3 ms·

Thanks for mentioning Beancount; I didn't know about it before. I'm American but have a job in a different country, so I deal with two currencies routinely, and

by rmunn 6mo ago

Thanks for mentioning Beancount; I didn't know about it before. I'm American but have a job in a different country, so I deal with two currencies routinely, and haven't found a good way of handling multiple currencies in Gnucash. So my wife and I have been keeping our records in text files. I'll look into what it would take to switch over to Beancount; I bet I could write a conversion script (or get an LLM to write most of it for me, even) that would do 95% of the work since we've been pretty consistent in our format, and throw up warning messages about any entries that it couldn't parse (we haven't necessarily been 100% consistent). I just might join you in Beancount + Fava land.

robcohen 6mo ago
Hey I'm working on a rust implementation of Beancount, if you get a chance check it out. https://rustledger.github.io https://rustledger.github.io . I'm also hoping to put together a standards body that can formalize plain-text accounting standards too so others can more easily implement their own systems that conform to the standard.
epistasis 6mo ago
One small warning about Beancount: v3 is a huge change from v2, and a lot of the documentation on the web is in v2 and it's not clearly demarcated that it doesn't apply anymore. I'd recommend looking up information with an LLM, and not trusting web pages. This is the first time I've made such an unusual suggestion, but LLMs are actua really good at information retrieval and translation. The Beancount community has a bit of cleaning up to do before web searches can be trusted again. That said, Fava is such a huge step up from the hledger web ui that it's totally worth it, especially since I want quick and easy attachment of documents and viewing of documents. It's super easy to convert between hledger/ledger and beancount formats, so it's fairly easy to switch to the other if you already have your data in such clear and clean formats.

by rmunn 6mo ago

robcohen 6mo ago

Hey I'm working on a rust implementation of Beancount, if you get a chance check it out. https://rustledger.github.io https://rustledger.github.io . I'm also hoping to put together a standards body that can formalize plain-text accounting standards too so others can more easily implement their own systems that conform to the standard.

epistasis 6mo ago

One small warning about Beancount: v3 is a huge change from v2, and a lot of the documentation on the web is in v2 and it's not clearly demarcated that it doesn't apply anymore. I'd recommend looking up information with an LLM, and not trusting web pages. This is the first time I've made such an unusual suggestion, but LLMs are actua really good at information retrieval and translation. The Beancount community has a bit of cleaning up to do before web searches can be trusted again. That said, Fava is such a huge step up from the hledger web ui that it's totally worth it, especially since I want quick and easy attachment of documents and viewing of documents. It's super easy to convert between hledger/ledger and beancount formats, so it's fairly easy to switch to the other if you already have your data in such clear and clean formats.