Image: github.com · Actual Ledger Reborn macOS window using synthetic data
Ledger Reborn: a QuickBooks-style desktop accounting app
After studying the QuickBooks Desktop trial with REA, the author built an independent accounting app for Mac and Windows.
Credits
Earliest dated source:
The full story
Ledger Reborn is an open-source desktop accounting app for Mac and Windows, in the style of QuickBooks. The author used REA and Ghidra to study the QuickBooks Desktop for Mac 2024 trial. They looked at focused areas such as inventory maths, budget signs, reconciliation balances and cash-basis reporting, plus the window layouts. They then wrote their own implementation and checked the accounting results separately.
It saves real SQLite journals, invoices, stock movements and payments. It handles customers and vendors, partial payments, moving-average inventory, bank CSV import with matching and reconciliation, and financial reports. The author is clear that REA gave evidence and rough pseudocode, not the original source or a finished product.
How it was done
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Sources
From the maker's own write-up or code. We summarise what they report; we haven't tested it ourselves.
- REA community: Project #000001: From REA to a working QuickBooks-style desktop app (Mac + Windows)Repository account: morlutoPublished
Project write-up: what REA contributed, what the app does, and links to source and downloads.
- The code: github.comRepository account: lxistired
Linked in the post.