Advice on alternative accounting system for trading (including daytrading)

[Marcio A. Vianna F. (mvianna)]

Hi, all.

Are you aware of accounting software targeted at a similar audience as Beancount, but meant for trading taxes, tracking and accounting? In common with Beancount, desirable features would be:

* flexible (customizable)

* extensible

* python

* for small businesses or personal use

* scalable at least to a certain point

All solutions I find on the internet are too limiting and may demand worksome workarounds.

The issue has been brought up some times on this board and it seems it is now acknowledged that this kind of application isn't in the scope of Beancount or its future developments (correct me if I'm wrong). I've been away from Beancount for some years, so that I cannot recall exactly what made Beancount a less-than-perfect fit for trading, but I think two needed features would be: time of transaction, mean value of inventories, inventories with negative balance (short positions). I could give up the plain-text advantages for sqlite or other rdms if needed.

Any tips in this regard?

Many thanks.

Marcio

[Marcio A. Vianna F. (mvianna)]

Just to make it clear: I've been thinking of using Beancount for general personal finance (tracking expenses, earnings etc.), with investment portfolio lumped up as "holdings" or so. These "holdings" would be updated from time to time with profits/losses or profit/losses accrued. Only the details of the actual single trades would have to be managed in the other application.

Marcio

[Martin Blais]

I've developed Johnny for that purpose (https://github.com/edgebips/johnny), in the context of retail trading (not pro).

It's not really in a state that's easy for others to use TBH. 

In theory it could be, but if you used it you'd be 90% sure to his some corner case that's not supported, e.g. some transaction type I've never encountered and don't support.

Broadly speaking, for that use case you need 

- more sophisticated transaction types wit some common fields

- the volume of transactions is such you'd want this in a table format, one line per transaction, ideally going to a database. Beancount is designed to be user-editable and too verbose.

- you'd also want to automate everything (ingest the data from your brokers, normalize it in the same schema, etc) with as little manual intervention as possible.

- Beancount doesn't handle derivatives with multipliers too great right now (futures and options), you have to multiply by hand, its symbology has to be extended to support that (Johnny does that fine)

So Beancount is fine for investments, say ~100 equities or funds positions with dividends and monthly transactions, but when you're talking about 1k-100k or more trades/month - still retail level but a bit more dedicated - Beancount isn't a great solution for that.

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[Marcio A. Vianna Fº]

Hi, Martin,

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

I think I have already, but will again have a look at johnny.

Regards.

Marcio

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