My Beancount side is automated now. Imports land, scripts clean and tag, queries answer most questions. Then I hand numbers to the senior bookkeeper I work with and it all collapses into Excel. Copy-paste exports, version confusion, stale figures by Friday. No surprise a 2025 Ledge survey found 94% of finance teams still use Excel in the close, and half say Excel processes are why the close runs slow. What bridges this gap? Meet Excel users where they are, or pull them into automation?
stale figures by Friday.
Meet her in Excel, fed by Beancount CSV exports, never retyped.
I would not build that bridge. Every CSV you hand her comes back edited, renamed, or quietly forked, and then nobody can reproduce the close. I have cleaned up too many of those months. The ledger exists to kill exactly that drift. Split the duties instead. She reviews and approves inside Fava. The reports look familiar enough for any accountant to follow. You keep the bean file end to end. Nothing crosses between you except posted transactions. Meeting Excel halfway does not solve the handoff, it just moves the mess somewhere harder to audit. What does she actually do with your exports, review the balances or rework them?