Sorry for not being clear. My end goal for using beancount is that I want to know future income/expenses and plan accordingly. This is, be able to answer: How much MONEY will I have at X date? Will I have enough money in the bank to pay Y? When would I have saved enough to buy Z?
Makes sense. In terms of reporting, the closest “standard” report that will help with that is usually called a “Cashflow report”, which is different from a “Net Profit” report. I’d recommend spending a few minutes with AI to dig in and understand these better. > On Mon, 27 Oct 2025 02:05:09 -0700 (PDT) "[email protected]" wrote: > So money flows from Assets:Bank to Liabilities:Mortgage and Expenses:Interest. There’s > nothing you should have to do: your net profit and net worth should all compute > correctly as expected. Which confused me, maybe I didn't hunderstand what redst was telling me or I didn't explain correctly. Now, what I am doing, is using "plugin "beancount_reds_plugins.rename_accounts.rename_accounts" to rename mortage pricipal to an expense in fava. This works great and now my Net Profit reflects correctly. if there is another way towhat money I really have available (Income - Expenses - Lean payments on Liabilities) I am all ears If you rename a Liability account into an Expense account, that would have a lot of unintended effects on your ledger and reporting. It breaks the bookeeping paradigm a bit. For example, now your ledger says you had a huge negative expense the year you bought your house. That said, doing it with my plugin above is a great way to experiment as it’s trivially revertible. See this thread <https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/fTlSnQRPayo/m/f53cF1RLBgAJ> on how to generate a Cashflow report and fine tune it to your needs. Which resources do you recommend? Is the book tracking your finances with python worth it? I know some programming, but I haven't touch python in ages. As I told: I don't want to spend hours to accomplish my financial tracking goals, but also the reason to use beancount was it extensibility if it will let me say, automate getting my bank statements and create dashboards with the info I need... it will be worth it. If you want to create custom reports or dashboards, or automate a lot using the Beancount ecosystem, you would need to be very comfortable with Python. What I’d suggest in getting started is to get your initial ledger created, figure out the most important set of questions you want to ask of your ledger, and then work through them (like you already seem to be doing). You’ll gain a much better sense of what you need to go towards, in a little bit. regarding milk I want to do this: 2025-11-07 * "Milk" Expenses:Groceries 3 MILK @ 0.6 EUR Liabilitios:Milk EUR without having to specify "@ 0.6 EUR" in every transaction, I want beancount to take the price directive. Why? because I know how many liters I take everytime, but I don't know if the price may have change. If I don't specify "@ 0.6 EUR" my liabilities in fava will show I owe lot of milk and that they owe me EUR. unless of course I select convert to EUR. I think you may be confounding the problem you’re trying to solve with the solution. A solution in Beancount is subject to its syntax and such that you must adhere to. But other than that, this is the straightforward part. The tricker part is the problem. I still can’t say I understand what you’re trying to accomplish around milk. Writing down a problem statement would help. Even better, spend a few minutes going back and forth with AI on this, and that should help. -- 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/767b76bf-961c-4584-9e79-e5aacf44584bn%40googlegroups.com.
