Help / Accounts

Account types

LedgerBear supports four account types. They differ in how they're grouped in the sidebar and which tabs they show when you open them.

Checking

A standard bank checking account. Shows the Transactions, Forecast, and Reminders tabs. Appears under the Cash group in the sidebar.

Use checking accounts for:

  • Everyday spending accounts where money flows in and out frequently.
  • Accounts you want to forecast against — the Forecast tab projects your balance forward using the reminders attached to this account.

Savings

Functionally identical to Checking in LedgerBear. Shows the Transactions, Forecast, and Reminders tabs and appears in the Cash group. The distinction is mostly so you can tell them apart in the sidebar, group them separately in reports, and keep forecast assumptions separate.

Credit Card

A credit card account, tracked as a liability. Shows the Transactions, Spending, and History tabs — no Forecast or Reminders tab of its own. Appears under the Credit group in the sidebar.

A few things are specific to credit card accounts:

  • They require a statement closing day, used to carve transactions into monthly cycles.
  • They can be linked to a reminder on a checking/savings account, which represents the monthly payoff and makes the card's balance roll into the forecast of the account that pays it. See Linked accounts for credit-card payoffs.
  • The Spending tab shows daily spending against the current statement cycle, and History shows month-over-month trends.

Cash

Physical cash you want to track — a wallet, a petty-cash drawer, an envelope under the mattress. Shows the Transactions, Forecast, and Reminders tabs, and appears in the Cash group.

Practically, cash accounts behave like checking accounts. Most people use them as a catch-all for untracked spending — you add a weekly "ATM withdrawal" transaction to the cash account and then break it down into finer categories as you spend it.

Why no "investment" or "loan" type?

LedgerBear focuses on cashflow, so it intentionally keeps the account types simple. For investment accounts, the common workaround is a Savings account where you record contributions and categorize them under an Investment category (see How categories are organized). For loans, a Credit Card account with a closing day works reasonably well as long as you only care about the monthly cycle of payments and charges.