You absolutely can filter by time, btw. It's one of the two search boxes on top (I forgot which). You can look at your balance sheet and income statement which is exactly what bean-report would've given you. And when you're looking at either statement, you can click on individual accounts to see their stock (or flow) over time.
The other search box on top lets you filter accounts in or out. So you could get your after tax savings rate by pulling up your income statement, filtering out income taxes, and looking at the expenses. But the better way to do that is which a plugin that renames accounts, because then you can put the income taxes under the Income account and both your income and expense statements will magically be after tax. Dashboards are where you get fancy, though. And I haven't gotten into dashboards myself because I don't need them. Sincerely, Timothy Jesionowski On Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 3:24 AM Adrian Utrilla <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CADMOc8Voa9WrCfADrubxrO-CTxhmuM0CxzTvrao65%2Bdiufq5xQ%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. 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