On Sunday, May 17, 2020 at 10:01:12 AM UTC+7, Runar Petursson wrote: > > My real mental block was around how to organize my beans. Single file? > Where do I put new transactions? What about staging transactions from > imports? Auto-match/tag/payee? What about other entities (wholly owned > companies, partially owned companies). How would I track passive income, > trading income etc. There seem to be about as many workflows as users. >
I have things split into multiple files. When I first started I saw that beancount supported that and it appealed to my OCDness along with vague "well, I wouldn't put all my source code in a single file..." feelings. I mostly regret it. Beancount has a few admittedly work-aroundable unresolved bugs around supporting multiple files (like plugins having to be defined in the main file; options have to be redefined in every sub-file; possibly others since per Martin's own statement "File includes were bolted on as per a quick request a long time ago") and most 3rd party tooling definitely doesn't understand the concept and won't work as expected. The sub-files have no reference to the containing file. So any file-centric tooling will struggle to figure out what is going on. As an example: say you have main.bean, accounts.bean, commodities.bean, prices.bean, and balance-statements.bean. If you open up balance-statements.bean in an editor it won't find any open/close statements and won't be able to provide any tooling support. Open up prices.bean and it won't find any commodity statements. Worse, you have to understand enough about beancount to know that this kind of multiple-file approach is a bad idea and why your editor isn't working the way you think it should. Luckily, beancount makes thing easy to move around, so this isn't exactly the end of the world. There is something theoretically appealing about having each automated/external data source going into its own file. Yahoo prices quote go here; IBKR imports go there. But it doesn't actually matter in practice and the downside is running into some corner case issue in beancount or external tooling with multiple files. In practice, I think just using code folding is easier & better than splitting things into multiple files. If there were a "smart" beancount file sorter (that kept comments and whatnot) it would make this approach even better. I've been meaning to write something like that for a long time and just....haven't. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/b4a1521d-5dd5-4874-96af-5b176a83dd99%40googlegroups.com.
