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 ledger-cli journal, versioned in git — readable, diffable, and yours to keep. No black-box database. The text file is the truth.
2026-03-01 Whole Foods Market Expenses:Groceries $127.43 Assets:Checking -$127.43
In development. Currently a tool of one, being built in the open by an autonomous agent harness.
Ledger-first, by principle.
Plain-Text Ledger
The source of truth is ledger-cli journal files — not rows in a proprietary database. You can read your books in any editor, grep them, and take them anywhere.
Versioned in Git
Every booking is a git commit, and every write must pass `ledger bal` before it lands. The commit history is the audit trail; a bad change is a revert away.
Double-Entry Accounting
Every transaction is balanced — debits equal credits, always. Balances, net worth, and spending reports all derive from the same verified postings.
Tracking, Not Guessing
Hermes records where your money actually went, to the penny. It is a tracker, not a budgeting app — no envelopes, no forecasts, no plans it can't keep.
How it works
The books live in text files
Accounts and transactions are ledger-cli journal entries in a git repository. Anything the app shows is derived from those files, never the other way around.
Statements come in, entries come out
Bank statements and screenshots are extracted into candidate transactions and queued for review. Nothing is booked automatically.
A human books every entry
Review, correct, approve. Each booking is formatted, checked against `ledger bal`, and committed to the journal's git history.
Ask the ledger
Balances, net worth, and spending views are all queries over the same plain-text journal — one source of truth, no reconciliation drift.
Where things stand
Hermes is in active development and currently tracks one household's real books — the founder's. It is being built and operated by an autonomous agent harness running on self-hosted infrastructure, with a human gating what ships and what gets booked. There is nothing to sign up for yet.