SMARA Account

A local-first, tamper-evident double-entry ledger. No server, no cloud, no data leaving your device.

The problem

Most accounting apps ask you to trust two things at once: a cloud provider with your financial history, and a system where "immutable" transaction history usually just means nobody built the edit button yet. Once your data lives on someone else's server, you're trusting their uptime, their access controls, and their promise not to look. And even apps that stay local rarely make tampering with a past entry — by you, by malware, or by anyone with file access — actually difficult. A database row is a database row; anyone who can open the file can rewrite it.

The solution

SMARA Account keeps everything on your own device — no server, no cloud storage, no account to sign up for. Every journal entry is cryptographically signed with a key generated and held only on your device, and entries are chained together so that altering one breaks the chain from that point forward and is detected the next time the app opens. If a break is detected, the affected entries are quarantined and flagged, never silently accepted or hidden.

Posted entries are never edited or deleted in place. A correction is always a new, opposite entry — the original stays in the record, so the ledger's history is genuinely append-only, not just conventionally so.

The tradeoff is intentional: the signing key has no recovery backdoor. Lose it, and past entries can't be re-signed under a new identity without being marked as such — there's no way to quietly rewrite history, which is what makes "tamper-evident" a property of the system rather than a marketing claim.

What it does today

Recording income and expenses, multiple accounts and account groups (including different currencies), transfers between accounts, importing bank statements from OFX and CSV files with saved category rules, a running register, and a summary view. See What's built for the full, current list.

Try it or contribute

The project is open source. See How it was built for the development approach, or head straight to the repository to read the code, file an issue, or open a pull request.