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Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

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Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#91

Post by qudat »

_benj wrote: post #28
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 enabled notifications on all our cards and bank accounts so whenever a transaction happens I get an email. From there I just use gmail filters to put all of those in a folder and then wrote a script to download, parse and enter those transactions on my ledger with “Expenses:FIXME” Once a week or so (when I have around 10-20 transactions) I import them and go through them, asking my SO if there’s any transactions I…

This is where I’d like to go. Manually logging into each bank and downloading CSVs every month is just too much of a burden.

I have email notifications for all transactions and a maildir on my dev machine. I just need to write some code to make it all happen.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#92

Post by every »

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…

Yes, you can make correcting entries but you cannot correct an entry. One must preserve the audit trail. Plain text seems vulnerable to this...

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#94

Post by blais »

raymondh wrote: post #84
fangpenlin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the connotation just makes it more memorable.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#97

Post by tacostakohashi »

haberman wrote: post #61
balves wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OFX is the closest to being universal, although often it is well hidden.

CSV feeds are often surprisingly useless for programmatic / feed use, they're often littered with stupid textual headers and footers and lack important columns - they're designed to be opened in excel and looked at by a human, not parsed and ingested.

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#98

Post by rthomas6 »

darcys22 wrote: post #73
hiq wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can’t bulk edit transactions to reclassify them after the fact. If you store your transactions in a plaintext format, why don't you use CLI tools? I just renamed a bunch of accounts using sed for instance, in a hledger journal.

UPDATE transactions SET account = "Income" WHERE account = "Expense";

sed 's/Expense:/Income:/'

Re: Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

#99

Post by fatcow »

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…

There's an upcoming UI to input stock transactions and will explicitly request capital gains, so, there will be fewer opportunities for error.

https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/818

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