Meet Soul Ledger — The 13-trait soul accounting, on a grid that never leaves your phone

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Soul Ledger

The 13-trait soul accounting, on a grid that never leaves your phone.

What Soul Ledger does

Soul Ledger runs the actual Cheshbon HaNefesh practice — the 200-year-old "accounting of the soul" from Menachem Mendel Lefin's 1808 Mussar classic, itself modeled on Benjamin Franklin's 13-virtue chart. You work one of the 13 character traits (middot) per week, mark a dot for each daily lapse, cycle the 13 traits four times a year, and watch which trait is actually improving. Until now that practice lived on a fill-by-hand paper grid — a printable "middot chart" PDF from your synagogue, or a blank journal.

The whole 13-middah scaffold ships hardcoded in the app, so there is nothing to rebuild each season:

— The 13 middot in Lefin's canonical order, each with its maxim, exactly as in Cheshbon HaNefesh (public-domain text on Sefaria). — Auto-rotating weekly focus. The app advances to the next middah every week, keeps the current week and season front-and-center, and repeats the 13-week season four times a year — the full deterministic cycle, run for you. — Daily dot-grid for the active middah. Tap a cell to record a lapse, exactly like the paper Franklin/Lefin tally chart. A mark means a slip, not a streak. — Per-trait trend. A year of dots condensed into a line per middah, so you can finally see, over four seasons, which trait is moving. — A private reflection note on each day's mark — the journaling half of the practice.

This is not a learning app and not a generic habit tracker. The one Mussar app on the App Store, Hachzek, serves bite-size seforim lessons to read — it does not run your personal accounting. The Mussar Institute's "Middah a Month" is a study curriculum, not a tool. Generic habit trackers and Apple Journal don't know the 13 middot, their order, their maxims, the weekly rotation, or the 13-week seasonal cycle — and they sync to the cloud by default, which is exactly wrong for a dated tally of your own moral failings. That log is the most sensitive thing a person can keep, so Soul Ledger is 100% on-device: free, no account, no cloud, no analytics. For the surging North-American Mussar revival — Hebrew College and the Mussar Institute's thousands of practitioners — this is the tool the paper grid has been standing in for.

A look inside

Tap any screenshot to open the full-resolution version.

What's inside

• 13-middah engine — Each trait with its canonical maxim, in Lefin's order, one focus middah auto-rotating per week
• Daily dot-grid — Tap a cell to record a lapse for the active middah, exactly like the paper Cheshbon HaNefesh chart
• Season tracker — 13-week season that repeats four times a year; current week and season always front-and-center
• Per-trait trend — A year of dots condensed into a line per middah so you can see which trait is improving
• Reflection note — Private on-device note attached to each day's mark, for the journaling half of the practice

Why we built it

Cheshbon HaNefesh is a deterministic regimen — work one of 13 fixed middot per week, mark a dot per daily lapse, rotate weekly, repeat the 13-week season 4x a year, track each trait's trend — but the only tool today is a fill-by-hand paper "middot chart" PDF. No software runs the actual accounting cycle: the one Mussa…

What makes it different

Soul Ledger is the only iOS app that runs the Cheshbon HaNefesh engine — the 13 middot in Lefin's canonical order with their maxims, an auto-rotating weekly focus, the 13-week season repeating four times a year, a tap-to-mark daily lapse dot-grid, and a per-trait year-long trend line — entirely on-device with no accou…

Who it's for

Hobbyists who want a tool that respects their time, their gear, and their offline life.

In one line: The 13-trait soul accounting, on a grid that never leaves your phone.

Try it

See the Soul Ledger app page for the full feature list, the info table, and support links.

Use Soul Ledger, found a bug, or have a feature request? Comments are open below — anonymous is fine.