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Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

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Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#61

Post by haberman »

balves wrote: post #53
haberman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)?

https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_importers/tree/m... https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import https://beancount.github.io/docs/importing_external_data.htm... Support for OFX is generally great, CSV is also great. There are some proof of concept things floating around too for PDF.

Do you find that all of your financial institutions offer reliable OFX/CSV feeds?

I'm asking because I've generally come to the conclusion that PDF is the only universal data format that every institution will offer.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#62

Post by globular-toast »

retrac wrote: post #32
derefnull wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's the problem? Just track all transactions.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#63

Post by KennyBlanken »

howeyc wrote: post #14
raspyberr wrote: post #9

Does anyone know if there's a good app I can use for plaintext accounting on my phone? I'd love to be able to use syncthing to sync the ledger on my PC and phone. It'd really help me stop collecting receipts so I can bulk put them in when I get home.

Any text editor will do. Or maybe this? https://cone.tangential.info/

I am not editing a structured text file on my phone while out and about.

Especially due to the error-prone-ness and slowness of using mobile screen keyboards, you need guided/assisted data entry; a number pad only when you need to enter numbers or dates. A "use today's date if blank" field, selectors for accounts and tags, etc.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#64

Post by barrucadu »

BeetleB wrote: post #31
howeyc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For envelope budgeting, I just make subaccounts of my bank accounts for specific purposes.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#65

Post by cranium »

nickray wrote: post #37
cranium wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's quite easily to map the accounts once you have the main categories mapped (I use the french naming so my german translation may be wrong):

- Aktiven Assets - Passiven Liabilities - Betrieblicher Ertrag Income - Betrieblicher Aufwand Expenses

I'm not sure I understand what you ask about rollup, but so far I haven't found a case I couldn't fit within Ledger. For VAT, I have a flat VAT rate that only applies to my turnover so it was simple to automate (reduce turnover by x% and put that amount into Owed VAT).

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#66

Post by fangpenlin »

raymondh wrote: post #58

Accountant here: Recommend using Beancount with version control on your data so that you can take snapshots at various points in time. The notion behind "accountants don't user erasers" is that like a blockchain, you're creating a trail of evidence. If all of the data is mutable all of the time, its evidentiary value is low (for example, the IRS gives more weight to "contemporary" evidence than to records constructed…

I really enjoy using Beancount + Git for managing the accounting book for my own startup company, but I found it a bit tedious to add entries periodically. I wonder why nobody build a service make it like GitHub but for Beancount and automate lots of stuff. I then decided to make a service for it a while back. Shameless self-promoting here, yesterday I just launched the service in very early stage of open beta:

https://beanhub.io/

Basically the idea is, as a software engineer, I believe accounting book can be automated like how we build software. There are many interesting workflow we can bring into the system, such as

- Pull request review - Commit sign off (pgp signature) - CI for generating reports

and many other interesting aspects. Also just like software, I believe many of the orgs can benefit from open sourcing their financial data, like no-profits or government. So I am thinking making open source accounting book free repository for the product just like GitHub did previously. Anyway, I just found this thread happen to appear on hacker news so just want to share the stuff I am building. Feedbacks are welcome.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#67

Post by globular-toast »

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 .

It really depends what your arrangement is. Is everything shared between you? Then you need to track all accounts. You should look into automating ingest of your accounts data. Most banks/credit cards etc. should allow some kind of statement export. If not, consider switching provider.

I would advise not to worry about petty cash. Don't get pedantic. Worry about the big things. Just make a cash account for petty cash.

If you don't share accounts then just track your stuff and set up reimbursement account(s) for your family. You'll only know the net amount you need to transfer between yourselves to square up at the end of the month or whatever you agree to do.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#68

Post by _benj »

Buttons840 wrote: post #55
_benj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I initially thought that it had to be either/or and when I switched to beancount I was sorely missing then simple balance reports from ledger. What I’ve been doing lately is just generating ledger-formatted ledger on the fly for this that I used ledger before, while still benefiting from the strict beancount format, balance assertions and such that ledger doesn’t have

https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Balance-asse... It appears ledger does have balance assertions.

oh nice, thanks for sharing, I wasn't aware of that :-)

It seems though that the assertions are attached to transactions. The way I use balance assertions on beancount is that, say, payday after balancing everything I'd enter

> 2022-01-30 balance Assets:Bank 500.00 USD

and that will ensure that whatever happens, even if I need to go back in time to clear transactions, the amount needs to be that one, and that balance is usually straight from my current bank balance.

So, it seems slightly different use case that ledger's balance assertion

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#69

Post by globular-toast »

user3939382 wrote: post #6

This reminds me of ledger: https://www.ledger-cli.org/ * Turns out they address the comparison: https://beancount.github.io/docs/a_comparison_of_beancount_a...

I've been using ledger for 10+ years. I guess I should try beancount, but ledger works for me. I've never had to calculate capital gains or any other taxes myself, though.

Ledger's simple model makes a lot more sense to me (ie. everything is just a commodity), but it sounds like beancount is set up to deal with a lot of the extra bullshit that exists in the legal system.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#70

Post by lelandfe »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #60
bobjordan wrote: post #34

Fava is a nice GUI that's built on top of beancount, see https://github.com/beancount/fava

Before anyone else does what I did and loses a bunch of time setting it up: fava is completely read-only.

https://fava.pythonanywhere.com/example-beancount-file/edito...

I do see the demo has an editor!

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