r/plaintextaccounting

Hi folks,

I’m a big Beancount fan and have been using it extensively to manage my personal finances.

Most of the time, I use Fava on my laptop to visualize my ledger. Fava is great, but I also wanted an easy way to check my finances from my phone. The main reason is that I want to look at my expenses, income, and assets more frequently on my phone, so I can develop a better sense of where my money is going and become more financially aware. Opening my laptop and starting Fava creates just enough friction that I don’t check it as often as I’d like.

I tried some existing iOS apps, but I ran into various issues when importing my own ledger. My Beancount setup contains multiple files, `include` directives, multiple currencies, and other things that didn’t always work as expected. I also felt that the available apps were missing some of the visualizations I personally wanted.

So I built an iOS app myself and tou can find it here: beanviz or download it in appstore.

Here are its main features:

1. Import a Beancount folder from iCloud Drive
2. Import from a private GitHub repository
3. Support for multi-file ledgers and `include` directives
4. Asset-allocation visualizations, including a sunburst chart
5. Expense breakdowns by category, month, day, transaction, and tag
6. Income versus expenses, income sources, and savings rate
7. Multi-currency conversion using the price directives already in the ledger
8. Everything is processed locally on the device
9. No account, analytics, tracking, or remote logging

Here is my own workflow with beanviz: I update my ledger on my laptop daily, push the changes to a my private GitHub repository, and then pull the latest version into beanviz to view the updated data on my phone.

I’d love to hear what you normally want to check when opening your ledger on your phone, and which visualizations or reports you think are still missing.

Below are some screenshots of the app:

https://preview.redd.it/8vzwb8hc2fah1.png?width=1242&format=png&auto=webp&s=d787491ad735f3e7257e4b722d77f8ade71bb45c

https://preview.redd.it/yqmc6owf2fah1.png?width=1242&format=png&auto=webp&s=16c7e71f41bfd1cdd58a980ab7897dbff8305b73

https://preview.redd.it/dikfnpwf2fah1.png?width=1242&format=png&auto=webp&s=4366fe65f5f65535f099d65e0550838c5a61e13b

https://preview.redd.it/y6sy5qwf2fah1.png?width=1242&format=png&auto=webp&s=2b2229828d83ddf46bbefd4ab06c79fa6bee99c0

I have a shell-function that uses ledger xact to identify a past-transaction matching a term and then update it with a new amount, so I can do things like

$ pay kroger 31.41

and it finds the most recent Kroger transaction and appends it to my transaction-log with the updated $31.41

It usually works fine. But for some reason, my transactions with Nothing Bundt Cakes consistently find a weird transaction. Today I issued

$ pay bundt 5.99

There were definite exact-match transactions for "bundt" that it should have found, and the only exact-match for "bundt" in my entire transaction-log is the one I wanted. Yet for some reason ledger instead identified some Lowe's transaction for a toilet-flapper and light-bulbs.

How does xact make its choice of which transaction gets matched?