Beancount: Double-Entry Accounting from Text Files

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • beancount

    Beancount: Double-Entry Accounting from Text Files.

  • ledger

    Double-entry accounting system with a command-line reporting interface

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • hledger-flow

    An hledger/ledger-cli workflow focusing on automated statement import and classification

    I use hledger-flow [1]. It's an opinionated way of importing csvs into the hledger format. Works really well for me, just export the csvs, write a mapping and you are good to go.

    It supports preprocessing the csvs if you need to clean the data or compute some new fields which is really powerful. Once you are up and running it only needs some minor updates each month to map unidentifiable transactions I can do this in under an hour these days.

    [1] https://github.com/apauley/hledger-flow

  • Fava

    Fava - web interface for Beancount

    Fava is a nice GUI that's built on top of beancount, see https://github.com/beancount/fava

  • godbledger

    Accounting Software with GRPC endpoints and SQL Backends

    Shameless self plug: ive been building a similar open source command line accounting system

    https://github.com/darcys22/godbledger

    Its heavily inspired by both ledger and beancount but my biggest issue with them is that text files arnt great for double entry bookkeeping. Having a relational database is the better option which is what GoDBLedger has.

    After a certain point a business cant keep track of its transactions in text files because there are simply too many of them, so these systems really only scale to personal finance levels (few hundred transactions maybe thousand transactions).

    In addition building plugins that can import your whole text file into a sql system so you can query them is redundant. Just have it in a relational database to start with.

  • beancount_reds_importers

    Simple ingesting tools for Beancount (plain text, double entry accounting software). More importantly, a framework to allow you to easily write your own importers.

  • beancount-import

    Web UI for semi-automatically importing external data into beancount

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • npo-ledger-cli

    Give Up GitHub: https://GiveUpGitHub.org

    Software Freedom Conservancy uses it for their non-profit accounting. They have published their workflow here: https://github.com/conservancy/npo-ledger-cli/blob/master/np...

  • beancount-multiperiod-reports

    Multiperiod Reports by Month/Quarter/Year in Beancount. Plotting income and expenses over time. Treemap plot of expenses.

    You can plot your monthly or yearly spending with Jupiter like this:

    https://github.com/isabekov/beancount-multiperiod-reports

  • GnuCash

    GnuCash Double-Entry Accounting Program.

    There's an upcoming UI to input stock transactions and will explicitly request capital gains, so, there will be fewer opportunities for error.

    https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/818

  • fava-review

    A Fava extension to help review transactions over a series of periods.

    I've also created an extension for Fava that does something similar. It's still early days but already very useful.

    https://github.com/kubauk/fava-review

  • beancount-mobile

    Data entry app for Beancount plain-text accounting system

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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