On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 9:34 AM TF <[email protected]> wrote: > I’d like to get started using beancount for personal finance, and have > started on the tutorial, etc. I have some practical, (mostly) non-technical > questions that I haven’t found answers to. For example: > > - Do I need to create all my accounts from the start? They’re all > connected, of course — bank account pays credit-card bill and mortgage, > checking account funds savings, etc. if I don’t create them all at once, > how do I create those connections as I go? Eg, how can I “pay” a > credit-card bill before I’ve set up the credit card account? >
By "setup" you could mean one of two things: 1. Declaring the existence of the account, or 2. Filling it up with transactions that will show the correct balance at date. In order to post to an account, you need just the first. Furthermore, if you'd like that account to show the correct balance at some date, you can pad it with an entry against a generic equity account like "Opening-Balances". Just insert a Balance directive and a preceding (in date) Pad directive to have that done without having to calculate (this way you can then start filling up the account without having go always readjust the padding amount). There's an example here: https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/src/tip/examples/example.beancount > > - How much history does it make sense to create at the beginning? I would > have to import bank and card data (no Quicken file or equivalent). I see > there’s a way of starting an account, padding it to the present and then > going back to add historical transactions from some arbitrary point before > I started recording transactions but after the account-open date. Does it > make more sense to start with the present or a month back/several > months/beginning of the year? > That's really a choice that depends on how much time you want to invest before you get started. One reasonable way is to choose a starting date (e.g. Sep 1st) and update all the accounts you care about from that date on. A good date to start from is the beginning of the calendar year (although this late in December that will give you a fair amount of work to fill all of this in). Another way is to begin with just one account (e.g., if you care about budgeting, maybe start with only your credit card) and update the last month, and as you have more time fill in the past months as desired. I would say the very most important thing is not to sweat the little details too much and to get going and get into the habit, on say, basic accounts like your credit card (and/or checking account), updating them on a regular basis, and to automate importing for those, to develop a discipline to do that over several months. Just focus on nailing down the process for that. The expenses breakdown will already be worthwhile and when you're comfortable with this start expanding to other accounts. (Pretty quickly you'll be at a point where you'll have the desire to cover your entire balance sheet.) > > - What’s the best way to get up to speed on importing csv or Quicken-type > files downloaded from a bank? I assume there may be some amount of > scripting available (I can manage that much python). So far I’ve hand coded > my most recent transactions from my checking account, just to get a feel > for what’s involved, but I don’t want to keep doing that for long. > You'll have to write some small amount of code, there's no way around it unfortunately. OTOH there's some support library and tools and I created a little interface to try to organize the process and minimize the amount of code you'd have to write. There's an example CSV importer. Writing a QIF importer if pretty straightforward with qifparse (I have an example somewhere I could share). http://furius.ca/beancount/doc/ingest https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/src/tip/examples/ingest/ Also see other people's contributions here, there might be something for you: http://furius.ca/beancount/doc/contrib > > Thanks! > > -- > 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 [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/b67a08b4-b720-4b7b-9a3b-563c026109b6%40googlegroups.com > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAK21%2BhM9DgPEv%3DduN4t--VJzo35ehFB_B-ySyouLLHzgceZGew%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
