Love this! I haven't used Beanhup, but was a user of text based accounting systems (beancount, hledger) for many years to track personal expenses. I stopped doing it when I realized I wasn't getting much out of it, but the knowledge of double-entry accounting still helps me to this day when I keep track of my business expenses in Xero.
One thing which I disagree with in this article is the focus on file based data storage:
> That makes it 10 times harder because you need to parse the text file, update it accordingly, and write it back. But I am glad I did. That guarantees all my accounting books are in the same open format.
This quote captures my issues with it. It just makes things so much more difficult; and it makes the whole process slower as the file grows. I remember that when I used hledger for tracking my expenses over 3 years, I had to "close books" once a year and consolidate all the transactions for the past year into 1 entry in a new ledger file to keep entry/query operations fast.
I get the sentiment; you want open data formats that remain even after your app is shutdown. But you can get the same by using open formats; maybe a sqlite DB is good enough for that?
The only thing that would be more complicated with a DB is versioning & reviewing commits like this app does; which does seem like a very exciting feature.
One thing which I disagree with in this article is the focus on file based data storage:
> That makes it 10 times harder because you need to parse the text file, update it accordingly, and write it back. But I am glad I did. That guarantees all my accounting books are in the same open format.
This quote captures my issues with it. It just makes things so much more difficult; and it makes the whole process slower as the file grows. I remember that when I used hledger for tracking my expenses over 3 years, I had to "close books" once a year and consolidate all the transactions for the past year into 1 entry in a new ledger file to keep entry/query operations fast.
I get the sentiment; you want open data formats that remain even after your app is shutdown. But you can get the same by using open formats; maybe a sqlite DB is good enough for that?
The only thing that would be more complicated with a DB is versioning & reviewing commits like this app does; which does seem like a very exciting feature.