I've been using beancount for a little over a year to manage my personal finances as well as some side self-employment accounting. I have twice gotten frustrated to the point of trying other products (specifically Personal Capital, Mint, Quicken, and QuickBooks) but give up and come back to command-line accounting for reasons probably familiar to everyone in this group.
So here are my frustrations and what I'm going to attempt to do for myself to address them. I'm mainly venting here, but if anyone has any suggestions I'd really appreciate them. - I update my journal every month. Getting updated transactions from 25+ different accounts every month is very time consuming. - Todo: Research programmatic downloads of transactions from all banks (has this been done already?) - The beancount file is getting overwhelmingly large after just 1 year. This is making it hard for me to jump around and find/fix things. I often have personal transactions that cross equity accounts into our rental business, or my software engineering self employment. - Todo: split personal.beancount into smaller journals (by month?) - omni-complete in vim is an awkward keyboard chord and account completions in vim are sometimes broken depending on what you last typed - Todo: try VSCode which can now embed neovim and has it's own beancount extension that should make the editing experience nicer - except VSCode folding is weird so this might actually make things worse - I still don’t understand how reporting works, and part of that is because I don't use it enough. I feel like I'm relearning Beancount Query Language every time I do need something. - Todo: keep a list of commonly-used queries - reconciling receipts / splitting transactions is time consuming, although vim macros help here - Todo: Improve importer recognition of payees and likely expense accounts - no way to attach receipt pictures to transactions? - Todo: Research beancount tooling or other apps to capture receipts - fava is nice, but could be nicer - Todo: Research writing a new frontend reporting/visualization tool and/or contribute to fava -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/4bd97aa7-ef37-4f08-9b65-d9555acbe7fbn%40googlegroups.com.