LibreMoney

What it's good for#

LibreMoney is for keeping track of where your money goes, month by month, without handing your bank balances to a budgeting company. It's one page: your accounts and their balances at the top, then a ledger for each month with money in, money out and a running balance that carries from one month into the next. Bills and income that repeat, like rent or a salary, can be added to each new month for you. There are totals, a savings summary, a housing affordability check against your income, several budgets in one ledger, and CSV or PDF exports.

What makes it different is where the encryption happens. When you save, your browser locks the ledger with your passphrase before it leaves the page. The server keeps only that locked file and a few earlier copies of it. It never sees your passphrase, your figures or even your account names.

Before you install: HTTPS#

LibreMoney works best on HTTPS, and LibrePortal treats it as an app that needs it. Browsers only hand their built-in encryption to pages on https:// (or opened on the server itself), so if your server is still on plain http://, LibrePortal warns you before you install it, and the app's Open button shows a padlock instead of opening. Hover over it and it says why.

Turning on HTTPS for the server fixes that and takes a few minutes. You don't need a domain: I don't have a domain gives every app the same address over https://. With a domain and Traefik, LibreMoney gets its own address, ledger.<your domain>. Domains and HTTPS walks through both.

Your passphrase is the only key#

There's no account and no sign-in. The first time you open LibreMoney, it asks you to create a passphrase (twice, to be sure) and press Create & open, and from then on the lock screen asks for it each time.

Because the first visitor to an empty LibreMoney chooses its passphrase, open it yourself as soon as the install finishes. That's also why LibrePortal installs it private: only your trusted places and your devices on the LibrePortal VPN can reach it. The server has no login of its own, so anyone who could reach it could download the locked file or save over it. They couldn't read it, but keep it private all the same.

Using it#

Start in Balances with the accounts you have and what's in them today. That total is where the ledger begins. Then add your repeating bills and income under Recurring, each with an amount and a schedule: monthly on a set day, every few weeks, or yearly. 🔁 Add recurring drops them into a month as ordinary rows you can edit, and + Add month moves on to the next month with them filled in.

Everything saves as you go, encrypted, and Lock at the top clears the page and forgets the key until you type the passphrase again. Use it when you walk away from a shared computer.

The ⋯ menu holds the rest:

• Export CSV and Export PDF write out your figures unencrypted, for a spreadsheet or your records. Treat those files with the same care as a bank statement.
• Backup downloads an encrypted copy of the ledger, and Restore loads one back.
• Change passphrase locks the ledger with a new passphrase from now on.

Backups and older copies#

There are two layers of safety net, and both stay encrypted.

LibreMoney keeps its own earlier copies on the server, in a backups folder beside the ledger: the ten most recent, plus the last one of each day for the past thirty days. LibrePortal's nightly backups then copy the ledger and all those earlier copies to your backup locations, like any other app, and restoring LibreMoney from its Backups tab puts the whole lot back as it was that night.

The Restore button in the app loads a file from your own device, such as one you saved earlier with Backup. Taking Backup now and then, before a big tidy-up for example, is the simplest way to have a copy you can bring back yourself.

To check: is there a way from the WebUI to restore one of LibreMoney's own dated server-side copies (data/backups/ledger-*.enc) without a shell? Upstream says: stop the server and copy it over ledger.enc

To move a ledger to another server, copy its file across (or use Backup here and Restore there) and unlock it with your passphrase.

Renamed from LibreLedger#

LibreMoney is the new name of LibreLedger. When your server updates, LibrePortal carries the app across by itself: the ledger files are not touched, the address and port stay the same, and your passphrase still opens everything. The old Download link still works too. On your phone, install the new LibreMoney app beside the old one, open it with the same server address, then remove the old LibreLedger app.

Upgrade encryption#

Old ledgers are locked under the app's earlier internal label. Open a ledger, choose ⋯ → Upgrade encryption and type your unlock password again, and LibreMoney re-locks it under the new label. It works only on a ledger you own that nobody else has open or shares. It checks the result before swapping it in, keeps the old copy until the check passes, and changes nothing about how you unlock. It's tidying, not extra security, so there's no hurry.

One ledger each#

LibreMoney holds one ledger per copy of the app. If each person in the house wants their own, with their own passphrase, make another copy with instances: each one gets its own data, its own address and its own backups.

Good to know#

• Updates wait for you. LibrePortal pins LibreMoney to an exact version and build, and nothing changes until you press Update, which takes a backup first. It only fetches that same version again; it can't move LibreMoney to a newer one yet.
• It's small. A standard-library Python server that stores one file, running read-only with no special permissions. It uses very little memory.
• Its source is public at git.libreportal.org, if you'd like to see exactly how the encryption works.