1. What JAL is, and how it thinks

What it does

JAL keeps a complete history of your money: every payment you make, every salary that arrives, every transfer between your own accounts, and — if you invest — every share you buy, every dividend you receive and every price those shares have had.

From that history it can tell you, for any day you care to name:

how much money you have, in every account, and what that adds up to in one currency;
what you spent, on what, and on whom;
what your investments are worth and how much of that is profit;
what a tax authority in Portugal or Russia would want to know about your investment account.

What it does not do

It does not connect to your bank. JAL never asks for your online-banking password and cannot log in anywhere on your behalf. You type your everyday spending in yourself, or import a file that your bank or broker gives you.
It does not send your data anywhere. Everything lives in one file on your computer. The only time JAL goes online is when you ask it to download share prices, exchange rates, or the contents of a blockchain wallet — and even then it sends no personal information.
It is not a budgeting app. JAL records what happened; it does not set spending limits or nag you.

The five ideas you need

Nearly everything in JAL is built from five things. It is worth two minutes to learn them, because the rest of the program then explains itself.

1. Accounts

An account is any place your money sits: a bank account, a wallet in your pocket, a credit card, a brokerage account, a savings deposit, a crypto wallet. Each account holds exactly one currency. If you have a bank account in euros and another in dollars, that is two accounts in JAL — even if your bank shows them on one page.

Accounts have a type (Cash, Bank account, Card, Broker account, Wallet, Crypto exchange), which is used to group them on screen and to decide what JAL offers you to do with them.

2. Operations

An operation is one thing that happened. JAL has ten kinds:

Operation	What it records
Income / Spending	Money arriving from, or going to, the outside world
Transfer	Money moving between two of your own accounts
Buy / Sell	A trade: money turns into an asset, or an asset back into money
Asset Payment	Money paid on account of an asset: a dividend, a bond coupon, a fee or tax it carries
Asset Income	The asset itself arriving: a stock dividend, vested shares, a staking reward
Corporate Action	A company changing your shares: a split, a merger, a spin-off
Wrapping	One asset becoming another with the price you paid carried across — a deposit into a protocol and back
Swap	One asset exchanged for another, on one account, at a market price
Bridge	The same asset moving from one blockchain to another
Action	A blockchain transaction that moved nothing but still cost gas: an approval, a failed call

The last four matter almost only to crypto users; see chapter 8. Most people use the first five and nothing else.

3. The ledger

You enter operations; JAL keeps a ledger behind the scenes. The ledger is the running total of everything: how much is in each account on each day, how many shares you hold, what each of them cost you, what you have earned and what you have spent.

You never edit the ledger. It is recalculated whenever you add, change or delete an operation, and it is what every balance and every report is read from. If it ever looks wrong, you can have JAL build it again from scratch — see chapter 12.

4. The reporting currency

Your accounts may hold euros, dollars and bitcoin, but a question like “how much do I have?” needs one answer in one currency. That currency is your reporting currency, and JAL takes it from where and when you live — see Residence in chapter 3.

To convert one currency into another, JAL needs exchange rates, and to value shares it needs prices. Both are downloaded on request; see chapter 9.

5. Labels: categories, peers and tags

Three separate labels can be attached to what you record, and they answer three different questions:

Category — what was the money for? (Groceries, Rent, Salary…). Categories form a tree, so Spending → Groceries adds up into Spending.
Peer — who was on the other side? (a shop, an employer, a landlord).
Tag — what does this belong to? — a free label that cuts across categories, such as Holiday or Car. One holiday can contain a flight (Transport), a hotel (Leisure) and a dinner (Eating out); the tag brings the three back together.

Where everything is kept

A single file called jal.sqlite. Your accounts, your operations, your settings, the prices JAL has downloaded — all of it. Copy that one file and you have copied your entire ledger; that is all a backup is. Chapter 2 says where the file lives, and chapter 12 explains backups.

← Contents

Next: Installing and starting JAL →