Automation - Overview

Beancount automation is an advanced topic. We try our best to explain how to do it step-by-step by assuming as little reader's technical background as possible. However, there's still a limit to how many details we can explain without making this whole book for a completely different topic. It would be helpful if the reader had an entry-level technical computer background. We will work hard to improve our service, open-source tools, and tutorials to make them more user-friendly in the future.

Many people give up bookkeeping because it takes too long to do the repeating work, and it's also error-prone to manually input each transaction. Automation is the key to successfully maintaining an up-to-date, accurate accounting book for personal finance, budgeting, tax, or business purposes. While many commercial accounting software programs provide a certain level of automation, they are mostly closed-source. Therefore, the level of automation you can achieve and what can be automated depends on the vendor's offering. Moreover, accounting software providers often shut down businesses for various reasons. Users often become victims of dead software services by relying on them and are forced to migrate to a different vendor or abandon the practice.

Unlike most paid accounting software, Beancount is open-source, and so are most of the tools we will use in this tutorial. Unlike proprietary software, if you're unhappy with the current system, you can always change how it works yourself if you have enough technical skills. With open-source software, you truly own the workflow and data. Some may not realize with Beancount and open-source tools provided by BeanHub, one can achieve way better automation than the one provided by other proprietary accounting software. We use the tools we built ourselves, and we have achieved something like 95% automation and only need to input a few transactions manually. Here's a screenshot of the Git history of commits generated from BeanHub's system showing the automatically imported transactions:

Git diff shows Beancount transactions become confirmed when bank account transactions become confirmed

As you can see, credit card transactions transition from pending to confirmed. Our system then automatically updates the corresponding Beancount transaction to confirm as well without human interactions. It depends on the nature of your business and personal financial situation, but as long as you have many regular, recurring, predictable transactions, our workflow can automate most of them. This chapter will introduce you to achieving Beancount accounting book automation.