Early draft. The ideas are open for debate, the economic model is untested, and JRCv1 is a working standard, not a licence or a certification. Current status.

Quartermaster · 0.1 draft

Expense ledger format

Rendered from spec/quartermaster/QM-LEDGER.md. Schema: qm-0.1.schema.json.

The first small, testable piece of Quartermaster: a format for publishing a project's operating costs honestly, and a validator for it. It is not a billing integration. Nothing here connects to a provider, holds credentials or reads invoices automatically.

Schema: qm-0.1.schema.json
Tool: node bin/qm.mjs validate | summary | csv2json | compare | savings, local files only
Live example: launch/costs.json, rendered at https://jollyrogercharter.org/costs/

Five categories, never added together

Category	Meaning	Amount	Hours
`cash`	Money actually paid or billed	known number, or `null` = unknown	—
`forecast`	Expected future spending, not billed yet	known or `null`	—
`reserve`	Money set aside, not spent	known or `null`	—
`donated-labor`	Unpaid contributor time	only with a published `valuation_method`	number, or `null` = unmeasured
`user-attention`	Time users spend because of the software	only with a published `valuation_method`	number, or `null` = unmeasured

qm summary reports known cash spending and counts unknown items. It never treats an unknown as zero, and it never folds forecasts or noncash time into the cash total. There's no default hourly rate; see the attention-valuation RFC in launch/RFC-DRAFTS-OVERNIGHT.md.

Every entry is sourced

Entries reference a declared source with a kind (invoice, registrar, provider-dashboard, provider-api, manual, estimate) and a retrieved_utc time. A cash amount can't come from an estimate source; use forecast.

Privacy rules (enforced by `qm validate`)

Publish amounts, never billing identifiers: invoice numbers, account numbers and card-like digit runs are rejected.
The same scanner jrc uses rejects email addresses, tokens, keys, credentials, home-directory paths and hidden characters.
Each entry carries a privacy class: public, aggregated (combined from several private records) or redacted (details withheld; say why in status).
Keep raw invoices and provider exports out of the repository entirely.

CSV import

node bin/qm.mjs csv2json entries.csv --header ledger-header.json > launch/costs.json

Columns: id, category, item, provider, amount, hours, valuation_method, date, period_end, recurrence, status, source, attribution, privacy. Write unknown or leave amount empty for unknown. The header JSON supplies qm, project, currency, as_of_utc and sources. Nothing is written unless the combined ledger validates.

Not built yet

Provider adapters: no credentials-free, publicly documented sample billing export was available to build and test one against honestly. FOCUS 1.4 mapping is a candidate for the next version (cash ~ BilledCost, forecast outside FOCUS scope); see seed RFC 6.