Yes! I came here to specifically mention plaintext accounting I'm also a beancount user. Having all of my data in plain text allowed me to write extra tooling

Yes! I came here to specifically mention plaintext accounting I'm also a beancount user. Having all of my data in plain text allowed me to write extra tooling so that I can generate higher-level reports than what beancount has built-in. (budgeting, cash flow, planning/savings, etc) That tooling also has much faster parsing than beancount. Not a knock against beancount, just proving out the point about not being locked in to a particular binary implementation.