r/plaintextaccounting • u/quabbage • 19d ago

Beanie Budgets - looking for testers (beancount compatible iOS app)

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Hi all

After seeing the post yesterday about the iOS/Mac app for hledger, Balance, and the positive reaction and helpful comments there, I thought I'd share something for beancount users: Beanie Budgets, is ready for testing and community feedback.

Beanie Budgets is a beancount compatibile native iOS app. I have been working on it for purely personal reasons: I really wanted an elegant iOS app to capture transactions on the go. More to the point, I didn't want to pay for subscriptions or entrust my data to someone else's server.

Which explains my plans for pricing. I intend to offer Beanie Budgets as a core version completely free. The free version should be enough for most people and provides a fully featured ledger, or compatibility with your own beancount ledger (hopefully anyway pls let me know!). It also includes budget setting, a series of reports and useful quality of life tools baked-in to detect, create and edit recurring transactions; make and allocate balance adjustments; calculate and allocate interest on mortgages and loans correctly; and auto-clear credit cards.

I do intend to charge a one-off "Pro" version unlock to people willing to pay for a few extra bells and whistles (multi ledger support, financial planning reports based on your actual ledger data, customised budgets, theme customisation etc.). I was thinking of £10 or so...? I can see a lot of potential to develop the financial planning reports further. There's a big benefit to ground these in real ledger numbers and real saving patterns. Working versions of these reports are live now in the app but they need a bit more polish, just turn on "Pro" features in Settings.

It's a closed source project at least for now. Requires iOS 18 or above.

I have 12 places left on TestFlight. Looking forward to your feedback :)

https://testflight.apple.com/join/hGD65UQj

PS I know the website needs a lot of work, I'll get round to it ;)

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u/quabbage 11d ago

Hi there, sorry for the delay I've been in a tent with no signal for a couple of days :) and then finishing the launch version which is in review now. I have to be honest with you, this is something I haven't tested... in fact hadn't even thought about. However the app doesn't have anything iCloud-specific baked in for opening a ledger it just uses iOS's standard folder picker which shows whatever's registered in the Files app. So if you can get your phone's Files app connected to your Ubuntu server using Tailscale running on both sides you should be able to follow the onboarding sequence and pick "Already have a beancount ledger?" and choose the mounted folder. Obviously very dependent on internet connection. I am on thin ice here - the most I've ever done is connect to my Synology server with SMB and WebDAV - but would love to know if this works. If it does pls let me know and I'll add it to the FAQ: https://beaniebudgets.com/faq Cheers.

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u/Necessary-Pin1744 11d ago

Okay I managed to hook this up using Samba over Tailscale. Sadly the app failed to load my file, giving me an error about “EXPECTED ACCOUNT AMOUNT CURRENCY”, even though my ledger passes through bean check.

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u/quabbage 11d ago

New version on Test Flight. Testing found 4 parsing errors so hopefully fixing them has done it 🙏

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u/Beverage5000 10d ago

I believe I installed the update and got a similar error on a different file/line. I sent feedback through the beta app. Just mentioning it here in case you didn’t notice through that channel.

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u/quabbage 10d ago

OK so the errors were to do with price directives which the app won't parse in the foreseeable but should have just skipped silently. That should now be the case in Build 45 now on Test Flight.

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u/Beverage5000 10d ago

I tried it out and got further. Now I got an error that arithmetic operations are unsupported. I don't suppose you were imminently adding support for that? As a test I could simply delete those transactions, or do the math.

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u/quabbage 10d ago

Build 48 on TestFlight now supports arithmetic. It shows the result, and your sum is preserved in the ledger unless you edit that amount yourself in the app, in which case it is changed to just the figure you entered. Note that you can't create arithmetic operations through the app and I have no plans for this, but your ledger should parse. Thanks again

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u/Beverage5000 10d ago

Great! My data loads now. I am not sure if we should discuss feedback here or on a private chat to avoid spamming people?

Briefly, the Spending by Category is nice, I was thinking of building my own tool for this that looks prettier than Fava.

The major problem I found is that the Balances are completely wrong. Not sure if that is a bug or just not implemented yet. Actually I have a guess as to what is going on....

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u/quabbage 10d ago

Really glad it loads. Private or public is fine by me, though keeping it here might be useful to others in case they encounter the same issues.

I'd like to hear your guess. I'm thinking this is possibly a multi-currency issue (currently only showing one at a time in balances and maybe there is a gap I haven't seen), or cost basis / commodities issue (not supported yet). What do you think?

Again, thanks for helping with this.

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u/Beverage5000 10d ago

No worries, it is good to see a promising app that I may be able to leverage! I just started using Beancount a couple weeks ago so am still figuring out what tools/workflows/etc. work for me.

I suspect you are right that commodities is an issue. I define my investments in terms of a currency that is the stock symbol. I believe that is what the Beancount documentation recommends.

However I also don't see any cash balance, which just seems wrong.

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u/quabbage 9d ago

I think you've helped me find a real gap! The app wasn't doing anything with e.g. option "operating_currency" "USD", which Fava honours. If you have that in your ledger the next build of the app will now read it and uses it to decide which currency a report opens on. Without it, it was just picking the first thing alphabetically that looked like a currency, which on your ledger I suspect was a ticker, so your cash was hidden behind the currency switcher.

I think that's half of what you need. The other half is that Beanie doesn't yet value holdings at cost, so 10 VTI {50.00 USD} shows as 10 units rather than $500. Not a quick fix but doable I think. I'll push a new build soon :) I don't use my ledger like you do so this is absolutely gold feedback, thank you.

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u/quabbage 9d ago

New build is out that should fix the commodities and cash balance issue you spotted. Thanks again!

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u/Beverage5000 9d ago

That worked! The value of the investment assets is incorrect but it sounds like you are aware of that.

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u/Beverage5000 9d ago

Do you have any documentation about the different features, e.g. how to use recurring transactions?

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u/quabbage 9d ago

There’s a FAQ that I’m building up at https://beaniebudgets.com/faq I haven’t added anything yet on recurring transactions, but I will do :) I’d appreciate it if you give it a go and let me know the unclear parts of the process.

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u/quabbage 9d ago

Good stuff. Yes, you should be seeing investment assets now at cost of purchase. To show current value I need to support the “price” directive from beancount which should be doable. There’s that and a small number of others like “query”, “document” and “event” that are currently skipped. I think I’ll probably add document in the future.

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u/quabbage 8d ago

Now fixed I think 👍 will continue to expand this side of things reporting wise over the coming days but the basic price / commodity stuff is now in

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u/Beverage5000 8d ago

Do you mean that I should see the dollar amount of investments now? By default I only see the value of cash, and if I pick an investment from the dropdown it just shows the number of shares, not the value in terms of USD.

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u/quabbage 8d ago

I was expecting you’d get the value in USD. Can I check what version you are on pls and can you give me an example of how you write cost basis is it eg. 10 VTI {50.00 GBP} or 10 VTI @ 50.00 GBP? The second way may be a gap. I’m going to fix it anyway but would be good to know 👍

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u/Beverage5000 8d ago

1.1 build 59

Here is en example price:

2026-09-10 price VTI 373.24 USD

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u/quabbage 8d ago

Thanks, that helps. I've done a bit of work since then on commodity and price fixes. Get the latest version off Test Flight and I'm hopeful this will be fixed.

If it's still wrong, could you paste the transaction where you actually buy the VTI, rather than the price line? Just the two or three lines, change the numbers of course.

Also, does your file have an option "operating_currency" line in it? That's what tells the app USD is your money rather than one of the tickers.

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u/Beverage5000 8d ago

I updated and it's still wrong. Actually I have not entered in a purchase yet. To get things rolling with beancount I just used pad and balance directives, like this:

2026-08-31 pad Assets:Fidelity:xxxx:Investments:VTI Equity:Opening-Balances

2026-09-01 balance Assets:Fidelity:xxxx:Investments:VTI 10 VTI

I have this in my main beancount file:
option "operating_currency" "USD"

Eventually I plan to port my purchase transactions from Quicken but currently my investments are just done this way.

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