As for automatically pulling transactions, it's still shocking to me that anyone handed over their banking username and password to a third party, quicken et al at least use a system now where the bank grants read only permission as an app integration, but still I'm not a fan of every bank transaction becoming someone else's anonymized data harvest.<p>I'm evaluating whether self hosting accounting software is at all feasible to meet CMMC requirements and so far have my sights set on ERPNext. I configured my bank to send me an email alert for every transaction and intend to parse that and appene it to my ledger, but the API to do so is fairly annoying, so hearing that beancount is meant to be automatable is intriguing indeed<p>BTW the other thing that shocks me about quicken classic is lack of version control - the database can become corrupt and your only recourse is restoring from backup or sending the file to support and having them manually fix it!
I've used beancount extensively, spent many hours a few years ago. Built importers parsing bank PDFs (in UK, plaid doesn't work. Plus I'd rather also keep all the original statement PDFs).<p>Probably built 10+ importers, plus some plugins to do automated transaction annotations.<p>I have not made any update for many years now, because:
- Downloading statements is still a pain, have to manually go through all websites. Banks are bad at making the statements available, and worse making it possible to automate it.
- The root of the issue is actually that beancount is too slow. Any change/update takes ages. Python is both a blessing (makes it easy to add plugins/importers etc), and a curse (way slower than some other languages.<p>I believe the creator of beancount has started working on v3 with a mix of C++/python, relying on protobufs, a C++ core for parsing, etc. AFAIK, that is not production-ready yet.
Love this! I have been using hledger for a while now and have a pretty automated process for importing exported CSVs. I would love a little more automation in terms of pulling down the data, but on the bright side the manual process provides a good touch point to keep up on accounting regularly in small doses. This is great for just keeping an eye on things on a monthly basis.<p>I am starting a new business now and intend to see how far I can take plain text accounting in that context. I plan to use mercury for banking and want to automate as much as possible. I would also like to associate invoices that are stored in a self-hosted paperless-ngx instance.
Love this! I haven't used Beanhup, but was a user of text based accounting systems (beancount, hledger) for many years to track personal expenses. I stopped doing it when I realized I wasn't getting much out of it, but the knowledge of double-entry accounting still helps me to this day when I keep track of my business expenses in Xero.<p>One thing which I disagree with in this article is the focus on file based data storage:<p>> That makes it 10 times harder because you need to parse the text file, update it accordingly, and write it back. But I am glad I did. That guarantees all my accounting books are in the same open format.<p>This quote captures my issues with it. It just makes things so much more difficult; and it makes the whole process slower as the file grows. I remember that when I used hledger for tracking my expenses over 3 years, I had to "close books" once a year and consolidate all the transactions for the past year into 1 entry in a new ledger file to keep entry/query operations fast.<p>I get the sentiment; you want open data formats that remain even after your app is shutdown. But you can get the same by using open formats; maybe a sqlite DB is good enough for that?<p>The only thing that would be more complicated with a DB is versioning & reviewing commits like this app does; which does seem like a very exciting feature.
Language models completely upended my Beancount setup. To me, there is no point fiddling with precise parsers when a language model can read any PDF. I have the language model extract balance assertions from the PDF (beginning/end balance) so that it grounds its work in reality.<p>I dream of a future where anyone can download a ZIP of all the PDFs they've ever received from their bank, drop it onto a local app, and wait while it creates an entire accounting setup for you.<p>Edit: also not mentioned here is Fava, which is a really nice web UI for Beancount (<a href="https://beancount.github.io/fava/" rel="nofollow">https://beancount.github.io/fava/</a>). I share a link with my accountants, and they find it convenient (for downloading files, at least).
That's interesting. I, however, still spend between 20 and 30 minutes once a week to keep by beancount updated by manually entering the transactions, a habit I perform for the past 14 or so years.<p>At the same time, I did automate 90% of my business beancount import by writing a custom stripe importer that imports transactions from stripe. As for the expenses, I still enter them manually in the aforementioned 20-30 minute session.
FWIW I went down the path of automating as much as I could about this process.<p>These days, though, my process is more manual. Around every 24 or 48 hours, or immediately after making a transaction, I'll record the transaction in my ledger, which I store in Google Sheets (!) instead of a .ldg file. No more CSVs, no more pure functions of bank output.<p>Sometimes I miss the .ldg format. But I don't really miss maintaining the automated system. Google Sheets isn't as expressive as Ledger, but it is sufficient for my needs. Charting is a bit easier. YMMV!<p>To me, the most essential pivots to get me back into personal accounting were to record expenses both manually and ~daily. If I were to return to ledger again — which I might! — I'd focus on those aspects more than the automation.
A long time ago I wrote a python extension to the C ledger implementation that did a basic RPN calculator:<p><a href="https://github.com/zdw/ledgercalc">https://github.com/zdw/ledgercalc</a><p>And fed it with pile of scripts that extracted bank PDFs -> Text -> ledger entries, and shoved it all in git.<p>This looks like it some superset of that, but in general I found the files + text to ledger process to scratch a great itch.
I use YNAB and love it but I'm always interested in alternatives. That said I opened the main website [0] and the animation [1] shows a bunch of crypto logos. To my eye this seems to be a product aiming itself at people using crypto. I don't think that's the case given the blog post I just read but it's not a good look. Anyone catering to the crypto market is at least a little suspect in my book. Maybe it's just a feature of BeanHub and you don't have to touch it at all but to be featured so prominently is icky/<p>[0] <a href="https://beanhub.io/" rel="nofollow">https://beanhub.io/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://cs.joshstrange.com/5njjtGND" rel="nofollow">https://cs.joshstrange.com/5njjtGND</a>
I own a couple of small businesses, and I've tried a few things with my books - was on Bench for a year (thankfully not the year they shut down, and they were so incompetent I dropped them before that), tried to do them myself for a year, then upon realizing the P&L generated did not match the numbers I expected, hired bookkeepers on Upwork to fix them for me.<p>I really feel like I ought to be able to do them myself - it's just following some rules, and my accounts aren't that complex. Still, it was just enough of a pain that it was easier to hire someone overseas for cheap (especially since I know what the business' numbers should roughly come out to, so I can validate their work).<p>But as I've been using the latest AI models, I really feel like this is something that's going to be fully automated by AI in the next 1-2 years (at least for my very simple use case). It's simple enough that an AI agent should pretty trivially be able to fetch the docs from the various places that I sell upload them, categorize transactions (this is already basically automated by rules for me anyway) and then do whatever it is that bookkeepers do to close the books.<p>I can't help but think that bookkeeper is not going to be a profession in five years, and I'm just not sure where those people go. It's not like automating bookkeeping will expand the economic pie enough to create new jobs - I don't believe it's a bottleneck to anything at this point.
Is there any solution for statement downloading, like many small businesses I have credit card statements, bank accounts that I need to provide to my accountant.<p>While my "books" are synced via Quickbooks, they (accountants) really seem to love having the PDF in hand. I just need the PDFs and they do not send them via email...
So can this be used for business books and records? A lot of the documentation I’ve shifted through since Intuit sh*ttified their product made me think that this the ledger open source accounting is more of a quicken like personal finance product.
I don't understand the anxiety with open source and big corporations, while deciding to use permissive licenses like MIT. Surely one could use a good copy left license and have far less anxiety.
Anyone tried this tool out for their personal accounting? My books are currently in a big custom Google sheet system, and building metrics on top of that has been a pain.
I love the idea of command line accounting and having books based on git, but my primary use case is accounting for a shared account with my non technical life partner. Has anyone tried navigating the hurdle of introducing a non technical person to a tool like Beancount?