Plain-text accounting insights, tutorials, and updates from the Beancount.io team.
A step-by-step readiness guide for cost-reimbursement contractors—how to build a traceable chart of accounts, run labor charging as a daily control, calculate indirect rates, and produce an invoice package reproducible from your books, with a 60-day plan.
An unredeemed gift card stays a customer liability until the facts support otherwise. This guide shows retailers how to book gift cards as deferred revenue, reconcile balances monthly, recognize breakage as a defensible estimate, and preserve the card-level data that state unclaimed-property (escheatment) filings require.
A feed store guide to costing bulk feed and bagged SKUs at delivered cost—allocating inbound freight, choosing FIFO or weighted average, counting bulk bins to expose shrink, and reconciling the inventory subledger monthly.
The EU Platform Work Directive (2024/2831) must become national law in all member states by December 2, 2026, creating a rebuttable presumption that platform workers are employees. US businesses hiring EU-based freelancers through digital platforms face reclassification risk, algorithmic transparency duties, and new data-processing bans — this guide covers the six pillars, a 10-month compliance playbook, and the bookkeeping changes to make now.
Classify an employee advance as a wage payment, business-expense advance, or personal loan before the cash leaves the bank, route it through one Assets:Employee-Advances clearing account, and reconcile the open balance every pay run so it never becomes hidden compensation.
A show-level bookkeeping system for comedy clubs — separate ticket, drink-minimum, and food revenue, settle performers from a written door-split formula, hold sales tax and tips as liabilities, and defer private-event deposits until the show is delivered.
Carnival's FY2026 Q2 revenue rose 5.3% to $6.66B while operating income fell 8.9% — fuel cost per metric ton jumped 29% to $793 and net income slipped to $539M. Customer deposits reached $9.0B, cash-backed proof of booked demand that is still a refundable liability sitting against $23.4B of long-term debt. Every figure traced line by line in a public Beancount ledger covering FY2021 through Q2 FY2026.
Amazon limits most non-media product titles to 75 characters and adds a 125-character Item Highlights field. This workflow shows sellers how to inventory the catalog, decide what stays in the title, log every edit, and reconcile listing changes to SKU-level books.
Set least-privilege access, human approval gates on money movement, and an audit trail that links each action to its evidence before an AI assistant creates financial drafts, changes records, or touches a payment workflow.
H.R. 1319, the Modern Worker Empowerment Act, would replace the DOL's six-factor economic reality test with a single common-law standard for worker classification under both the FLSA and NLRA, centered on two prongs — control over the work and entrepreneurial opportunity — while explicitly excluding safety rules and project deadlines as evidence of control. Here's how it compares to the ABC test, what it wouldn't change, and the contractor bookkeeping checklist to run while the bill is pending.
Beancount.io's cash-flow report now reads account classifications straight from cash-flow-role metadata on open directives — one key, four values (cash, operating, investing, financing), version-controlled with your books, with the familiar heuristics as fallback.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (Public Law 119-101, enacted July 11, 2026) bans institutional investors controlling 350+ single-family homes from buying more, with exceptions for build-to-rent, renovate-to-rent rehabs costing at least 15% of purchase price, and rent-to-own programs. Here is how the thresholds, exceptions, and a two-year grace window affect small landlords and property managers — and the ownership-count and job-cost records to set up now.
