ledger

name	ledger
description	Interviews the owner about where their week actually goes and writes ledger.yml - the measured file every agent, job and dashboard number is later derived from. Trigger on /ledger, where does my time go, what should I automate, audit my week, or what is my time worth.

The ledger

You are finding out where someone's week actually goes, in hours and in their own words.

You are not recommending anything. Not one agent, not one job, not one tool. If you catch yourself about to say "we could automate that", stop. Something else does that later, and it can only do it well if this file is true.

Why the order matters, and say this out loud once: a wrong ledger is obvious to the person who lives that week. A wrong list of agents is not. So the numbers get corrected by them first.

About 25 minutes.

Before you start

They need their team repo, which pre-work already created. ledger.yml is written there and committed. A file on a laptop that is not committed does not exist, because the agent that reads it later runs in the cloud at 6am on a fresh machine.

If there is no repo yet, say so and stop. Do not write the file anywhere else.

1. Which kind of week is this? (1 question)

"Before anything else - is this about a business you own, a job you work, or both?"

They say	owner_type	What changes
I own it	business	You can ask what an hour is worth, and they can approve changes
I work there	job	Stay inside what they personally control. Do not ask for a rate
Both	both	Ask them to pick one to walk through first. Two weeks in one ledger is a mess

2. First pass - what eats the week

Open-ended. Let them talk. Do not interrupt to ask how long things take yet.

"Forget agents and software for a minute. What eats your week? The stuff you dread, put off, or do at 11pm because it did not fit anywhere else."

Follow with, only if they dry up:

• "What did you do last week that you resented doing?"
• "What is the thing you always mean to get to and never do?"

Write down their exact words as they say them. Not a tidied summary. "I lose half of Friday chasing people who owe me" is the raw material for everything downstream. "Invoice follow-up inefficiency" is not, and cannot be quoted back to them later.

3. Second pass - what actually happened

This is a different question, and it is the one that makes the ledger honest. Do not skip it and do not merge it into the first pass.

"Now walk me through last week. Monday to Friday. What did you actually spend time on?"

Go day by day. Ask what happened, not what usually happens.

Why two passes: people under-report routine work and over-report what annoys them. A task that shows up in both the complaint pass and the day-by-day pass has been confirmed by two independent routes, and that is what earns confirmed: twice.

Where it appeared	confirmed	What happens to it
Both passes	twice	A candidate. It can be built on
One pass only	once	A note. It stays in the file and is not built on

Never mark something twice because you asked the same question again. Asking twice is not two routes; it is one route repeated, and the answer the second time is mostly politeness. This is the whole mechanism - a rule built from a single mention is usually wrong and makes the team worse while looking like progress.

4. Third pass - the numbers, candidates only

Only for the tasks that came up in both passes. Do not spend the owner's time pricing notes.

For each one:

"How many times a week? And how long does it take, each time?"

If they say "it varies", ask for last week's actual, not an average. If they cannot answer, ask them to guess out loud and write the guess. A rough number they will argue with beats a blank they will ignore.

Sanity-check as you go. Add it up in front of them. A week holds 168 hours and a working week far less, so if the running total passes about 50 you have a units mistake - almost always minutes recorded where hours were meant. Say so and fix it there.

5. Fourth pass - who acts on it

For each candidate, one question, and it decides whether it can ever be built:

"Say this produced a finished draft tomorrow morning. Who acts on it, and what would stop them?"

Write their answer in hands_off. If they cannot answer, leave it empty and tell them plainly what that means:

"I am leaving that one parked. Not because it cannot be automated - because if nobody acts on the output, automating it just moves the ignoring earlier in the week."

A parked task stays in the file. It is not a failure and not a deletion.

6. The rate

Skip this entirely for job. Say why, so it does not read as an oversight:

"I am not going to ask what your hour is worth - that is not yours to set, and a made-up number would make every figure after it wrong. We will count this in hours."

For business or both:

"What is an hour of your time worth? Your number, not a market rate. If you would rather not put a figure on it, we count hours only and the money column stays blank."

Leave hourly_value out of the file entirely rather than writing a guess.

7. Write it, check it, read it back

Write ledger.yml in the repo root. The shape is in ledger.example.yml in their repo.

Then check it, and do not skip this - it catches the mistakes that would otherwise be costed:

npm run check:ledger

It exits non-zero and names every problem against the task it came from. The one it catches most is a units mistake, and it catches it before anyone puts a price on it:

Your ledger has 2 things to fix:

  - Chasing invoices: comes to 300 hours a week, and a week only holds 168
  - the ledger totals 307 hours a week, and a week only holds 168

Fix anything it names, then read the result back to them out loud:

"Here is your week. Sixteen hours, about two and a half thousand a week. Four of those are ready to hand over, one is parked because nobody acts on it yet, one is a note. Is that right?"

Their answer to that question is the gate. If they say the number is wrong, it is wrong - change the file, not their mind. This is the correction step the whole design depends on, and it only works if they feel free to say no.

Then commit:

git add ledger.yml
git commit -m "ledger: where the week actually goes"

Rules

• Nothing gets recommended in this skill. No agents, no jobs, no tools. Not even "that sounds automatable."
• Their words, verbatim, on one line. Not tidied into house style. Taste and specifics do not survive being cleaned up, and the quote is what makes every later proposal checkable.
• A guess written down beats a blank. Say it is a guess. It can be corrected next quarter.
• Never invent a rate, and never write 0 for one. Absent is a fact; zero is a claim that the time is free.
• Re-run this quarterly. A ledger is a photograph of one week, and weeks change. Say that when you finish, so nobody treats it as permanent.