Beancount Workflow

Tracking Transactions

The easiest way to track transactions is to just check each asset and check if previous transactions have been recorded automatically. This will be true for most assets, but wrong for assets such as cash in wallet.

It requires two things:

• Adding the involved accounts if they're not already in Beancount.
• Recording manually the transactions that are not recorded automatically by any entity.

For example, if I open a new bank account, I have no way to know it exists through Beancount. So I need to add a new account just after I've opened it to keep track of it before forgetting it (well, I guess I won't forget I have a bank account, but some other assets are easy to forget).
Then, if I've bought something with the money in this bank account, the transaction is recorded by my bank, so I don't need to record it directly.
Finally, if I buy something with cash, it's not recorded. So I either need to keep the bill (and don't lose it), or keep the transaction somewhere. This "somewhere" is Obsidian, I create a temp note for the month, and at the end of the month I have to review this note to process the transactions that could not be processed automatically in Beancount.

graph TD;
      Z[A new transaction is happening]-->A[Is it automatically recorded by any instance?];
      A-->B[Yes];
      A-->C[No];
      B-->D[Process the transaction at period]
      C-->E[Process the transaction now or keep it somewhere]

Periodic Review

If the above workflow is followed, then the periodic review should just consist in checking each account or each entity that recorded the new transactions, and process them.

graph TD
A[Gather all the places where transactions are stored]-->B[Process the new transactions]
A-->C[Add the new accounts]

Importing Data

flowchart
	702402["Upload generated files to beancount import folder"] --- 184244["Import transactions with fava"]
	1["Download bank files"] --- 702402

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