How to live stream transactions?

[Rick Lan]

Hello,

Seeing that fava can detect bean file changes, is there a way to live stream beancount transactions to a ledger? Or ideas on how to assemble such a workflow from existing tools?

Motivation: I have been using beancount for a couple of years. I also live in a country where cash is still used often. Instead of batching up receipts monthly, I find it more sensible to enter the transaction and choose the expense type right after spending the cash. Receipts sometimes are lost. And it takes longer to recall the spending type later. Currently I am using a Google Form to capture this information in a CSV. Then, monthly, I run a custom import script whose output is a bean file. It would be helpful to be able to stream transactions to a ledger. Fava picks up the changes. This also opens the door for adding balance alerts.

Regards,
Rick

[Rick Lan]

[Chary Chary]

Hi,

are you running Fava on your desktop PC or on a server?

Regardless of this, why don't you just have some job which periodically (e.g. daily or even more often) collects all transactions, entered in Google Form and adds them to beancount ledger?

[Rick Lan]

Hi,

Thank you for sharing.

I am running Fava in docker on a server.

A periodic job is a solution. I am leaning towards reusing existing tools such as n8n or Apache Airflow and as low-code, open-source and self-host-able as possible. A cursory glance reveals if webhooks exists in Fava or beancount, the entire workflow would work. I probably should check the beancount contribution list.

Regards,