Beancount and the concept of plaintext accounting look really interesting.
Any recommendations for guides or short books to get into accounting for personal/individual finance as a total beginner?
Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
81–90 of 127 posts
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#82Fava 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.
This is not true, you can edit single entries from journals or even the whole file from the "Editor" section (it uses Codemirror). Then click "Save" and your changes will be updated on the file in real time.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#83Fava 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.
I use Fava+Beancount and this is not accurate, I use the Fava editor on my beancount files without any problem.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#84Accountant 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…
If you just started the service, carefully consider the name of the service. "Bean counter" is a disparaging term that is almost never a compliment.
The first paragraph of https://www.cfo.com/accounting-tax/2007/10/finance-in-histor... explains:
“Bean counting” has long been an insulting term for what finance professionals and accountants do. Often it’s been used to tar CFOs as transaction processors — a role largely relegated to the back office. What’s more, people like to use the phrase to ratchet up the pedestrian aspects of finance by tagging practitioners as “mere” bean counters or “little more than” bean counters or “simply” bean counters. Such clichés get tossed around a lot.
Per https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/bean-counter.html , "A disparaging term for an accountant, or anyone excessively concerned with statistical records or accounts."
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#85Out 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.
> has anybody used this to do business accounting?
Keep in mind that these projects were born for personal accounting that use the cash-basis approach. Business are more complex and require an accrual approach, simplyfying we can say that they recognize revenues in a period only when these are certain, and recognize expenses related to these revenues in the same period, even if the expense occurs before or after the revenue.
You don't need to perform these steps for personal finance, you just "follow the money".
I'm enjoying plain text accounting for personal use but I struggle to see it applied in business use cases.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#86If you're new to plain text accounting there is an amazing guide by Simon Michael & contributors. (Simon Michael is the creator of HLedger)
https://plaintextaccounting.org/
Previous discussions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420797
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
My ledger file has over $20K entries. Although I'm cheating: I actually input transactions into another SW and simply convert its format to Ledger.
Interesting! Whats the other software? I actually love ledger, and GoDBLedger can read in ledger files for this reason. I hate to throw negative feedback at other open source systems because the ultimate goal is to automate the financial process and we are really all working together to achieve that.
KMyMoney. Data entry is a lot easier than in Ledger. I use Ledger only for occasional reports.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#88I just recently started using Beancount for tracking my personal finances and I really like it so far. I've written some custom importers to parse CSVs from various financial institutions and auto-categorize some of the expenses, income, etc. based on regex matching on the transaction description from the CSV.
I'm able to auto-categorize many of the transactions this way but there will always be some to which I need to manually apply categories. For example, entering "Expenses:Restaurants" for a restaurant I've never been to and thus don't have a corresponding matching rule. I also occasionally add new matching rules and then re-run the importer to generate a new ledger with the new auto-categorizations.
Once I edit the ledger file though I can't rerun the importer or else I'll lose my manually entered labels. Do I just add those one-off entries to the matching rules? Or is there a better way to handle this? Would be curious to hear how others are approaching auto-labeling expenses, etc.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#89Shameless self plug: ive been building a similar open source command line accounting system https://github.com/darcys22/godbledger Its heavily inspired by both ledger and beancount but my biggest issue with them is that text files arnt great for double entry bookkeeping. Having a relational database is the better option which is what GoDBLedger has. After a certain point a business cant keep track of its transactions…
I have also written a ledger using sqlite and go. It is not open source (yet) because somewhere in the git history may be traces of personal details. But at some point I think I will open it. The way it works now is that I generate a directory structure from my bank account transactions. In each directory I put a text file thay describes my accounting transactions. The program parses this and inserts it into the data…
Nice! sounds pretty cool.
Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files
#90You can plot your monthly or yearly spending with Jupyter like this: