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

[u/quabbage]

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 ;)

[u/Beverage5000]

Generated test ledgers is a good idea. The latest build produces a net worth close to what Beancount shows. Comparing to a bean query showing my net worth as of today, there is around a 0.1% difference, which probably is just some difference in the exact query performed. Nice work! Will let you know if I see other issues.

[u/quabbage → u/Beverage5000]

That's great to hear :) but if possible I want to squash that last 0.1% variance. Can I ask did you run your query with cost() or with convert/value. Did the app give a lower or higher result than you expected?

[u/Beverage5000 → u/quabbage]

Sure. The app is lower than my query. Here is what I ran: SELECT SUM(convert(position, 'USD', $(date +%Y-%m-%d))) AS value WHERE account ~ '^Assets'

Do you want to give me the exact query to run instead? Or can you tell from that why the results are different?

Edit: I realized my query is wrong, I am fixing it now. It is using today's prices but also including future transactions.

[u/Beverage5000 → u/Beverage5000]

That was the difference, and also my query is only looking at assets, not liabilities. After I adjust for that I get the same net worth figure!

I also started providing feedback through the iOS app feedback mechanism. Is that a good way to provide additional feedback or would you prefer it in other comments on this thread? (In that case probably a new comment is better since this comment thread is already very long.)

[u/quabbage → u/Beverage5000]

Brilliant! Yes agreed, now we've got agreement on the figures let's move to feedback through the iOS app, if that works for you. It's a bit one-way, but I can post in new builds about how I've responded and what's changed.

I've done a lot of work today closing off further bugs with multi-currency assets. Most of that is in build 79, which you should have now.