westurner on How you can track your personal finances using Python

Comment on How you can track your personal finances using Python

We take the output of the previous step, pipe everything over to our .beancount file, and "balance" transactions.

Recall that the flow of money in double-entry accounting is represented using transactions involving at least two accounts. When you download CSVs from your bank, each line in that CSV represents money that's either incoming or outgoing. That's only one leg of a transaction (credit or debit). It's up to us to provide the other leg.

This act is called "balancing".

Balance (accounting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_(accounting)

Are unique record IDs necessary for this [financial] application? FWICS, https://plaintextaccounting.org/ just throws away the (probably per-institution) transaction IDs; like a non-reflexive logic that eschews Law of identity? Just grep and wc?

What does the ledger look like?

I wrote earlier that one of the main things that Beancount provides is a language specification for defining financial transactions in a plain-text format.

What does this format look like? Here's a quick example:

  option "title" "Alice"
  option "operating_currency" "EUR"

  ; Accounts
  2021-01-01 open Assets:MyBank:Checking
  2021-01-01 open Expenses:Rent

  2021-01-01 * "Landlord" "Thanks for the rent"
      Assets:MyBank:Checking     -1000.00 EUR
      Expenses:Rent               1000.00 EUR

What does the `*` do?

freddie_mercury 5y

The star is just an 1-digit field for "flag". I don't think there are any defined semantics for the field but by convention 'star' means something 'no special flags on this transaction'.

People use other flags to indicate, for instance, whether a transaction has been reconciled, or cleared their bank, or whatnot.

Comments