Overview
Reeve is an open-source accounting tool that lets organizations prove their financial records have not been edited after the fact. Finance teams keep using the accounting software they already have, and Reeve quietly writes a small fingerprint of each record to a public ledger. The original numbers stay with the company. The ledger just holds the receipt1.
Built by the Cardano Foundation, Reeve runs on Cardano and was previously known internally as Ledger on the Blockchain, often shortened to LOB. It is aimed at organizations whose books need to stand up to outside scrutiny: enterprises with internal audit duties, charities reporting back to donors, government agencies publishing public spending, and the auditing firms that review them all2.
Key Features
- Tamper-evident books. Reeve writes a fingerprint of each validated transaction to Cardano. If anyone later tweaks the underlying entry in the company's ledger, the fingerprints no longer match and the change is obvious to any auditor checking the chain1.
- Works with the accounting software you already have. A ready-made connector handles NetSuite (via Altavia), and a CSV importer covers everything else. Finance teams carry on with their existing workflow rather than learning a new ledger3.
- Pick the pieces you need. Reeve is split into separate modules for validation, reporting, publishing to the chain, reading from the chain, and connecting to outside systems. Organizations can adopt only the parts that fit and swap others in later3.
- Sensible access controls. Built-in support for company structure, departments, and cost centers, paired with single sign-on, so the right people see the right reports and nobody gets access they should not have3.
- Free to read, fork, and self-host. The full codebase lives on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, and a companion repository packages everything into something an organization can deploy on its own infrastructure4.
What to Expect
For a finance team, Reeve sits quietly behind the accounting software they already use. They keep posting transactions the usual way, and Reeve validates each record and writes the fingerprint to Cardano in the background. A separate reporting layer pulls the validated data into clean financial reports that an auditor or board member can read.
For the person setting Reeve up, the experience feels like configuring any internal business application: define the company's structure, add departments and cost centers, assign roles, and connect single sign-on. Once that is in place, day-to-day use is largely automatic.
For developers and integrators, the documentation site at docs.reeve.technology walks through every module, the data flow, and how to plug in a new accounting system. A live demo indexer runs at indexer.cardano-foundation.app.reeve.technology so anyone curious can see what published records actually look like before committing to deploy3.
