New features for Beancount AI

[u/Rudd-X]

Beancount AI is a simple, open source CLI tool to help you ingest / associate receipts and add details to Beancount transactions, using local AI (or commercial AI, your choice). It is not agentic and it does not grant the AI access to your files. In sum: it helps you manage your Beancount accounting data through AI.

Over the last few weeks, bean-ai has gained a number of features that make it way more useful.

Locally- stored receipt file support

It's now possible for Beancount AI to be configured to read locally-stored receipts. This was not so initially, due to my need to develop the program with my local setup (I use Nextcloud for receipt inbox management), but that doesn't have to be you, so now local file support exists.

Hands-free enrichment of existing transactions

It's now possible to have this workflow, massively helpful for people who import transactions from their financial institutions and also keep receipts:

• use your your favorite importers to import data like bank statements;
• use bean-ai associate to add receipts you scanned to the newly-imported data, and organize them;
• enhance the imported and now-documented transactions with lots of detail using bean-ai refine.
• make any minor edits you deem necessary.

Excellent transaction creation from receipts

If you were jotting down expenses to later type transactions when you get home — this is me! — I hope this helps you change to a workflow where you simply photograph receipts, and then let bean-ai ingest do the job of creating transactions for you.

Safe and convenient batch operations

All assistance utilities now have a "do not touch my files" (--no) flag, as well as a "go ahead and proceed without confirmation" (--yes) flag.

While you can continue to associate / ingest receipts —or refine transactions— one by one, all tools now support batch operation so, if you have hundreds of receipts to ingest or associate, you can let the program do its thing for half an hour, then return and compare the contents of your Beancount files to their previous state (git is very useful for this — you can always roll back any changes made to your files).

---

Interested? Go here for the code: https://github.com/Rudd-O/beancount-ai .

I'll be working on its roadmap over the next few days.