If Fava does not give you all the answers you are looking for, then yes,
you need to write queries.
The issue with default reports is that everybody wants to have a slightly
different report, hence generic reports will never satisfy everybody. For
this reason even in a big multinational company I am working for, the IT
team has largely given up producing reports (as they were always blamed for
not being able to provide all the needed reports) and instead has given
people access to the data warehouse and Tableau to allow everybody to
generate own reports. By dropping bean reports and by promoting beanquery
Martin is doing pretty much the same with beancount.
E.g.
** What is my net worth?*
I use the following query to get a Net Worth at a specific date, converted
to a target currency and grouped by account
query = f"""
SELECT account, convert(SUM(position),'{currency}',{date_iso}) as amount
where date <= {date_iso} AND account ~ 'Assets|Liabilities'
"""
I personally created a Jupiter notebook, where I run different queries in
beanquery and then display and visualize the output.
So, I have my Jupyter notebook -based Fava equivalent (I am planning to
release it, once it has reached the proper status, but here
<https://github.com/Ev2geny/evbeantools/blob/main/docs/sing_curr_conv_usage.ipynb>is
an example on how beancount can be use from Jupyter).
And in this case beancount is extremely powerful. I just don't think there
is any other tool, which can provide as much power.
Surely you can read postings from CSV in pandas dataframe and analyze it
there. Also in the same way you can import CSV data in Excel and create
pivot tables and reports there. And it will work. But in my experience it
only works if you have one bank account in one currency. If you have
anything more complex then that, then it becomes quite difficult. Even if
you add one credit card or you lend money to someone, even in this case it
becomes not obvious how to do it.
But Imagine you have different bank accounts in different currencies,
credit cards, investment accounts. Plus you have mortgage, car, which
yearly depreciates in price etc. And then you move founds from one account
to another, you lend money, pay taxes, spend money in different
currencies, get paid in different currencies, at the same time exchange
rate between currencies constantly changes. Can you manage this complexity
with some simple python script of Excel pivot table? I do not think so.
And here beancount comes into play. As any complexity can be logged into
the simple beancount format, checked that it follows double entry
accounting rules and then analyzed with beanquery
On Monday, August 18, 2025 at 11:06:59 AM UTC+3 Viren Bhanot 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?
> * What is my savings rate?
> * What is my FIRE date at the current savings rate?
> * How much have I been spending on Expenses:Restaurants year-over-year?
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
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