Help getting started - new Beancount user

[Anantharaghavan Sridhar]

Hi Beancount community,

(Apologies if this question is a repeat; if I've missed something that answers this, please do point me to the right place).

I'm a new user, and am unsure if I should start building my scripts/tools around v2 or v3. Any advice? Any top of mind pros/cons to either choice?

To build some familiarity with the state, I spent the last ~1 week reading docs and code from the master branch of beancount, beangulp and Red's importers (and skimmed through a bunch of other repos as well). It seems to me like everyone's contributions (e.g. Red's importers, Jeremy's beancount-import) are all based on Beancount v2, unless I missed something.

Appreciate any advice!

Thanks,

Ananth

[Red S]

I'm a new user, and am unsure if I should start building my scripts/tools around v2 or v3. Any advice? Any top of mind pros/cons to either choice?

To build some familiarity with the state, I spent the last ~1 week reading docs and code from the master branch of beancount, beangulp and Red's importers (and skimmed through a bunch of other repos as well). It seems to me like everyone's contributions (e.g. Red's importers, Jeremy's beancount-import) are all based on Beancount v2, unless I missed something.

IMHO, it’s still is a very valid question for the reasons you mentioned. Martin started recommending v3 over v2 ~1.5 years ago. That thread has some good reasons for picking v3. As a personal data point, I still haven’t upgraded because the ecosystem hasn’t fully yet, and I have zero time to fix my workflow issues or find gaps. Although someone posted just a few days ago that Fava now supports v3. Reds-importers will support it as soon as I get some time or someone contributes.

So what should a new user pick? I don’t mean to oppose Martin’s recommendation, but IMHO, new users need to freely explore the ecosystem to understand their needs and workflows, and for that reason, I’d say v2 would be the better option right now, though that might change very soon. The good news is, upgrading to v3 in the future should be very easy because the ecosystem will eventually fully support it.

Hope that helps. Welcome, and good luck!

​

[Petr Beránek]

Hi,

From my experience: I started with Beancount v2 about 2 years ago. If I'm not mistaken, most of the docs are still referencing v2, so for a beginner it may be a good option for initial exploration.

Once I started to invest into automation (using both CLI tools and Beancount as a Python library), I moved to v3 as it is meant to be the future (pre-built wheels are also nice). I think v2 is frozen and receives no further updates.

Best regard,
Petr

Dne čt 2. 1. 2025 19:35 uživatel Red S <redst...@gmail.com> napsal:

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[Anantharaghavan Sridhar]

Thank you for the comments Petr and Red! I think the bigger challenge I'll need to tackle immediately is being disciplined enough to use the tools regularly (and achieve the goal on Red's blog - make updates to my ledger a <1 minute task). :)

So perhaps v2 is the easier place for me to get started and build my habits. Once that's done, I suspect it won't take too much effort to upgrade to v3 when the time comes.

Thanks,

Ananth