Books (dispatchlabs-ai)

What it is

Books describes itself as “a local-first, command-line general ledger for humans and software agents” (pkg.go.dev). It keeps exact double-entry books in SQLite and makes posted accounting immutable. The first public release, v0.1.0-alpha.2, came out on 19 August 2026 under the MIT licence from Dispatch Labs, a GitHub organisation created in May 2026 whose other public work is an agent wiki and related agent tools. It is experimental, USD only, and runs on macOS and Linux.

It covers company setup, a manual chart, transaction entry, statement imports, reconciliation of bank, card, loan and investment accounts, the four core reports, period and fiscal-year close, multi-entity consolidation, a one-time QuickBooks import, audit verification and verified backup. It leaves out invoicing, AR and AP, payroll, tax, automatic bank feeds and any web interface.

How it works

Each company is a SQLite file under ~/.books/companies/<name>/ with folders for attachments, imports, plans and backups. Money is stored as integer cents and never touches floating point. Journals start as drafts; posting checks balance, open period and account activation, and after that a journal cannot change. A mistake is fixed with a linked reversal (reverse, undo, correct). Closed periods keep a balance digest.

The architecture notes are the interesting part. Every provider observation becomes a new immutable source_record revision that points to the one it supersedes, and each has a disposition: POSTED, PENDING, NEEDS_REVIEW or SOURCE_ONLY. Only posted evidence enters reconciliation; moving an item out of review needs a reason and JSON evidence. Reconciliation, close and import all follow plan then apply, and apply rejects a plan whose state has changed. Every open checks the SQLite application id, a checksummed migration ledger and the live schema against an embedded copy. The audit log is hash-chained, and the docs say plainly that the chain “detects uncoordinated changes but does not resist a privileged party that can rewrite and replace the entire SQLite file”.

Data and access

You hold the file. There is no service, no account and no limits. The interface is the CLI: table, JSON (books.cli/v1 envelope), JSONL or CSV output, decimal strings for money, stable error codes, one failure envelope per failed command. Statement data comes in as JSON against a published schema; ownership is never guessed from labels or amounts.

Agents

Books is written for agents to drive. No command prompts, stdin is read only with --input -, ambiguity exits nonzero, and agents must pass --company and a stable --key so retries are idempotent. --draft and --dry-run let an agent prepare without posting. There is no MCP and no approval gate: an agent with shell access can post. The project’s AI policy holds a named human accountable for every AI-assisted change to the code.

Customers

No usage figures, reviews or discussion were found. The Go proxy lists two tagged versions, both from 19 August 2026, and a later commit from 20 September 2026.

History

The changelog says the release came “from a fresh root commit” with “all deployment-specific accounting mappings and private integration bridges” removed. That suggests it was extracted from a private deployment that had live feeds. On 10 October 2026 the GitHub repository returned 404, while pkg.go.dev and the Go proxy still served the source.

For ownpurse

This is kin, and the nearest we have found. Both are local, SQLite, exact to the cent, append-only, hash-chained and built for agents through a noninteractive CLI. The difference is the job. Books is the ledger of record: you post into it, and sources are evidence for reconciliation. ownpurse leaves the books in Xero or QuickBooks, rebuilds them from what each source reports, and writes back only through approved packages. Worth borrowing: the disposition states on source revisions, plan and apply with stale-plan rejection, closed-period digests, a doctor on every open, and the honest limit of a hash chain. The gap Books leaves open is the one ownpurse aims at: live connectors to the systems people already use, and a person’s approval before anything is written.