We needed someone to look at a possible problem with our roof, and as a first step I wanted a list of the companies that had we had used in the past.
Thankfully, I had a file called all.hledger, which gives me access to all our hledger transactions from 2015 until 2023.
One of the first things to do was to remind myself of how I categorized the transactions related to roof repairs. Therefore, I used the command:
hledger -f all.hledger print repair
The above worked very well for what I wanted, as I had guessed correctly that “repair” would be part of the spending category. Because the print command lists whole transactions, I see all the details of a transaction, which was helpful in this case.
The only problem was that there were too many transactions listed, as I was getting the starting and ending balances for each year. However, I did notice that the roof repairs were all categorized as house:repair.
Thus, the solution for me was to next run the command:
hledger -f all.hledger areg house:repair
The above showed me every instance that we had a house repair expense (thankfully, not too many!) including roof repairs. The output showed the payee, so I could see a history of who worked on our roof.