I’ve switched over my personal finance accounting to a pretty neat open source software application called Beancount. Now, it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s best suited for coders/developers and similar types of people who don’t mind getting a little dirty with scripts and learning how to work with a tool on the command line.
With that said, I’ve been especially attracted to it’s simple and elegant data representation, which is all done in plain text! No wacky or proprietary data formats to worry about. Beancount, and it’s associated web front end Fava, do a lot of great stuff right out of the box. But my financial needs are a bit more complex, and so, for the past few months, I’ve been working on an assortment of Python, Bash, and PowerShell scripts to help do what I want with Beancount. I have a TON of ideas for improvements to the app!
To get things started, I’ve reorganized my singular repository into about 15 or so smaller ones. This is somewhat of an experiment, as I’ve never tried to maintain this many “small” repos before. We’ll see if the overhead drives me up the wall, or if it turns out to be coding bliss. Enough of me rambling, if you’re interested in seeing what I’ve currently made public, head on over to my Gitlab Profile page:
Full disclosure: some stuff might be broken until I go back through everything and vet it after the reorg. I’m advertising the public repos as available now because there is still some good stuff in there, and I want to start the process of networking with people and potentially collaborating on some of these mini-projects!
| Project Name | Description | Usable as of 2018-04-28? |
|---|---|---|
| Beancount Secure | Some ideas which increase the security capabilities of Beancount (which are basically non-existent). | No – ideation. |
| Beancount INS | Import and Sync capabilities that I’ve attempted to add to Beancount. | Yes – prototype. |
| Beancount Templates | Templates of transactions and entry helpers to make entering these templates easier. | Yes – prototype. |
| Beancount Vagrant | Creates a full Ubuntu based VM with all the necessary software to run Beancount (and Fava) using Vagrant and VirtualBox. (Recommend Beancount Fava Docker instead – see below!) | Yes. |
| Beancount Scheduler | Adds scheduled transactions and related capabilities to Beancount. | Yes – prototype. |
| Beancount Fava Docker | Containerizes Beancount and Fava using Docker technology (thanks to ‘yegle/fava’) and provides useful scripts to interface with Beancount when it is running in a Docker container. | Yes. |
| Beancount Ionic | A mobile/progressive app for Beancount which uses the Ionic Framework. Can run on basically all devices ranging from desktops, to phones! | No – prototype. |