[cobby]

> beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal file

Actually, beancount supports include directive. See includes section [1] of the language syntax document

[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAMVrKIA2qtRGmoVDSUBJGmY...

[haberman]

Thanks for the reference. But a single transaction can span multiple financial institutions. Say you pay off a credit card. One half of the transaction comes from the credit card statement, the other half comes from your bank. The two halves sum to zero.

My understanding is that the whole transaction has to live in one file with Beancount. This doesn't seem amenable to having each bank statement generate a single Beancount output file.

But I could be wrong. I don't know how Beancount's importer works.

[arnarbi]

I use beancount, and a somewhat custom importer and categorizer. (happy to expand on those but this comment is about the multi-transaction).

I have the categorizer send such transactions to a temporary "limbo account". So I have two transactions:

  # This TX is imported from checking acct statement:
  2020-05-15 * "ACH Payment BankA credit card"
      Assets:BankA:Checking  -500
      Equity:Limbo:CreditCardPayments

  # This TX is imported from credit card statement:
  2020-05-16 * "Payment applied THANK YOU"
      Liabilities:BankB:CreditCard  500
      Equity:Limbo:CreditCardPayments

In both cases the second posting is added by the automatic categorizer based on the description.

After doing a bout of imports, I look at the Limbo account, which should always sum to zero. Sometimes the two TXs don't appear on the same day, so occasionally there's a temporary balance there but that's fine.

I use the same to match up my direct deposits (one end from paystubs import, other from checking account), wire transfers between banks/brokerage, etc. I tend to put them in different subaccounts of "Equity:Limbo" so that I can more easily spot any discrepancies.

Edit: Should've first read the previous reply that says the same thing!

[freddie_mercury]

If you really want to do that, there is a beancount plugin called ZeroSum that does it

https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_plugins/tree/mas...

[jonahbenton]

Conceptually this is one transaction; from a book keeping (and beancount) perspective it is, or can be, two.

Often (in the US) the dates are different- debit from the bank on day X, post to credit card on day X + 1 or X + 2. For my stuff I want the dates in beancount to reflect the dates on the respective statements, so that the balances, which are date-specific, match.

So I capture these as two transactions. I do it as- debit the bank, credit the "ether", then debit the "ether" credit the credit card.

Beancount just wants the postings within a literal transaction to sum to zero. If this conceptual transaction is split into two literal transactions, with some fictional bridge account in between, they can live in different beancount files.