beancount for travel and investing purposes
Fabian Braennstroem
I am quite new to beancount (and in accounting in general) and are testing a few
minor things at the moment with version 3.
At the moment I am planing to use it for two topics. One is for travelling and
another one is for calculating tax relevant gains from
investing (with interarctive brokers), which needs to be converted to EUR
currency gain. For my understanding that is possible with beancount, but I missed up
to now a good example case for it. Maybe someone can point me to one? This would
be great!
As mentioned, in addition to these investing tasks, I would like to track my business trips and also count days abroad or days in a hotel.
For my understanding I am having different options to track this.
I saws this: https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/NGt2BRHR6LE
and understand, that I can use tags, meta or links for additional information.
It seems that meta is a good option.
Maybe I could even use a special NIGHT-currency also for tracking it.
But I am not sure yet, what the best way is to get e.g. the number of nights
which I stayed in a hotel in a certain time frame and what I paid for this.
E.g. I could state a stay of 3 night in these two ways:
```
2025-03-11 * "Hotel in Berlin (3 nights)"
date: "2025-03-08" ; Booking date
nights: 3 ; Number of nights
purpose: "Conference"
Expenses:Travel:Accommodation:Hotel 300.00 EUR
Assets:Bank:Checking -300.00 EUR
2025-03-08 * "Hotel in Berlin (3 nights)"
firstNightDate: "2025-03-11" ; date of 1st night
nights: 3 ; Number of nights
purpose: "Conference"
Expenses:Travel:Accommodation:Hotel 300.00 EUR
Assets:Bank:Checking -300.00 EUR
SELECT SUM(position), entry.meta['nights'] as nights
WHERE account ~ '^Expenses:Travel'
GROUP BY nights
I get something like this:
---------- -
600.00 EUR 3
nights.
Do you have an advice how I can adjust my query for this?
Thank you in advance!
Best Regards
Fab
Patrick Ruckstuhl
Hi Fab,
welcome to your journey with beancount :)
First for your journey questions. I think if you need/want the days, having it as a special currency instead of just metadata might be useful.
This allows you to do calculations/aggregations on them, which I think you can't do with the metadata. I use here a separate expense account for the "NIGHTS", because I don't like to mix "Currencies", but you could keep it in the same one as you keep the monetary expenses.
I'm modeling the other side of the nights as Equity, personally
that feels cleaner than putting in Assets/Liabilities.
I'm guessing this is just for your own interest, not for
reimbursing, otherwise I would model it differently.
```
option "operating_currency"
"EUR"
2025-01-01 open Expenses:Travel:Accommodation:Hotel EUR
2025-01-01 open Assets:Bank:Checking EUR
2025-01-01 open Expenses:Travel:Nights NIGHTS
2025-01-01 open Equity:Nights NIGHTS
2025-03-11 * "Hotel in Berlin (3 nights)"
date: "2025-03-08" ; Booking date
purpose: "Conference"
Expenses:Travel:Accommodation:Hotel 300.00 EUR
Expenses:Travel:Nights 3 NIGHTS
Assets:Bank:Checking -300.00 EUR
Equity:Nights -3 NIGHTS
2025-03-08 * "Hotel in Berlin (3 nights)"
firstNightDate: "2025-03-11" ; date of 1st
night
purpose: "Conference"
Expenses:Travel:Accommodation:Hotel 300.00 EUR
Expenses:Travel:Nights 3 NIGHTS
Assets:Bank:Checking -300.00 EUR
Equity:Nights -3 NIGHTS
and you can query that information like
WHERE account ~ '^Expenses:Travel' GROUP BY entry_meta('purpose')
As for dealing with investments from IBKR, I'm doing this as well.
My use case is pretty simple and boring, mostly buy and hold. For this I have built two things which are useful for me
An importer which pulls, buys and dividends directly from IBKR
https://tariochbctools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/importers.html#interactivebrokers
A price import which pulls the price information for securities from IBKR
https://tariochbctools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/price_fetchers.html
For general documentation about investments, this part of the official beancount doc is a very good starting point
https://beancount.github.io/docs/trading_with_beancount.html
Regards,
Patrick
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Vasily M
I was interested in tracking trip expenses on a high level as well and recently solved this for myself, at least to the point I'm satisfied with.
The starting point was the awesome https://github.com/andreasgerstmayr/fava-dashboards plugin for Fava that already had "Travel" tab in examples but it wasn't clear to me how to use it without much friction. I ended up slightly altering it and finding some practices that make it straightforward.
It's all included in https://github.com/Evernight/lazy-beancount and I've also described various tips at the guide's section here: https://lazy-beancount.xyz/docs/stage4_improvements/overview/#tracking-trips-and-travel-expenses (of course, you don't have to use the whole package and can just reproduce the bits separately). Well, this point is currently just a single sentence but hopefully other tips and context make it more understandable. In any case, happy to expand on technical details.
1. Adding #trip-trip-id-maybe-also-date-05-24 and #travel tags make all transactions appear in the dashboard. This allows to view them in Fava views and indeed write BQL queries, etc. The Expenses breakdown dashboard tab then also becomes useful but I had to patch Fava (pull request pending) to make it work.
2. Usually trips happen over continuous period of time and most of transactions happening within this period can be automatically categorized into this trip. I use / wrote filter_map plugin to avoid manual tagging.
3. You also may be interested in https://github.com/Akuukis/beancount_interpolate plugin to use, for example, with transactions related to booking accommodation. For dashboards and other analytics you can virtually move transaction to a different date than a date of payment and spread the cost across number of days.
4. Indeed, metadata is a good mechanism for further customization. I guess the only point to add here is that you can easily plug queries into your customized dashboards for more visual representation.
Best regards,
Vasily