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💹 Automated Price Fetching

The plugin integrates with bean-price to automatically fetch current market prices for your commodities (stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, cryptocurrencies, and more) and save them to your prices.beancount file.

How It Works​

  1. The plugin runs bean-price <ledger.beancount> — passing your main ledger file so that bean-price can discover all commodities with configured price sources.
  2. bean-price fetches current prices from the internet (Yahoo Finance, Morningstar, Coinbase, etc.) and prints ready-to-use Beancount price directives to stdout.
  3. The plugin filters those lines, deduplicates them against existing content in prices.beancount, and appends only new directives.
  4. Your prices file stays in sync — no manual entry required.

Example price directive written to prices.beancount:

2026-02-27 price AAPL 179.50 USD
2026-02-27 price VTSAX 123.45 USD

Installation​

bean-price is part of the beanprice package (separate from Beancount itself):

pip install beanprice

Verify installation:

bean-price --version
WSL Users

If you run Beancount inside WSL, the plugin will automatically detect and use wsl bean-price during the onboarding prerequisites check.

Annotating Commodities with Price Sources​

For bean-price to fetch prices, each commodity needs a price: metadata line specifying the data source.

Common examples:

; US stocks — Yahoo Finance
2024-01-01 commodity AAPL
  price: "USD:yahoo/AAPL"

; ETFs
2024-01-01 commodity VTSAX
  price: "USD:yahoo/VTSAX"

; Cryptocurrencies (Coinbase Pro)
2024-01-01 commodity BTC
  price: "USD:coinbase/BTC-USD"

; Indian stocks (via Yahoo Finance)
2024-01-01 commodity RELIANCE
  price: "INR:yahoo/RELIANCE.NS"
note

For a full list of supported price sources and their syntax, see the beanprice documentation.

Enabling Automatic Price Fetching​

  1. Open Settings → Beancount for Obsidian → General
  2. Toggle "Enable automatic price fetching" → On
  3. Set your preferred fetch interval (default: 24 hours)

The interval starts immediately — no Obsidian restart needed.

You can also view when the last automatic fetch ran below the interval field.

Manual Price Fetch​

Run a price fetch on-demand at any time:

Command Palette (Ctrl/Cmd + P) → "Fetch Commodity Prices"

A notification will confirm how many new price directives were saved.

Where Prices Are Saved​

All fetched prices are written to:

Finances/
└── prices.beancount   ← prices appended here

The file is never overwritten — only new directives are appended. Existing price entries are preserved.

Configuration​

SettingDefaultDescription
Enable automatic price fetchingOffToggle scheduled price fetching
Fetch interval (hours)24How often the automatic fetch runs
bean-price commandAuto-detectedSet manually in Connection settings if needed

Troubleshooting​

"bean-price command not configured or not found"​

  • During onboarding: Run the prerequisites check — it will auto-detect bean-price.
  • Manual setup: In Settings → Connection, look for the bean-price command field, or run: 
    pip install beanprice
    bean-price --version

No prices fetched after running the command​

  • Verify your commodities have price: metadata (see Annotating Commodities)
  • Check your internet connection — bean-price makes network requests
  • Open the dev console (Ctrl+Shift+I) and look for [PriceService] log messages
  • bean-price stderr warnings (e.g. balance errors) are logged but do not cause failure

Prices not updating / stale prices​

  • bean-price fetches the current market price — outside market hours you may get the last close
  • Ensure your commodity's price source ticker is correct (e.g. RELIANCE.NS for NSE stocks on Yahoo)

Duplicate prices appearing​

Deduplication is line-based. If the same directive (same date, symbol, amount, currency) already exists in prices.beancount, it will not be appended.