Plain text accounting with Beancount

Plain text accounting is the idea of managing personal finances (or perhaps a small business, or club, or whatever) using a scriptable, command-line-friendly open source accounting software keeping all related data in plain text files which are easy to version control e.g. with git.

This is an alternative to using something like e.g. Intuit QuickBooks, Zoho Books, Xero, etc. or even just whatever one of your banks offers you built-in.

Beancount is one, among a suprising many, such tools, with an impressively rich community-based ecosystem around it. This includes transaction importers for many financial institutions, a Web front-end, etc.

Here is how to have a quick play with it to explore what it can do for you:

mkdir LearningBeancount && cd LearningBeancount

sudo apt install python3-venv
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate.fish

sudo apt install python3-dev
# sudo dnf install python3-devel
pip3 install --upgrade beancount==2.3.5 fava==1.23.1

bean-example >example.beancount
code example.beancount
# check it out... Accounts, Credit Card Liabilities, Investments with P&L, Taxes, Commodities with Prices, etc. (Ctrl-O)

# modify example.beancount, to break it, and see error:
bean-check example.beancount

fava -p 8080 example.beancount