Ledger started as a weekend hack: pull every account, subtract the debt, show one number. That was it.

Assets minus liabilities

Everything else — the charts, the envelopes, the tax-lots — came later. The core was always the same two-column subtraction that turns a pile of accounts into something you can actually read.

Ship the obvious thing

We didn't start with a dashboard. We started with the one number, because that's what we wanted to see. Everything else is decoration.