Track income, expenses, assets, and liabilities with real double-entry accounting. Generate P&L and balance sheets. QuickBooks Simple Start without QuickBooks having your financials.
Most "bookkeeping" apps for small operators are really transaction trackers with a category column. They ask you to remember whether something was income or expense and trust you to get it right. Real double-entry doesn't work that way. Every entry has two sides, a debit on one account and a credit on another, and the totals always balance. If you spent fifty dollars on stamps, that's a fifty dollar credit to your bank account and a fifty dollar debit to office expenses. Two entries, one transaction, books always tied out.
Ledger does the actual accounting. You set up your chart of accounts once. Cash, accounts receivable, equipment, payables, owner's equity, the categories your operation actually uses. Every transaction records both sides automatically based on which accounts you pick. Run a P&L for any date range and the numbers come out of the ledger, not a spreadsheet you maintain on the side. Same for the balance sheet. Same for the account-level statements your accountant asks for at year-end.
A printable P&L by date range. A balance sheet snapshot. A general ledger export with every entry, every account hit, every running balance. CSV that opens in Excel without surgery. Tax-category tagging so come April you're not retroactively guessing what a charge was for. None of this leaves your computer unless you email the file yourself.
No payroll. If you have W-2 employees, you still need a payroll service. Ledger will record the journal entry once you've run payroll elsewhere, but it won't calculate withholding or file your 941s. No bank-feed sync. QuickBooks pulls transactions from your bank automatically, Ledger does not, by design. You'll either type entries in or import a CSV from your bank statement. No e-invoicing, no tax-rate lookup tables for thirty countries, no payment processing. If you need any of that, QuickBooks Online is probably the right call. Ledger is for the case where you've decided that owning your books and your data matters more than the convenience of automated bank feeds.
Solo operators. Freelancers. Side projects that grew up. One-person shops that need real books for taxes but don't want to hand a startup a permanent copy of their financial life. Anyone who's been burned by a bookkeeping SaaS getting acquired or sunset. People whose accountant is fine with a CSV export and a balance sheet, which is most accountants.
All cloud, all subscription, all storing your financials on someone else's server. Ledger gives you the same core capability the small-operator tier of those products is selling: chart of accounts, double-entry, P&L, balance sheet, accountant export. What you give up is the bank-feed sync and the white-glove import wizards. What you get back is your data on disk in a SQLite file you can back up by copying a folder and open with any tool on earth.
Single binary. Embedded SQLite. No Docker. No database. No dependencies.
Your license key arrives by email within 5 minutes of checkout. Set it as an environment variable and restart the binary.
export STOCKYARD_LICENSE_KEY=SY-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ./ledger
No cloud connectivity required. The binary validates the key offline with Ed25519 signatures.