On 2021-02-07 10:23, Dustin Farris wrote:
I've been using beancount for a little over a year [...] 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.
Don't feel bad. I think it took me like 3 or more tries over some years to finally get off the ground. I think the most important takeaway is that we each have to find some workflow that suits us. It's highly personal, IMO. Not only that, but there are a few related proficiencies / tools that I think I finally got into place /around/ Beancount to facilitate the process in a way that worked for me (and I will touch more on these below).
* 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?)
When first starting out, I remember reading Martin's advice to handle things more manually, and more frequently. Like you, I thought the way to go was to automate as much as possible. So I spent a lot of time (and a couple complete failures) going down that path. I think I can attribute a big part of my recent success doing a more "manual" and frequent approach. Which really means, I created some tools to very quickly and easily facilitate this "manual" entry process (more on this further down). Personally I also found the automatically imported data quite ugly (all caps, etc.) and often not very descriptive, either, which bothered me a lot.
* 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?)
To split files or not is a subject you can find a lot of discussion about on this list, but I decided on "one big file" because I seem to recall reading about / experiencing some other small/subtle issues that can happen when splitting files (account name completion, etc.). OTOH, I keep a lot of my (non-Beancount) personal notes in a more Zettelkasten-like style (many smaller notes) so perhaps that helps you get your head around things, particularly separate entities like rental properties. I think if/when I start another business entity again, I might probably do a separate file for that. So, this one I think, is personal... Anyway, it sounds to me like your real problem is navigation. Nothing to add to what Martin said, get that sorted and I think it will solve that problem for you. Like Martin I am also an Emacs user. Which is something else that took me many tries to get off the ground with, in it's own right... So either give Emacs /yet another/ try (and keep doing so until you succeed), or figure out a way to do similar things in other editor of your choice. But this is why we love Emacs so much, it is a completely customizeable environment and can do so much, once you get the hang of it.
* 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
I do this for all manner of code snippets and other seldom used information. A personal knowledge base, if you will. Of course, again implemented in Orgmode / Emacs. ;)
* reconciling receipts / splitting transactions is time consuming, although vim macros help here * Todo: Improve importer recognition of payees and likely expense accounts
I devised a little "worksheet" based on a couple Orgmode tables to help facilitate the splitting process (on nontrivial, i.e., "long" receipts, with many different Expense accounts) more quickly and easily. I have been meaning to make a video to demonstrate, but if there is interest perhaps I could start a new thread on the list to discuss that separately.
* no way to attach receipt pictures to transactions? * Todo: Research beancount tooling or other apps to capture receipts
In fact, the tool I wrote handles all of the above in one go. I simply take photos (with smartphone, usually immediately) of all of my receipts. Which are then synced automatically across devices with SyncThing. Later at desktop/laptop I invoke my function from Dired in Emacs which prompts me for things like Payee, amount, etc. from the receipt. It then re-names the receipt photo filename accordingly, and also generates the Beancount transaction, because I realized it's largely the same information. But most importantly, you only need to "touch" each receipt once. And the whole process really is facilitated by nice completing-read style interfaces, based on Controlled Vocabulary of Payees and things like that, making it very fast and easy and eliminating things like typos from truly manual entry. I posted to the list about my workflow starting with taking a photo of a receipt once before, but there was no interest it seemed. If that has changed, I would be happy to being it up again (perhaps in a new thread). I think I finally realized, that a lot of the guys on this list are probably making so much money that they are more interested in tracking their investments / net worth than their expenses any more. :D Cheers, TRS-80 -- 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/d30d90819a30aabf7319e5ba486ac0a5%40isnotmyreal.name.
