WARNING: This is just a proof of concept. It's implemented in a hacky way using regular expressions. Not ready for real-world use.
Let's say you buy some food at the grocery store using your credit card, then you buy a book at the bookstore (also with your credit card), and then finally you pay off your credit card using your bank account. In conventional double-entry bookkeeping, you would do something like this:
Expenses:Groceries
Debit | Credit
------+-------
12.50 |
Liabilities:CreditCard
Debit | Credit
------+-------
| 12.50
| 8.95
21.45 |
Expenses:Entertainment
Debit | Credit
------+-------
8.95 |
Assets:BankAccount
Debit | Credit
------+-------
| 21.45
In Beancount, you would do something like this:
2024-03-15 "Buy some food"
Expenses:Groceries 12.50 USD
Liabilities:CreditCard -12.50 USD
2024-03-15 "Buy a book"
Expenses:Entertainment 8.95 USD
Liabilities:CreditCard -8.95 USD
2024-03-15 "Pay off credit card"
Liabilities:CreditCard 21.45 USD
Assets:BankAccount -21.45 USD
With Beanslate, you can instead input the following:
2024-03-15 "Buy some food"
Liabilities:CreditCard (charge) -> Expenses:Groceries (expense) 12.50 USD
2024-03-15 "Buy a book"
Liabilities:CreditCard (charge) -> Expenses:Entertainment (expense) 8.95 USD
2024-03-15 "Pay off credit card"
Assets:BankAccount (decrease) -> Liabilities:CreditCard (repayment to them) 21.45 USD
Beanslate will then translate the above into an input acceptable by Beancount:
2024-03-15 "Buy some food"
Expenses:Groceries 12.50 USD ; Debit, Increase: expense
Liabilities:CreditCard -12.50 USD ; Credit, Increase: charge
2024-03-15 "Buy a book"
Expenses:Entertainment 8.95 USD ; Debit, Increase: expense
Liabilities:CreditCard -8.95 USD ; Credit, Increase: charge
2024-03-15 "Pay off credit card"
Liabilities:CreditCard 21.45 USD ; Debit, Decrease: repayment to them
Assets:BankAccount -21.45 USD ; Credit, Decrease: decrease
No more having to manually think about signed amounts or what Debit/Credit mean!
Now let's say that you and your friend Bob often pay for each other's meals at restaurants (to simplify logistics; some restaurants don't like it when multiple cards are used to pay for a single table's meals) and later PayPal each other. Should Bob be an Asset (accounts receivable) or a Liability (accounts payable)? With Beanslate, it doesn't matter! Let me show you what I mean. Let's first treat the amount owed to Bob as a Liability:
2024-03-16 "Bob buys me lunch"
Liabilities:Bob (owed to them) -> Expenses:Dining (expense) 15.00 USD
2024-03-16 "Pay Bob back for lunch"
Assets:PayPal (spend) -> Liabilities:Bob (repayment to them) 15.00 USD
This is translated to:
2024-03-16 "Bob buys me lunch"
Liabilities:Bob -15.00 USD ; Credit, Increase: owed to them
Expenses:Dining 15.00 USD ; Debit, Increase: expense
2024-03-16 "Pay Bob back for lunch"
Liabilities:Bob 15.00 USD ; Debit, Decrease: repayment to them
Assets:PayPal -15.00 USD ; Credit, Decrease: spend
Now let's treat the amount Bob owes (in this case, a negative amount) as an asset:
2024-03-16 "Bob buys me lunch"
Assets:Bob (owed to them) -> Expenses:Dining (expense) 15.00 USD
2024-03-16 "Pay Bob back for lunch"
Assets:PayPal (spend) -> Assets:Bob (repayment to them) 15.00 USD
This is translated to:
2024-03-16 "Bob buys me lunch"
Assets:Bob -15.00 USD ; Credit, Decrease: owed to them
Expenses:Dining 15.00 USD ; Debit, Increase: expense
2024-03-16 "Pay Bob back for lunch"
Assets:Bob 15.00 USD ; Debit, Increase: repayment to them
Assets:PayPal -15.00 USD ; Credit, Decrease: spend
As you can see, in both cases, you just had to put "owed to them" and "repayment to them". You no longer have to go through mental contortions like "Money owed to Bob is a Liability, and an increase in Liabilities is a negative amount in Beancount, so I should use a negative number" or "Bob is an Asset in my accounting, and in this case I'm owing him money, so my Asset is going down – so that's a negative amount".
Which keywords are supported? That part is still being figured out by me... but at the very least, increase/decrease is supported for all account types, and even that I think helps a lot.
The newer implementation Beanslate.hs actually parses the input (rather than
just doing regex search-and-replace) and supports the arrow notation suggested
by the Reddit user captain_currie.
For example, we can parse the file reddit.txt:
$ ghci Beanslate.hs
ghci> parseOrPrintErrorFromFile (sepEndBy1 transaction (some spaceChar)) "reddit.txt"
([Right (Transaction {txnDate = Date {year = 2024, month = 3, day = 17},
txnNarration = "Buy a book",
txnAccountLines = [
TransactionAccountLine {
talAccountName = "Expenses:Entertainment",
talAmount = "8.95",
talSign = '+'},
TransactionAccountLine {
talAccountName = "Liabilities:CreditCard",
talAmount = "8.95",
talSign = '-'}]}),
Right (Transaction {txnDate = Date {year = 2024, month = 3, day = 17},
txnNarration = "Buy a book",
txnAccountLines = [
TransactionAccountLine {
talAccountName = "Expenses:Entertainment",
talAmount = "8.95",
talSign = '+'},
TransactionAccountLine {
talAccountName = "Liabilities:CreditCard",
talAmount = "8.95",
talSign = '-'}]}),
Right (Transaction {txnDate = Date {year = 2024, month = 3, day = 17},
txnNarration = "Buy a book",
txnAccountLines = [
TransactionAccountLine {
talAccountName = "Liabilities:CreditCard",
talAmount = "-8.95",
talSign = '-'},
TransactionAccountLine {
talAccountName = "Expenses:Entertainment",
talAmount = "8.95",
talSign = '+'}]}),
Right (Transaction {txnDate = Date {year = 2024, month = 3, day = 17},
txnNarration = "Buy a book",
txnAccountLines = [
TransactionAccountLine {
talAccountName = "Liabilities:CreditCard",
talAmount = "-8.95",
talSign = '-'},
TransactionAccountLine {
talAccountName = "Expenses:Entertainment",
talAmount = "8.95",
talSign = '+'}]})],"")The output is a bit messy so I've "pretty-printed" it. Hopefully you can see that all four input styles get parsed in the same way.
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