Introduction
Welcome to the documentation for Beancount Ledger, a comprehensive personal finance plugin that brings the power of Plain Text Accounting directly into your Obsidian vault.
📈 What is Beancount?
Beancount is a popular open-source, double-entry, plain-text accounting system. In plain-text accounting, you record your financial transactions in a simple, human-readable text format. Beancount then parses these text files to generate balance sheets, income statements, trial balances, and custom reports.
Unlike traditional spreadsheet tracking or closed-source proprietary apps, Beancount is:
- Plain Text: Your data is stored in simple text files (
.beancount). You own your data forever; it will never be locked in a proprietary database or obsolete binary format. - Double-Entry: Every transaction must balance to zero. If you spend $5 on coffee, it is deducted from your cash asset and added to your food expenses. This ensures mathematical accuracy and prevents data entry errors.
- Extensible: A huge ecosystem of tools, scripts, and importers exists to help you automate your finances.
📚 Major Beancount Resources
If you are new to Beancount or want to deepen your understanding, check out these excellent resources:
- Official Beancount Documentation: The main repository of guides, design documents, and user manuals.
- Beancount Language Syntax Guide: The definitive reference for writing directives, transactions, costs, and prices.
- Beancount Cheat Sheet: A quick, handy reference for standard syntax.
- Trading with Beancount (Cookbook): A deep dive into tracking investments, stock transactions, lots, and cost basis.
- Plain Text Accounting: A community hub for all things plain-text accounting (covering Beancount, Ledger, hledger, and more).
🌟 Why Beancount Ledger?
This plugin bridges the gap between powerful plain-text accounting and the convenience of modern personal finance apps. It integrates seamlessly with your existing note-taking and journaling workflow in Obsidian.md.
Key Features of Our Plugin
- 🔒 Privacy First: Your financial data never leaves your local device. There are no cloud servers, no third-party APIs fetching your data, and no advertising trackers.
- 📊 Unified Dashboard: A centralized, tabbed interface to visualize your financial health (Overview, Transactions, Journal, Accounts & Balances, Income Statement, and Commodities).
- 💸 Transaction Management: A friendly entry modal that lets you add transactions, balance assertions, and notes in seconds without manually writing plain text.
- ⚙️ Smart Connection: Automatic detection of Python, Beancount, bean-query, and bean-price, including support for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
- 🔍 Live BQL Queries: Run Beancount Query Language (BQL) statements directly in your markdown notes using custom code blocks or inline queries.
- 🪙 Bean Price Integration: Automated market value updates for stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies.
- 📁 Structured Layout: Automatically split large journals into clean, organized files (e.g., separating accounts, prices, and transactions by year).
- 📝 Pro-grade File Editor: A complete
.beancounteditor view featuring live syntax highlighting, diagnostics/linting, smart auto-indentation, and autocompletion.