Your finances, kept in plain text.

Hermes is a personal-finance tracker built on plain-text accounting. Every transaction is a double-entry posting in a journal you can open in any editor. The text file is the truth. 

2026-03-01  Whole Foods Market
    Expenses:Groceries                    $127.43
    Assets:Checking                      -$127.43

The ledger is the database.

Plain-Text Ledger

The source of truth is a ledger-cli journal, not rows in a proprietary database. You can read your books in any editor and search them with grep. When you leave, they leave with you.

Checked Before It Lands

Every booking must pass ledger bal before it is written, and every change is kept in the journal's history. A bad entry is easy to find and easy to undo.

Double-Entry Accounting

Every transaction balances: debits equal credits, always. Balances, net worth, and spending reports all derive from the same verified postings.

Tracking First

Hermes records where your money actually went, to the penny. Budgets and plans only work when the record underneath them is true, so the record comes first.

How it works

01

The books live in text files

Accounts and transactions are journal entries in plain text. Anything the app shows is derived from those files, never the other way around.

02

Statements come in, entries come out

Bank statements and screenshots are extracted into candidate transactions and queued for review. Nothing is booked automatically.

03

A human books every entry

Review, correct, approve. Each booking is formatted, checked against ledger bal, and written to the journal.

04

Ask the ledger

Balances, net worth, and spending views are all queries over the same plain-text journal. There is no second copy to drift out of sync.

Where things stand

Hermes currently tracks one household's real books — mine. Most of the code is written by coding agents on self-hosted infrastructure; a human reviews every merge and approves every booking. There is nothing to sign up for yet.