On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 10:24 AM Dustin Farris <dustin.far...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?) > > Look for Yodlee, or Plaid. If you're willing to give up your passwords, those could save you time by lumping together a bunch of imports. (I tend to only update the most important ones - checking, credit card, investing - frequently, and the others lag behind a bit.) Also, there are simplifications coming up to the importing framework which is going to make it substantially simpler to use, though I'm not sure if those changes will address your specific needs. > > - 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?) > > Sure, you can split. It won't make it much faster though. (The ongoing rewrite in C++ is going to address that.) I use outline-minor-mode. Another clever trick is to realize that like in life, you only ever go to a few places in that file - depending how you organize it - and insert unique comment tags and just i-search for them to go there directly (*). Huge time saver. The new import framework might even auto-insert in front of those tags. I think if you have the patience, you could refine your previous transaction detection so that it's nearly flawless, automatically categorize your transactions, and implement auto-insert in your file and trust it. Would save some time, but it'll be time-consuming to get it right IMO (you'll spend the time coding instead of updating; it's unclear to me in that situation which will be better). beangulp will also provide more hooks for you to refine previous-import-detection, even per importer. (For more on upcoming changes on that look here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O42HgYQBQEna6YpobTqszSgTGnbRX7RdjmzR2xumfjs/edit ) (*) In fact, I would say if you're using emacs this is the fourth stage of evolution of Emacs users about cursor movement: first you use the cursor keys, then you learn to use the relative word and paragraph movement, then you graduate to sexp movements (e.g. beginning of function), and when you nearly achieve enlightenment you are nearly always moving via interactive-search ( https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/effective-editing-movement). There is a final stage of awakening called "ace-jump-mode", kept as a closely guarded secret by those of use experiencing a permanent state of non-duality ;-). > > - 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 > > Write your queries as code, and run your own scripts. There's a neat API. You can also use the Query directive to save pre-made queries in your Beancount file and execute them by name. Easier reporting is something I'd like to refine in the next version. With a more generic SQL or providing a library that works with petl. > - reconciling receipts / splitting transactions is time consuming, > although vim macros help here > - Todo: Improve importer recognition of payees and likely expense > accounts > > Yep. (v3's new parser will bring another dimension to this: instead of having to write code to fixup the payees in memory only, the new rewriting capabilities will make it possible to rewrite the actual file by changing the AST and writing it back out.) > > - no way to attach receipt pictures to transactions? > - Todo: Research beancount tooling or other apps to capture receipts > > See the ingest framework's filling ability. It renames files that have been identified prepending a date and can stash them in a repository under the same account hierarchy. bean-web used to serve those directives right next to the transactions and you could insert a common link to link them together (or write a plugin that attempts to match them up automatically) > > - fava is nice, but could be nicer > - Todo: Research writing a new frontend reporting/visualization > tool and/or contribute to fava > > Go for it! Custom one-off renderings are also useful (e.g. like in beangrow). > -- > 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 > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/4bd97aa7-ef37-4f08-9b65-d9555acbe7fbn%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- 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/CAK21%2BhNsEmRrdxnDCbrZXqxam2pphcGysM4WpEmb0CS-wd3R6w%40mail.gmail.com.
