Anyone tried this tool out for their personal accounting? My books are currently in a big custom Google sheet system, and building metrics on top of that has been a pain.
For me, the main benefit is tax lot matching and an auditable trail of sales should the IRS come knocking. It's impossible to do this properly in a spreadsheet (I mean... it is possible, but no one will complain if it's done wrong until it's too late). With beancount, matching is much more straightforward. I have a python script that does it automatically for each sale using normal FIFO, tax loss minimization, etc. Due to beancount's internal checks, I am certain that these are correct once they're entered into the ledger. There is no chance of failure, and if the IRS ever asks me to justify a capital gain / loss figure, it's very easy to point out that I keep track of all my shares and have for the past several years and I maintain a solid record of the entire history of each lot.
You give beancount the balances at the end of each month straight from your bank / broker statements, and it throws an error if your transactions don't match up.
You won't make a mistake using any of them.
I used and still use both, since they share the file format. Beancount is more opinionated, with slightly different file format, so I didn't bother adding it.
But I did write an importer for the csv files my bank provides and with smart_importer I don’t even have to categorize the statements anymore (although there are mistakes sometimes). I don’t gather metrics though , I use fava to have a visual view of my books.
I usually spend half an hour per month maintaining the ledger .
However, contrary to the article's automated method, my workflow is to manually input transactions every day (or every couple days, depending on what's going on) and balance my accounts. It's a bit of a ritual, but I like having a really good handle on day-to-day spending. Plus, I find ~10 minutes once a day way easier than (e.g.) ~3 hours once a month, even if it's the same amount of time overall.