Newcomer question: How to manage recurring expenses with Beancount?

[mars...@gmail.com]

I'm looking at Beancount to get a better grasp of my expenses. A vital part of that are regular expenses, things like income, monthly rent, yearly insurance fees, or semesterly university fees. I'm surprised to find no documentation on how to manage such regular expenses with Beancount. I've searched the documentation, this group, and the web, but the closest thing I've found is the forecast plugin which marks itself as experimental and seems minimal.

Instead, I'm under the impression that I'm supposed not to project these costs into the future, but to just keep track of the actual transactions that have occurred in the past. However, this feels insufficient to me, since it seems important to know how much money I will have left next month to spend on running costs.

Therefore I would love some feedback on how you handle recurring expenses with Beancount and whether it's the right tool for what I'm looking for?

[Oon-Ee Ng]

I use fava's "budget". So for example I have these:-

2017-01-01 custom "budget" Expenses:Automobile:Petrol "yearly" 5000 MYR
2018-01-01 custom "budget" Expenses:Automobile:Petrol "yearly" 7000 MYR
2019-01-01 custom "budget" Expenses:Automobile:Petrol "yearly" 6000 MYR

Which allows me to set my annual petrol budget. This reflects in fava's view (and auto-splits to monthly if I'm selecting a monthly view).

Only useful if you're using fava though, sorry about that.

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[Martin Blais]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 6:57 AM <mars...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm looking at Beancount to get a better grasp of my expenses. A vital part of that are regular expenses, things like income, monthly rent, yearly insurance fees, or semesterly university fees. I'm surprised to find no documentation on how to manage such regular expenses with Beancount.

The author makes more money than he spends, so never cared much about budgeting.

> I've searched the documentation, this group, and the web, but the closest thing I've found is the forecast plugin which marks itself as experimental and seems minimal.

Look for "envelope budgeting" on the mailing-list, it's been discussed
before several times.

> Instead, I'm under the impression that I'm supposed not to project these costs into the future, but to just keep track of the actual transactions that have occurred in the past.

Recording history and extracting various reports from it has been the focus.

> However, this feels insufficient to me, since it seems important to know how much money I will have left next month to spend on running costs.
>
> Therefore I would love some feedback on how you handle recurring expenses with Beancount and whether it's the right tool for what I'm looking for?

You'd have to design an envelope budgeting scheme and perhaps a plugin
to auto-generate transactions in the future.
It's likely not very difficult, all the underlying pieces are in place
to do this.
But if you don't code Beancount itself doesn't provide a great
solution for this.

[Makdisse]

I wonder what did you end up using to achieve the outcome you needed?

[mars...@gmail.com]

I have yet to set up a working system. I've not even gotten invested in beancount yet.

I had planned to simply use beancount to get acquainted and if I needed more maybe develop a plugin. Though obviously I have to date shied away from that effort. ;)

[Jonah Benton]

FWIW I have been using beancount for many years, love it, but it is not the tool for modeling flows or forecasting. 

The data it captures can feed a model, but getting that model to a useful place can be quite a lot of work and is an entirely separate domain from the ledger. 

I think there is an opportunity for someone to put together a Jupyter notebook that brings in some basic modeling infrastructure and can pull in ledger data with SQL. Not a trivial task but would be quite useful for a lot of people. 

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[Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)]

On 27/04/2020 18.56, Jonah Benton wrote:

FWIW I have been using beancount for many years, love it, but it is not the tool for modeling flows or forecasting. 

The data it captures can feed a model, but getting that model to a useful place can be quite a lot of work and is an entirely separate domain from the ledger. 

I think there is an opportunity for someone to put together a Jupyter notebook that brings in some basic modeling infrastructure and can pull in ledger data with SQL. Not a trivial task but would be quite useful for a lot of people.

I have some code and a Jupyter notebook to graph assets and their current market prices, and it exactly does use Beancount's Python to SQL interface to fetch that data.

It's hacky, but I could share it, if there is interest.

-- 
Rudd-O
    http://rudd-o.com/