Beancount for BUSINESS accounting?

Life Hacking
1

I found some posts about beancount for personal finances, but not really accounting (also searched myself and my “AI employees” the internet, no result found :()

Invoicing: done, I needed this ASAP, so I have a pipeline, invoices I have both in structured files (JSON) and PDF

Expenses: all collected electronically and annotated with structured data files (JSON again), thanks to Claude (I needed them ASAP in the past for estimates)

So I have all the track record, what I have left is to generate the beancount format, but did not find anything online, so I was wondering someone else here already does it with the beancount+fava stack.

For example, unsure how to match the swiss accounting codes (so good i canm “steal” a lot from banana templates - btw this is AI-generated based on a Banana example accounting I did and exported)

; CH1140 ? or simply 1140?

2025-01-01 open Assets:CH1140-AdvancesAndLoans                   CHF
2025-01-01 open Assets:CH1176-WithholdingTax                     CHF
2025-01-01 open Assets:CH1179-TaxAtSource                        CHF
2025-01-01 open Assets:CH1180-SocialInsuranceReceivables         CHF
2025-01-01 open Assets:CH1190-VariousReceivables                 CHF
2025-01-01 open Assets:CH1199-Deposits    

; ...

; ============================================================================
; JOURNAL TRANSACTIONS
; ============================================================================

2025-01-01 * "BUY PC" ^doc-1
  Expenses:CH4400-PurchasedServices          2691.30 CHF
  Assets:CH1025-BankAccountUSD              -3000.00 USD @ 0.8971 CHF

2025-03-01 * "PayPal Convert USD to CHF" ^doc-3
  Assets:CH1020-BankAccountCHF                900.00 CHF
  Assets:CH1025-BankAccountUSD              -1000.00 USD @ 0.90 CHF

2025-03-02 * "XY paid me" ^doc-2
  Assets:CH1025-BankAccountUSD               6000.00 USD @ 0.9153 CHF
  Income:CH3400-ProvidedServices            -5491.80 CHF

2025-11-15 * "PayPal FX 500 USD" ^doc-5
  Assets:CH1020-BankAccountCHF                400.00 CHF
  Assets:CH1025-BankAccountUSD               -500.00 USD @ 0.80 CHF

2025-12-31 * "Exchange rate loss Bank account USD"
  Expenses:CH6949-CurrencyLosses              312.12 CHF
  Equity:CH2891-RetainedEarnings             -312.12 CHF

(Why not Banana? They just changed sub model, and might do again, so no thanks. Also their software has no MCP, pain to automate, while beancount+playwright is perfect text base, i can version control the data with git, plus for my agents their web ui is easier to use. Bexio is an overkill and MagicHeidi should be rather called SuperLimitedHeidi).

2

… what exactly are you trying to do?

1 Like
3

just put in my expenses and invoices and see it calculate fx gains/losses, and generate a document i can attach to my taxes

also i need amortize 3 items

4

Would be really interested in that, also thought of creating it in the past but haven’t gotten around to it yet and MWST-calculations are probably pretty ugly with that. But I guess Claude should be able to setup the initial structure pretty easily based on a CSV of the Kontenplan KMU.

I am using Bexio for roughly 10 years, but starting to get really tired of it. Basically no new features since then while the price more than doubled and almost no AI integration. I actually extended a MCP server ( GitHub - OpenCoreCH/Bexio-MCP-Server ) such that I can now use Claude to create the entries based on statements / exports / whatever which works nicely, but that is not really the perfect solution (I guess you could do the same for Banana using their API). https://www.infinity.swiss might also be interesting for you, recently stumbled upon that (have not tried it so far) and looks promising.

5

Thanks!

The question is rather the accounting format, not the automation (these days it pays out to automate anything, because LLMs are virtually free, the only time I need to put in is to review their work and give feedback - 5 years ago for many problems I automate the time to automate it would not have worth the saved time over 5 years).

The moment I get into VAT area, I basically will hire an employee anyway, a pro accountant + LLM agent supervisor (that’s most of my time, checking what harmful stuff they are trying to do).

Bexio is a nono, expensive, bloated, dinosaur software. I also do not need many features it provides.

This infinity might be fine, but honestly in Switzerland I try to avoid anything that does not speak English (and this does not even speak French or Italian - I am a difficult user, I only speak 60% of the common Swiss languages, so not big chances with me)..

6

Hi, did you get any further with this?

I’m considering moving my company accounting from Gnucash to Beancount and wondering how you are feeling with Beancount (I do not have to deal with VAT and Payroll).

I would have liked to keep account numbers and account names separated but I did not find a way of doing this (I see you lumped them together).

Any advise, for or against a migration to bc? Thanks a lot

7

Beancount does not to automatically what Banana does.

So in the end I dropped Beancount completely (at least for now). I did an AI-driver accounting system for my business, paid 1 year Banana (to generate / show AI examples), that will be good next time too then I cancel Banana and plan to use my software (basically my accounting is super simple, just I had to get into the codes etc - Beancount just seemed in the end extra layer without added value (since for me the double-ledger checking is simple and anyway needed a custom UI as the Beancount UI was quite lacking))

1 Like