check

Check for various kinds of errors in your data.

_FLAGS

hledger provides a number of built-in error checks to help prevent
problems in your data. Some of these are run automatically; or, you can
use this check command to run them on demand, with no output and a zero
exit code if all is well. Specify their names (or a prefix) as
argument(s).

Some examples:

hledger check      # basic checks
hledger check -s   # basic + strict checks
hledger check ordereddates payees  # basic + two other checks

If you are an Emacs user, you can also configure flycheck-hledger to run
these checks, providing instant feedback as you edit the journal.

Here are the checks currently available:

Default checks

These checks are run automatically by (almost) all hledger commands:

-   parseable - data files are in a supported format, with no syntax
    errors and no invalid include directives.

-   autobalanced - all transactions are balanced, after converting to
    cost. Missing amounts and missing costs are inferred automatically
    where possible.

-   assertions - all balance assertions in the journal are passing.
    (This check can be disabled with -I/--ignore-assertions.)

Strict checks

These additional checks are run when the -s/--strict (strict mode) flag
is used. Or, they can be run by giving their names as arguments to
check:

-   balanced - all transactions are balanced after converting to cost,
    without inferring missing costs. If conversion costs are required,
    they must be explicit.

-   accounts - all account names used by transactions have been declared

-   commodities - all commodity symbols used have been declared

Other checks

These checks can be run only by giving their names as arguments to
check. They are more specialised and not desirable for everyone:

-   ordereddates - transactions are ordered by date within each file

-   payees - all payees used by transactions have been declared

-   recentassertions - all accounts with balance assertions have a
    balance assertion within 7 days of their latest posting

-   tags - all tags used by transactions have been declared

-   uniqueleafnames - all account leaf names are unique

Custom checks

A few more checks are are available as separate add-on commands, in
https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/tree/master/bin:

-   hledger-check-tagfiles - all tag values containing / (a forward
    slash) exist as file paths

-   hledger-check-fancyassertions - more complex balance assertions are
    passing

You could make similar scripts to perform your own custom checks. See:
Cookbook -> Scripting.

More about specific checks

hledger check recentassertions will complain if any balance-asserted
account has postings more than 7 days after its latest balance
assertion. This aims to prevent the situation where you are regularly
updating your journal, but forgetting to check your balances against the
real world, then one day must dig back through months of data to find an
error. It assumes that adding a balance assertion requires/reminds you
to check the real-world balance. (That may not be true if you
auto-generate balance assertions from bank data; in that case, I
recommend to import transactions uncleared, and when you manually review
and clear them, also check the latest assertion against the real-world
balance.)