#beancount — Public Fediverse posts

iOS app that scans grocery receipts into Beancount transactions, fully on-device

I think most #beancount users have some automation to import bank statements into their ledger. So do I. But when the monthly summary says "30%+ goes to groceries," I can't make a budget with that coarse number.

So I built #BeanBeaver: an iPhone app that turns a photo of a grocery receipt into a Beancount transaction — one posting per line item, each item sorted into an expense category.

How it works:
- OCR runs entirely on-device (PP-OCRv5 via ONNX Runtime). No server, no network, no analytics — it works in airplane mode.
- The parser uses each text fragment's position on the receipt (its bounding box) to extract merchant, date, item names, and prices.
- The output is plain Beancount text you can copy or share. Optionally, connect a GitHub repo and each scan opens a PR with the transaction.

It's in TestFlight now (iPhone, iOS 17+): https://testflight.apple.com/join/6mw5ScqH

I'd love to hear how it does on your receipts, and what would make it fit your workflow.

@alerque

Hi Caleb, I'm so excited to find that I'm not the only person interested in the breakdown of #beancount or other #plaintextaccounting

My current progress: Given this receipt

https://github.com/Endle/beanbeaver/blob/master/demo/receipt_groups/tnt_20251202/receipt_20260217_200222.jpg

It generates such beancount output:

https://github.com/Endle/beanbeaver/blob/master/demo/receipt_groups/tnt_20251202/2025-12-02_t_t_supermarket_32_70.beancount

After almost two months, I’ve finished first version of #BeanBeaver: it parses grocery receipts into #Beancount records.

https://github.com/Endle/beanbeaver

I hope I’m not the only person who cares about a grocery-by-item breakdown 🦫

After bouncing around ideas and several experiments, I've decided to launch a new project with the goal of creating CLI tooling that facilitates receipt handling for #plaintextaccounting workflows. LLM based OCR and data extraction has improved to the point that I believe it will be possible to make bulk data extraction useful. If you have ideas, want to contribute, or just want to follow along jump in:

https://codeberg.org/plaintextaccounting/acceptarium

#hledger #ledgercli #beancount #llm #ocr

@nobodyinperson I'm asking you first because involving #gitannex would be high on my priority list. Really this wouldn't need to be #hledger specific as it could just as well be paired with #ledgercli or #beancount either directly or via CSV or whatever. I'm not a huge GitLab fan these days but can do it if you prefer. Codeberg seems more aligned or GitHub having the advantage of contributor pool. Thoughts?

Vibe Coding 了一个扫描 Receipt 生成 #beancount 的工具，现在雏形跑起来了，感觉这开发效率有点快得可怕了

Last night, I did monthly1 accounting for my publishing business. And since it was the beginning of the year, I figured it would be an easy2 task to finally stop regenerating my accounting data from source .xlsx and .csv files from 2002 and just close off each year into a final .beancount.

It did not go well2.

I really need to get to the commission, but I'm going to try fixing it for a few hours before giving up until 2027.

#PlainTextAccounting #Beancount

1. Two months, I skipped December because I couldn't find the energy. ↩︎

2. I didn't do it because it was easy, I did it because I thought it would be easy. ↩︎ ↩︎

any #beancount or #fava users here? i’ve been wrestling with a fava-envelope bug for days and unfortunately, i think i’ve hit the upper ceiling of my limited python ability 😭 this is the issue i’ve filed on the repo if anyone’s able to help: https://github.com/polarmutex/fava-envelope/issues/107 i’d be eternally grateful

the initial installation simply fails, what i’ve had success doing is building from source in a virtual environment (homebred-installed python). the plugin registers but doesn’t render any information

hopefully fosstodon gets this to the right people! thanks so much in advance 🙏

#fosstodon @fosstodon #OpenSource #PlainTextAccounting #python

If you handle your #plaintextaccounting using either #vim or #neovim based on either #ledgercli or #hledger then be sure to update your plugins! The vim-ledger plugin got some much needed love in the last 48 hours with a lot of rough edges smoothed over and a few new features.

https://github.com/ledger/vim-ledger/releases/tag/v1.3.0

If you're a #beancount peep then carry on as before. If you do #bookkeeping without PTA at all then what are you even waiting for? If you use #emacs then this post is in another castle.

Who needs a financial advisor when you’ve got ten years of **plain text files**? 📂✨ Just spend a casual 3045 minutes each month in a thrilling relationship with #Beancount and voila, your bank statements become your best friends! 🤑🔧 Because nothing screams ‘financial wizard’ like being a spreadsheet sorcerer. 🪄📜
https://sgoel.dev/posts/10-years-of-personal-finances-in-plain-text-files/ #financialadvice #personalfinance #spreadsheets #moneymanagement #HackerNews #ngated

@nobodyinperson @realestninja Second on both counts here; #plaintextaccounting is the only way to fly. Any of #beancount, #ledger, or #hledger are decent choices which some tradeoffs for each, but the latter is my choice as well having tried the other two.

Going deep into #beancount; I can't get `bean-price` to work, but `pricehist` and some bash is magic:

```
uv run bean-query --no-errors --format csv books.bean 'SELECT DISTINCT currency' | tail -n +2 | tr -d '\r' | xargs -I {} uv run pricehist fetch -s 2025-10-01 -e 2025-10-24 -o beancount --quantize 2 --type close yahoo {} 2> /dev/null || true
```

... and I have price history for all my securities.

Pulindo a configuración do meu Emacs como "Python IDE", ainda non queda fina de todo.
Tamén probando BeanCount, para contabilidade en texto plano.
#emacs #emacsElpaca #eglot #tree-sitter #BeanCount

https://codeberg.org/salvari/emacs30_elpaca_public

Vim Macros for Beancount

https://tangled.sh/@adam.tngl.sh/vim-beancounting

#HackerNews #Vim #Macros #Beancount #Productivity #Coding #Tips

Нашёл исследование о бухгалтерских способностях языковых моделей:

https://accounting.penrose.com

Результаты любопытные. Не то, чтобы я доверил свой учёт сторонним сервисам без надлежащей ответственности, но попробовать поставить мелкую модель и потестить хочется, вдруг сможет.

И ещё момент: насколько хорошо они воспринимают текстовые системы типа #Ledger или #Beancount ? Масштабируемость у них безграничная, а формат устойчивый, было бы здорово

Finally upgraded to Beancount v3. My hand was forced when bean-price stopped working. Its latest version had Beancount v3 as a dependency. v3 is a breaking change but this post by @siddhantgoel helped a lot:
https://sgoel.dev/posts/moving-from-beancount-2x-to-3x/

#beancount #plaintextaccounting

For those of you who are into #PlainTextAccounting: Which software are you using and why?

I'd like to finally start personal accounting again. I stopped when #YNAB became SaaS. YNAB's "envelope budgeting" worked really well for me, and I'd like to get back to a similar workflow. (Or, if you think you know something superior, let me know!)

I'm very open to comments and suggestions here, but it has to be open source software.

#Beancount #hledger #ledgerCLI #ledger #accounting #FOSS

I think I'm giving up at keeping track of my money with Beancount, adding transactions to it is painful, so I always end up procastinating it, and after a couple months of procastination figuring everything out is pretty much impossible...

Maybe I should make my own simpler but quicker tool for that instead...

#Beancount

My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024)
https://fangpenlin.com/posts/2024/12/30/my-beancount-books-are-95-percent-automatic/
#ycombinator #beancount #startup

My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024) — https://fangpenlin.com/posts/2024/12/30/my-beancount-books-are-95-percent-automatic/
#HackerNews #Beancount #Automation #PersonalFinance #FinancialTracking #Productivity

https://joyful.com/Lot+tracking+in+PTA

Tracking investment lots is often necessary to calculate capital gains accurately and to comply with tax law. It's a tricky, increasingly widespread bookkeeping need. This page aims to be a useful guide to the topic, for PTA users and PTA developers.

#plaintextaccounting
#hledger
#ledgercli
#beancount
#bookkeeping

Today, for the first time in several years of reading, I seem to be getting the hang of #plaintextaccounting [1]. Whenever I have read the #beancount [2] docs in the past, I have found the concept incredibly difficult to understand. However, after stumbling across the #Hibiscus project [3], with a focus on German #banking, and several other tools (ofxget, beancount_reds_imp.), I seem to be making progress!

[1]: https://plaintextaccounting.org/
[2]: https://beancount.github.io/docs/index.html
[3] https://www.willuhn.de/products/hibiscus/

Going through #beancount's documentation and being overwhelmed when it's supposed to be the "easier" of the #plaintextaccounting tools (compared to #ledger) makes me feel a lot of trepidation for trying to set this up.

Almost all the documentation for these tools seems to assume you already have a file set up with your accounts information to some degree.

Good morning all. More robust #beancount export has landed in #hledger master, if you’d like to help me test before release.
This should just work (maybe with a few --alias options):

hledger print -o foo.beancount
pip install fava
fava foo.beancount

Docs: https://hledger.org/dev/hledger.html#beancount-output

#plaintextaccounting