Heya beancounters,

  I'm struggling to organize my financial documents in a way that is
both consistent and supported by Beancount/Fava and I'd like to hear
from others what best practices you're using.

The main disconnect I notice is between statements documents and
everything else:

1) via the "documents" option beancount has great support for bank
   statements and similar documents. You just drop them using a name
   like documents/Assets/Bank/Checking/YYYY-MM-DD.pdf and they show up
   in your ledger. I want no more/less than this.

2) but I also want to store other documents and associate them to either
   transactions as a whole or even individual transaction postings.
   Examples are: receipts (for payments, donations, etc.), invoices,
   paychecks, etc.

As far as I can tell Beancount itself has not direct support for (2),
please correct me if I'm wrong. You can drop them into the same
directory structure for (1), but that doesn't associate them with
individual transactions or postings.  Fava, OTOH, has the
"link_statement" plugin which supports (2). Aside from a lack of
generality[^], that allows to link documents to transactions/legs.

[^]: https://github.com/beancount/fava/issues/740

But where do you store the documents for use case (2)? If you store them
in the same directory for (1), there is a use clash, and documents
appear both as associated to transactions and in the journal flow --- at
least conceptually, no matter what Fava actually does, which I find
annoying.

It seems to me we lack a Beancount *native* (as opposed to
Fava-supported) way of associating documents to either transactions or
postings. Or am I missing something here? Is this planned and/or being
discussed anywhere else?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts / comments on this.
Cheers
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli . z...@upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director  . . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

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