Support
Report a bug
Email mateusz.kociola@icloud.com with a minimal journal snippet that reproduces it. Strip real payees and amounts if you'd rather not share them; structure is what matters.
Can I use a journal I already keep?
Yes, and wherever it already lives. On Mac and iPad it's File ▸ Open Journal… (⌘O), with the last five under Open Recent; on iPhone it's Open Journal… in Settings ▸ Journal. Balance edits the file you picked in place rather than copying it, so a journal that sits in a git working copy stays in it. To go back to the journal Balance keeps for you, it's Use Default Journal on the menu, or the Current Journal picker on iPhone. For the step by step, including how to move a journal you already keep into the one Balance syncs, see How to.
Where do budgets and recurring templates live?
In budgets.json andrecurring.json, never in the.ledger itself. For the journal Balance keeps for you they sit beside it in the same iCloud container, so they sync the way the journal does. For a journal you opened yourself they stay with Balance's data on that device and don't sync: opening a file grants the app that file and nothing next to it.
My journal won't open
Balance refuses to show data it can't safely write back, so the blocking screen with the parse error is deliberate rather than a fallback to some in-memory copy. Fix the reported line in any text editor and open it again. If a journal you opened yourself has since moved or been deleted, you get Journal Not Found instead, with the choice of opening it again or going back to the default journal.
Which formats are supported?
The plain-text journal conventions of ledger-cli and hledger. Directives Balance doesn't understand are preserved untouched, never rewritten.
Source
The parsing engine, SwiftLedger, is MIT-licensed on GitHub, and issues and pull requests are welcome there. The app itself is closed source; if what you actually want to know is whether it talks to anything, check that yourself rather than taking our word for it.