Airline miles: expiry and value reporter for Fava, Beancount [fava_miler]

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Red S

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May 6, 2020, 2:08:27 AM5/6/20
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This is a simple but useful extension I've used for a while, and would like to share.


pip install fava-miler


Airline miles and rewards points: expiration and value reporting for Fava/Beancount (Personal finance software).

Introduction

Airline miles and rewards points typically expire after a period of inactivity. They also can be viewed as having a value in a currency of your choice. If you track airline mile transactions in Beancount, this simple plugin reports on the value of miles and their expiry date. This is particularly useful if you have miles/points on many airlines or businesses.


Screenshot: Miler

Installation

pip install fava-miler

Configuring your beancount source

  • Define your operating_currency
  • Declare the currency for each of your airline miles
  • Add expiry-months and points-value metadata to your commodity declaration

This should get the reporter working. Example:

option "operating_currency" "USD"
1990-01-01 commodity MILESAIRALD
    expiry-months: 24
    points-value: 0.015 USD

2000-01-01 open Assets:Miles:AirAldorra MILESAIRALD
2000-01-01 open Income:Misc

2010-01-01 * "Credit card miles"
        Assets:Miles:AirAldorra 100 MILESAIRALD
        Income:Misc

Running

beancount

./miler.py --help

fava

Add the following to your source and run fava as you normally would.

2010-01-01 custom "fava-extension" "fava_miler" "{
  'accounts_pattern' : '^Assets.*Reward',
  'exclude_currencies' : '(POINTS_ABC)|(POINTS_DEF)',
}"












Martin Michlmayr

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May 6, 2020, 5:40:09 AM5/6/20
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* Red S <redst...@gmail.com> [2020-05-05 23:08]:
> Github <https://github.com/redstreet/fava_miler>
>
> Airline miles and rewards points: expiration and value reporting for
> Fava/Beancount (Personal finance software).

I can't tell you how happy this fava module makes me... I've used
ledger for many years and while I put a lot of data into ledger,
ledger doesn't make it easy to actually *do* something with the data.

So I had big plans with beancount and fava, but never found time to
work on it. But fava-miler is *exactly* the kind of stuff I want to
do. Thanks so much for creating it and for inspiring me to do similar
things... I have to think about some ideas and actually make time to
implement them.

--
Martin Michlmayr
https://www.cyrius.com/

Martin Blais

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May 18, 2020, 5:21:16 AM5/18/20
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Thanks Red, I added a link to the contrib doc.

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Red S

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Sep 16, 2020, 1:51:52 PM9/16/20
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Thank you for the kind words!

Many of us have benefited from the fantastic community here sharing code around personal finance. Agreed: it would be great to see extensions of this into closely related topics that might be a natural fit for solving via Beancount/Fava. Healthcare related analyses (in the US), or extracting automobile related analyses, or tax forecasting, for example.

I have bits and pieces of some of these and more that work for me, and will try to clean up a few things and share them at some point to spark an interest if nothing else.
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