Double-entry accounting is a recognized standard by the accounting profession. Differing from single-entry bookkeeping, each transaction in double-entry accounting has two sides, referred to in terminology as debit and credit. This allows for a more accurate representation of the flow of funds and also reduces accounting errors.
Double-entry accounting typically consists of five primary categories of purpose accounts: Assets, Liabilities, Income, Expenses, and Equity. Money flows among these accounts. For example, your salary flows from Income to Assets, while spending or buying goods results in a flow from Assets to Expenses. In practice, you can create additional accounts within these main categories to meet your specific needs. For example, you can create a separate account for each bank card to track balance changes. You can also create multiple accounts for different types of expenses to track your spending. You can also create accounts for investments, such as stocks and mutual funds, to track investment returns.
A well-organized ledger provides a clear understanding of your financial situation, helping you know where your money is being spent, the current values of your assets and liabilities, and the returns on your investments. This leads you to make better financial decisions.
Beancount is an open-source double-entry accounting tool that uses plain text for accounting, coming with a simple and easy-to-use Web UI —— Fava to view reports. Beancount uses plain-text files to store data, meaning that you can use any plain-text editors and use Git for version control. These features are reasons why developers highly favor it.
The open-source and plain-text nature ensures that, as a user, you won't be locked into a proprietary file format. You are free to write your own scripts to process ledger files or even switch to another tool.
HostedBeans aims to maintain the same level of openness as Beancount, focusing on providing hosting services.
When you and your collaborators make changes to the ledger in Fava, HostedBeans will create a commit within a few seconds in the name of the modifier:
$ git log
commit 42f54cc00b22581c4bfc447bf2cdd9ed0bf6f8d6 (HEAD -> master)
Author: Ziting <[email protected]>
Date: Sun Oct 15 11:57:28 2023 +0800
Synced from Fava: added 2 lines and deleted 2 lines in main.bean
The collaborators you invite can see your email address.
When you make changes to the ledger in the Web UI, your name and email address will appear in the Git commit, which can be seen by other collaborators (for public ledgers, it can be seen by everyone).
Because HostedBeans needs to synchronize changes between Fava and Git while supporting multi-user collaboration, there is currently no viable way to implement end-to-end encryption.
We strive to follow industry-standard data security practices and reduce the use of third-party services. As of November 1, 2023: