You’ve received a lot of excellent responses and perspectives already. To add to those, it seems to me like most of the issues you presented either are already solved and are trivial, and you might need just a bit of exploration of the Fava UI to get what you want; or are actually very deep questions requiring custom solutions that you might not realize as such. Specifically:
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. These seem to be UI issues that I don’t have, and I get annoyed rather easily with such issues. Platform/OS/version info might help. Recording a screen video and showing what you’re seeing would help a lot. Also, from what I can see, there is no way to limit the plots to just 2023 or 2024 etc. Type in 2023 or 2024 or ‘2023 - 2024’ into the ‘Time Box’ on the top. It’s very versatile. See here <http://172.19.83.239:5000/am-accounts/help/filters>. 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 text contrast is 100% fine for me. I imagine this is an OS or browser setting at your end. Does it match the screenshot here <https://beancount.github.io/fava/>? But now what? How can I answer questions like: - What is my net worth? Ease: trivial. That’s what the “Balance Sheet” tab already shows in its default view. Pick “Converted to USD”. Or use this link <http://172.19.83.239:5000/main-accounts/balance_sheet/?conversion=USD&time=year+-+day&interval=day> and bookmark it. Replace USD with your currency. Replace ‘main-accounts’ with your title in your ledger: option "title" "Main accounts" - What is my savings rate? Ease: trivial. Income Statements -> Net Profit (default). Use “Converted to “ and “Yearly”. - What is my FIRE date at the current savings rate? Ease: moderate - complex, but there are solutions that make this reasonably easy. This is a much deeper question than you might realize, involving dozens of assumptions in your mind that no good software can figure out for you. What do you consider your threshold for retirement? Will you earn at the same rate between now and then? What’s your expense profile between now, retirement, and at various milestones? Eg: are there loans/mortgages to be paid off? Major expenses? Unforeseen expenses and how you’ll mitigate for those? Withdrawal pattern in retirement and how it might be based on how well the market is doing? Will you downsize? How will your tax rate and profile change? Assumptions about the market in the next few decades. Etc. I personally use some scripts with Beancount to feed all my ledger data into a calculator like ficalc.app that includes things I said above - How much have I been spending on Expenses:Restaurants year-over-year? Ease: trivial. Income Statment -> Click on Restaurants in the treemap -> “Changes” -> Pick “Yearly” on the top right -> “Balances (Yearly)” This is really nice: it gives you stacked bars that instantly let you zero in on problem areas while also giving you an expandable tabular treemap. 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. I’d imagine 85-95% of your needs would not need bean-queries or other advanced solutions when you’re starting out. That’s the problem Fava solves. As your needs get more sophisticated, you’ll find yourself solving those. Beancount makes it very easy to write these custom solutions as fundamentally, Beancount is a versatile python library into your double-entry ledger. See a sample article <https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/computing-taxes-with-beancount/> for example, or Fava-Miler <https://github.com/redstreet/fava_miler>, which are among many things I use Beancount for. 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? Generally, answers everyone wants to see like some that you asked above are trivial. Advanced queries require custom solutions. Hope that helps! Happy accounting! -- 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/3df432fb-59a9-4070-9e37-44245c749704n%40googlegroups.com.
