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Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

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Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#31

Post by BeetleB »

howeyc wrote: post #15
nightski wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate mint but use a different budgeting system. I'm not sure you can compare an accounting system with a budgeting system - they serve different purposes. I'd love to build a full budgeting system on top of one of these text accounting systems some day.

Just create a "Budget" account and a report that does "Budget" vs "Expenses"

Beancounts budgeting system is fairly poor. It can't handle envelope budgeting, which is the only useful budgeting system I've found so far.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#32

Post by retrac »

derefnull wrote: post #19
clircle wrote: post #8

Any married people have advice on how to track finances? I used bean count or ledger when i was single, but the manual system kind of breaks down when you have a family .

How does the system 'kind of break down' when you have a family?

Once you add parallelism to your transaction processing, all manner of untoward things can happen. For example, two parent processes may attempt to execute the same transaction to acquire the same resources at the same time, having failed to exchange messages to ensure their internal household state is fully synchronized. And sometimes child processes will fail to acquire permissions but silently commit transactions anyway!

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#33

Post by _benj »

Switched to beancount from ledger a few months ago and I’m really enjoying the strict syntax of beancount. The cool thing though is that I really didn’t lose any of my reporting flows that I had with (h)ledger… I just made scripts that convert the beancount journal on the fly, run whatever I was used to with hledger, and then delete the temporary file.

I feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds :)

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#35

Post by NoboruWataya »

balves wrote: post #22

I switched to beancount after trying several other things (mint, spreadsheets, gnucash), and I like it quite a bit. It's choice to be very strict about things held at cost (like units of stock) is a great differentiation. It's VERY hard to accidentally miss capital gains, or get cost basis wrong on something, or have something not balance. Much harder than even ledger-cli, let alone the other alternatives. It feels a…

> gnucash requires learning some niche scheme stuff; it feels very "tacked on".

There is also piecash, which gives a nice Pythonic interface to the SQL files generated by GnuCash: https://pypi.org/project/piecash/

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#36

Post by chana_masala »

Pasorrijer wrote: post #27
clircle wrote: post #8

Any married people have advice on how to track finances? I used bean count or ledger when i was single, but the manual system kind of breaks down when you have a family .

I use homebank. Download all your various transactions, load and tag them and you're done. You can build rules too so the more you use it, the more automated it becomes.

Wow, I can't believe I haven't heard of Homebank [1] before. This looks very much like what I've been wanting. Thank you for the recommendation.

[1] http://homebank.free.fr/en/index.php

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#37

Post by nickray »

cranium wrote: post #17
bingohbangoh wrote: post #10

Out of curiosity: has anybody used this to do business accounting? I am intrigued by these ultra simple setups. However, most accountants -- the people who will ultimately help you once your business is sufficiently complex -- will use Quickbooks or some other established software.

I started using Ledger for my small consulting business in Switzerland. Here, the internal accounting structure is quite flexible as long as you can output the balance sheets in the required format. My fiduciary asks for PDFs to verify the (legal) accounting norms anyway.

How do you map KMU Konten to ledger accounts (can you rollup?), and do you automate VAT accounting?

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#38

Post by haberman »

balves wrote: post #22

I switched to beancount after trying several other things (mint, spreadsheets, gnucash), and I like it quite a bit. It's choice to be very strict about things held at cost (like units of stock) is a great differentiation. It's VERY hard to accidentally miss capital gains, or get cost basis wrong on something, or have something not balance. Much harder than even ledger-cli, let alone the other alternatives. It feels a…

> Importers have been great.

What importers do you mean? Are these importers you've written yourself, or existing importers you were able to reuse? What format are these importers pulling from (PDF statements, CSV, OFX, etc)?

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#39

Post by clircle »

derefnull wrote: post #19
clircle wrote: post #8

Any married people have advice on how to track finances? I used bean count or ledger when i was single, but the manual system kind of breaks down when you have a family .

How does the system 'kind of break down' when you have a family?

The short answer is that my wife and I have different opinions about how to track data.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#40

Post by repiret »

balves wrote: post #22

I switched to beancount after trying several other things (mint, spreadsheets, gnucash), and I like it quite a bit. It's choice to be very strict about things held at cost (like units of stock) is a great differentiation. It's VERY hard to accidentally miss capital gains, or get cost basis wrong on something, or have something not balance. Much harder than even ledger-cli, let alone the other alternatives. It feels a…

For GnuCash it’s easy to parse it’s XML files or Sqllite database, so you don’t have to mess with scheme.
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