scope for proof today: the format gate and the walk are I/O, and the model in verify/lean stops at the ledger.

P3: the odd cent (2026-10-20)

The cumulative members close (rules.md B-13) adds a kernel function, kernel::apportion_cumulative, which Kani proves exact and refusal-safe for up to three parts and checks against the integer model of periods::allocate_cumulative for bounded drift; Lean proves the drift bound and the true-up laws for any number of members and any amounts. Not proved: the regime query (Ledger::members_regime: which closes count), the Decimal exactness check in allocate_cumulative, and the journal's since_seq. They are checked by the tests in ledger-core tests/odd_cent.rs, ledger-store tests/member_closes.rs and the old-books fixture x_member_closes (docs/testing.md, "P3: odd cents"). Kani times, each harness alone on a busy laptop (Kani 0.68, 2026-10-20): apportion_cumulative_is_exact 257 s, cumulative_close_never_drifts_a_unit_at_halves 17 s, _at_tenths 320 s, _at_near_thirds 449 s, cumulative_closing_entry_balances 202 s (apportion_is_exact, for scale: 121 s). Two shapes were too slow and were changed, not weakened in what they prove: restating apportion's postconditions on the cumulative parts directly ran past ten minutes, so apportion_cumulative_is_exact proves the parts are apportion's less given on the same inputs (the solver shares the two runs' formulas) and apportion_is_exact supplies the rest; and the drift bound with symbolic weights ran past ten minutes, so it is checked at three fixed sets of shares (the brief's fallback), Lean carrying any weights.

Running it

mise install   # once: Kani, Lean, and the rest, pinned in mise.toml
just prove

just prove runs every Kani harness, in parallel (-j $(nproc), under a 30-minute timeout), builds the Lean proofs (seconds), and fails if any headline theorem depends on anything beyond Lean's standard axioms (propext, Quot.sound, Classical.choice). In particular, sorryAx fails it. Its time is the slowest harness's: entry_flows_of_a_reversal_mirror, about 14 minutes on the development laptop (8 cores); the 20 harnesses before P3 take about 17 minutes of CPU in all (accounting_equation the longest, about 4), the cash flow's other ten about 17 (constructive_mirrors about 2.5 minutes, constructive_nets_to_zero about 1.5), so the whole run is about 15 to 20 minutes. Kani downloads its pinned nightly and CBMC into ~/.kani on first use.