I'm reaching out for some advice on a few challenges I'm facing with Beancount. To give some context, I don't have any formal accounting education—everything I know is self-taught. I suspect many of my issues stem from that, but I'm eager to learn and improve.
This is the first time I'm tracking my finances seriously, with specific financial objectives in mind. I was previously using GNUCash, but I found the UX for budgets and reporting suboptimal for my needs. I really like the Fava UI in comparison—it's much more intuitive. Here are the main areas where I'm seeking help: - Automate recurring transactions (with reconciliation) and forecasting This is the feature I'm missing most from GNUCash. In GNUCash, I could set up recurring transactions using a mortgage formula that automatically calculated principal + interest. When you opened GNUCash, if a recurring transaction was due, you had the chance to review and apply it. That way, if something like a phone bill was higher than expected for some reason, you could modify it before posting. My main reason for tracking finances is to forecast: knowing how much money I'll have at certain points, when I'll reach X amount, or if there's a month where I need to keep extra in my regular account for annual payments. How can I achieve something similar in Beancount? Are there plugins, scripts, or best practices for automating recurring entries and generating forecasts? I have tried some of them but I feel they where too complicated or too simple this is, they just don't have any mechanisim for reconcile (beancount_periodic.recur/amortize) or the mechanism/setup is too involved (beanahead). - Buy milk from farmer. rigth now I do transactions like: ,---- | 2025-01-01 event "Milk price" "0.6 EUR" | 2025-01-01 price Milk 0.6 EUR | | 2025-02-27 txn "Milk" | Expenses:Groceries 6 MILK | Liabilities:Milk | | 2025-03-03 txn "Pay Milk January/February" | Assets:Cash -50.00 EUR | Liabilities:Milk `---- But this results in Fava reporting a liability of something like -300 MILK and 170 EUR, which isn't ideal. Of course, I don't want to track my daily milk consumption in detail. I set a price for MILK because I don't want to manually add the @ price every time, like this: ,---- | 2025-02-27 txn "Milk" | Expenses:Groceries 6 MILK @ 0.6 EUR | Liabilities:Milk `---- So, how can I fix this while still keeping track of how much I owe without cluttering reports with commodity quantities I don't care about? - Keep track of fuel consumpution AND KM/EUR Similar to the Milk issue but more involved. I have a car that can use LPG or Gasoline (95 or 98). Rigth now I do: ,---- | 2025-07-27 balance Equity:Hacks:Expenses:Coche:Kilometraje 154043.6 KM | | 2025-07-27 * "Fuel" | time: "06:06:39" | Expenses:Car:Fuel 15.91 LPG @@ 15.58 EUR | Expenses:Car:Fuel 12.43 G95 @@ 20.00 EUR | Equity:Hacks:Car:Fuel | Assets:Cash EUR | | 2025-07-27 * "LPG: Marino" | Expenses:Car:Fuel 25.32 LPG @@ 24.03 EUR | Equity:Hacks:Expenses:Car:Mileage 255 KM @@ 25.32 LPG | Equity:Hacks:Car:Fuel | Assets:Cash EUR `---- This feels too cumbersome, and I'm adding stuff to Equity that probably shouldn't be there. I want to track mileage, add maintenance events for the car, and calculate costs like EUR per KM so I can budget for long trips. What's a cleaner way to handle this in Beancount without hacks? - Net Profit Liabilities and Expenses I have a mortgage on my main house (it's my only one and not an investment). As far as I can tell, net profit is calculated without accounting for principal payments on the mortgage because those are treated as Liabilities, not Expenses. This doesn't make much sense for personal finance tracking. How can I adjust this? Or, alternatively, how can I calculate what money I really have available (Income - Expenses - Payments on Liabilities)? Thank you in advance for any insights, examples, or resources you can share. I'm happy to provide more details if needed. -- 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 visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/BAE3355E-E0A6-427C-84F6-F90826CA032E%40posteo.org.
