ALFA

LedgerPDF

A PDF workpaper binder for tax and accounting work, built so a human and an AI agent can prepare the same binder. Drag in PDFs, Excel files, Word documents, scans, and photos; it assembles one ordered, bookmarked binder where the binder is the PDF itself. Your tick marks, calculator tapes, notes, and stamps export as standard PDF annotations that open in Acrobat, Preview, Edge, or Chrome.

The LedgerPDF binder: a 55-page synthetic tax engagement with bookmarks in return order down the left, the binder summary page in the center, and page thumbnails carrying status and mark counts on the right

The whole engagement as one binder, filed in return order

A consolidated 1099 in LedgerPDF with a green tick beside the total and three calculator tapes below the page showing the individual entries behind each subtotal

Marks carry the work: the tape keeps every addend behind a total

The AI work tab of the LedgerPDF Review Center, listing 65 AI-created items grouped by run and timestamp, each run with its own undo button

Every AI action logged, attributed, and revertible by run

These are screens from the released app, not mockups. The engagement, the documents, the names, and the figures are all synthetic.

Charlie's walkthrough of the app. If the player does not load, watch it on Tella.

Nothing leaves your machine, and your IT reviewer can verify that.

LedgerPDF makes no network calls: no cloud, no account, no telemetry. Agent access is off by default, and when you turn it on it runs over a local connection only (never a network port) with a fresh token each launch. It is GPL-3.0 licensed on purpose: a "nothing leaves your machine" claim is only worth what your own reviewer can check, and open source is what makes it checkable.

Get the latest release (Mac and Windows)Source on GitHub

Each release ships a Mac .dmg (Apple Silicon; signed and notarized, opens with no warnings), a Windows installer (x64; not yet code-signed, so click "More info" then "Run anyway" at the SmartScreen prompt), and a checksums file so you can verify what you downloaded.

Alpha software, said plainly

LedgerPDF is early and under active development. Keep your source documents and backups; do not make a binder your only copy of anything. That caveat comes from the release notes themselves, and it is the same discipline you would apply to any new tool in a firm.

What it does

  • One ordered, bookmarked binder from PDFs, Excel, Word, Markdown, scans, and photos
  • Bookmarks move with their pages when you reorder
  • Spreadsheet cells become real, selectable text, not pictures of text
  • On-device OCR for scanned documents
  • Tick marks, stamps, shapes, and notes for review work
  • Calculator tapes that carry the entries behind a total, not just the total
  • A Review Center that gathers open items, source coverage, and AI work into one queue
  • Export is a standard PDF with every marking preserved
  • An MCP server, so an AI agent can prep the binder with every action attributed, journalled, and revertible by run

Who built it, and why it is here

Built by Charlie Barmore, CPA, one of the Lab's partners, under his software studio Ledger Labs, and shared with this community as a working example of what one accountant can build with AI. The agent workflow practices the rule we teach: the AI's work stays visible, attributed, and reversible, and the professional reviews and signs.

More at ledgerpdf.com. Questions, bugs, and feature requests are welcome in the community or as GitHub issues.

Free and open source under GPL-3.0, provided as-is. Like everything here, the licensed practitioner reviews, decides, and signs; the software keeps the workpapers.