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 have used beancount and it is significantly better than an Excel or Google Sheet.
For me, the main benefit is tax lot matching and an auditable trail of sales should the IRS come knocking. It's impossible to do this properly in a spreadsheet (I mean... it is possible, but no one will complain if it's done wrong until it's too late). With beancount, matching is much more straightforward. I have a python script that does it automatically for each sale using normal FIFO, tax loss minimization, etc. Due to beancount's internal checks, I am certain that these are correct once they're entered into the ledger. There is no chance of failure, and if the IRS ever asks me to justify a capital gain / loss figure, it's very easy to point out that I keep track of all my shares and have for the past several years and I maintain a solid record of the entire history of each lot.
Another very beneficial double-check is asserting account balances at certain dates.
You give beancount the balances at the end of each month straight from your bank / broker statements, and it throws an error if your transactions don't match up.
Yeah definitely enjoy that as well. It's just so much better than a hand-written spreadsheet. Also, since you're re-using open-source software, I think it's evidence of good faith (whereas if your own spreadsheet's numbers are off, then you'll have to deal with concerns of bad faith acting).
It follows the same principles as ledger-cli and hledger.
You won't make a mistake using any of them.
I used and still use both, since they share the file format. Beancount is more opinionated, with slightly different file format, so I didn't bother adding it.
Yes. I have maintained my ledger with beancount for 5/6 years now. I don’t automate downloading from my bank, it’s not worth the hassle especially now that every login requires 2FA with my phone.
But I did write an importer for the csv files my bank provides and with smart_importer I don’t even have to categorize the statements anymore (although there are mistakes sometimes).
I don’t gather metrics though , I use fava to have a visual view of my books.
I usually spend half an hour per month maintaining the ledger .
Yes, I have one big beancount file tracking everything back to 2014. I use fava for visualization and git for history/backup. I've occasionally gone back and split or moved accounts, based on what metrics I want to track at that moment, it's pretty easy.
However, contrary to the article's automated method, my workflow is to manually input transactions every day (or every couple days, depending on what's going on) and balance my accounts. It's a bit of a ritual, but I like having a really good handle on day-to-day spending. Plus, I find ~10 minutes once a day way easier than (e.g.) ~3 hours once a month, even if it's the same amount of time overall.
