On Mon, Aug 18, 2025 at 10:06 AM Viren Bhanot < [email protected]> wrote:
> I cannot understand how to actually *use* beancount to do *anything*. From > what I see, *bean-report* doesn't exist anymore, and certainly not in my > installation of beancount from AUR on Arch (btw). > > If I load my ledger into *fava*, I see some poorly-designed plots not > useful for analyses. I don't get the fuss. The plot area is too small, the > colours don't contrast well, the tooltips often goes off-screen, or covers > the plot so I cannot see where I am. Also, from what I can see, there is no > way to limit the plots to just 2023 or 2024 etc. The most useful view is > the Treemap of Expenses, but even their the text contrast is poor and I > can't seem to generate it year-by-year. The documentation also seems > non-existent. > > The act of actually wrangling ten years of financial data into beancount > was meditative, and a task I enjoyed thoroughly. But now what? How can I > answer questions like: > > * What is my net worth? > In fava, go to Balance Sheet, and then instead of "At Cost" select "Converted to <CURRENCY>". * What is my savings rate? > How do you define it? Before tax, after tax? I use fava-dashboards with a query I wrote myself for this. > * What is my FIRE date at the current savings rate? > Again, how do you define this? What are the expected returns of your different assets? > * How much have I been spending on Expenses:Restaurants year-over-year? > You can either run a query, or fava-dashboards comes with a default dashboard that basically does this. Must I generate *bean-queries* for everything? Because that rather defeats > the purpose of a ledger file in my opinion. I could just as easily list my > postings on CSV and write python queries to it. What's more, I don't see > how it could be interactive and *fast*? In the absence of a quick feedback > loop, what exactly is the tedium of writing out all of my postings going to > get me? > Yes, you must generate queries for everything or use a plugin that does this for you. The plugin would have to necessarily be opinionated and make many assumptions. I don't really see why you think this defeats the purpose of a ledger file: a ledger is a book where transactions are recorded, not a crystal ball that predicts what questions you want answered. I used a Google Sheet before beancount. Beancount gets you many things. You can add properties to transactions. There's many plugins (e.g. beancount-periodic) that do things that would be tedious in a spreadsheet. You can write automatic importers that make best guesses at transaction categories. It's easier to write queries than in a spreadsheet. The data is more structured. You have balance assertions, you can specify tolerances, and a million other features. Can you do this with a CSV file and Python scripts? Probably, as long as it's computable, Python can compute it. But I think you'll find that you're rewriting chunks of beancount. As I said, I apologise if I come across a bit cranky but I think that. > despite the trove of writing by Martin, I'm missing something fundamental > about beancount. > > -- > 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/dcd8ed97-0fca-47a2-965d-dcb30b41a981n%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/dcd8ed97-0fca-47a2-965d-dcb30b41a981n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- 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/CADMOc8Voa9WrCfADrubxrO-CTxhmuM0CxzTvrao65%2Bdiufq5xQ%40mail.gmail.com.
