On 19.05.2020 15:44, Justus Pendleton wrote:
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.
I'm splitting up things quite a bit and it works quite well for me.
I have lots of automatic price updates which get written into an own
file each and also most importers use their own file.
Fava works very well with multiple files and it has support for
automatically placing new transactions in the correct file.
Regards,
Patrick
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