Beancount.io v3.0: Your Financial Data, Under Your Control
Most financial software forces you to trust them with your data. They own it, control it, and lock you in. We believe you deserve better.
Today, we're launching the next generation of Beancount.io, built on a simple principle: your financial data should belong to you, not us. With native Git integration, you can pull your complete accounting ledger to your own machine, edit it with any tool you want, and push changes back. No lock-in. No proprietary formats. Just your data, under your control.
This release focuses on three core goals that matter most to the people managing their finances with plain-text accounting:
- True Data Ownership through native Git integration
- Seamless Collaboration for teams, partners, and accountants
- An Intuitive Interface that makes plain-text accounting accessible to everyone
Powerful Financial Reports at Your Fingertips
The new dashboard includes comprehensive financial reporting tools that help you understand your financial position at a glance:
Income Statement
Track your net profit, income, and expenses across different commodities over time. The Income Statement view provides a clear breakdown of your revenue streams and spending patterns, helping you identify trends and make informed financial decisions. Visualize your financial performance with interactive charts that show how your income and expenses evolve month by month or year by year.
Balance Sheet
Monitor your net worth across different commodities over time with the comprehensive Balance Sheet view. See your assets, liabilities, and equity at any point in time, with historical tracking that shows how your financial position changes. This powerful tool helps you understand your overall financial health and track progress toward your financial goals.
Trial Balance
The Trial Balance view provides a complete snapshot of all your account balances at a specific point in time. Perfect for reconciliation and ensuring your books are balanced, this view shows debits and credits side by side, making it easy to verify the accuracy of your accounting records.
Account Detail View
Dive deep into any account with the Account Detail view. See account balance values and changes over time with intuitive charts and graphs. The view includes a comprehensive account journal that shows all transactions affecting the account, including sub-accounts, giving you complete visibility into how money flows through your financial system.
Modern File Editor
The new dashboard introduces a completely redesigned file editor that makes editing your Beancount ledger files a pleasure. Built with modern, responsive design principles, the new editor provides a smooth, intuitive editing experience whether you're on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
Git Integration: Your Ledger, Your Way
One of the most requested features is now here: native Git integration. With the new version, you can seamlessly pull your ledger accounts using standard Git protocols, giving you complete control over your financial data.
What you can do:
# Clone your ledger to your machine
git clone https://git.beancount.io/your-username/my-ledger.git
# Edit locally with your favorite tools
vim 2025.beancount
# Push changes back
git commit -am "Added Q4 transactions"
git push
Why this matters (Data Sovereignty):
- True Exit Plan: Your complete financial history is in a standard Git repository. You stop paying us? You keep everything.
- Tool Agnostic: Edit with VS Code, Vim, Emacs, or specialized Beancount tools. Your choice, not ours.
- Complete Audit Trail: Every change is tracked with Git's full history, showing exactly who changed what and when. Perfect for compliance and peace of mind.
- Distributed Backup: Git's distributed nature means you have automatic, versioned backups on your machine.
This makes Beancount.io the only platform that makes your data more portable, not less.
Team Collaboration: Built for How Teams Actually Work
Whether you're running a small business, working with an accountant, or managing household finances with a partner, collaboration matters.
The new collaboration system makes this natural and affordable:
- Invite Collaborators: Simply invite others by email to join your ledger as collaborators
- Real-Time Updates: See changes made by collaborators in real-time, keeping everyone in sync
- Activity History: Track who made what changes and when, maintaining full accountability
Perfect for small businesses, freelancers working with accountants, or anyone who needs to share financial management responsibilities. Collaboration has never been easier or more secure.
Multi-Ledger Support: Organize Your Finances Your Way
The new version supports creating multiple ledgers, giving you the flexibility to organize your finances exactly as you need. Whether you want separate ledgers for personal and business finances, different projects, or different entities, the new version makes it simple.
Benefits of multi-ledger support:
- Separation of Concerns: Keep personal and business finances completely separate
- Project-Based Organization: Create dedicated ledgers for different projects or clients
- Flexible Structure: Organize your accounting system in a way that makes sense for your unique situation
- Easy Switching: Move between ledgers seamlessly with the intuitive ledger switcher
Create as many ledgers as you need to keep your financial records organized and manageable.
Public Ledgers: Share and Learn from the Community
The new version introduces public ledger sharing, allowing you to share your well-structured ledgers with the Beancount community. This feature promotes knowledge sharing and helps others learn best practices for organizing their own accounting systems.
How public ledgers work:
- Share Your Expertise and Let it Go Viral: Make your ledger public to help others learn from your setup
- Discover Best Practices: Browse public ledgers to see how others organize their finances
- Community Learning and Social Network: Learn from real-world examples of effective Beancount usage
- Privacy Control: You decide which ledgers to make public—your private ledgers remain completely private
By sharing excellent ledger examples, we're building a stronger, more knowledgeable Beancount community where everyone can learn and improve together.
Enhanced Fava & Beancount Community Features
We've integrated popular features from the Beancount community that solve real workflow problems:
- Expense Amortization (
amortize_over): Spread annual subscriptions or prepaid expenses across months automatically - Financial Forecasting (
forecast): Project future cash flow based on recurring transactions - Document Linking(
link_documents): Keep receipts and invoices connected to transactions - Auto-Document Discovery(
tag_discovered_documents): Automatically tag and organize supporting documents
These aren't experimental features—they're battle-tested tools from the Beancount community, now seamlessly integrated.
Faster Performance, Smoother Experience
Under the hood, the new version includes significant performance optimizations that make everything feel faster:
- Quicker Load Times: Pages and reports load noticeably faster, even with large ledgers
- Smoother Interactions: UI interactions are more responsive, with reduced lag when navigating between views
- Optimized Data Processing: Complex calculations and report generation happen more efficiently
- Better Resource Management: The system uses resources more intelligently, ensuring consistent performance even during peak usage
These improvements mean you spend less time waiting and more time managing your finances effectively.
Privacy & Security: Your Data, Your Rules
We champion your data sovereignty by securing your ledger in a private, encrypted Git repository that you fully own, can export, and delete at will. This control demands responsibility: you determine access by managing trusted collaborators and must exercise extreme caution when publishing ledgers, understanding that public data is permanently visible to the internet and should be thoroughly sanitized of sensitive details. Ultimately, your data remains yours—protected by our infrastructure but governed strictly by your rules.
What's Next?
The new version is just the beginning of our journey toward making Beancount.io the best plain-text accounting platform available, targeting toward GitHub of Finance. Traditional financial software relies on "Data Lock-in". Beancount.io is building a different kind of defensibility: Protocol Lock-in. We're already working on:
- Mobile app improvements for on-the-go accounting
- Additional integrations with popular financial services
- More advanced reporting and analytics features
- Enhanced collaboration tools for teams
We'd love to hear your feedback on the new version! Your input helps us prioritize what to build next.
Happy accounting!
The Beancount.io Team
