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Overview

Example Beancount file

A comprehensive, self-contained personal-finance ledger demonstrating everyday Beancount usage: banking, credit cards, employer payroll and benefits, taxes, and multi-asset investing — generated with Beancount's own bean-example tool. Pa… Ledger notes

Financial position

Net worth and the accounts that make it up

Net Worth
Assets plus liabilities over the last 12 months
117,649.488 USD-13 VACHR
+2,191.507 USDfrom previous month

Cost basis 106,826.049 USD · Unrealized +10,823.439 USD

Accounts
Current asset and liability account balances

Money movement

Monthly income and spending by account category

September 2017
Money in
September 2017
+4,639.7 USD+5 VACHR
Top sources
Average of up to 3 preceding periods
+11,939.32 USD+11.67 VACHR
View all
Money out
September 2017
-2,284.81 USD
Top spending
Average of up to 3 preceding periods
-8,188.02 USD-2,166.67 IRAUSD-42.67 VACHR
View all

Recent activity

Posting-aware activity from the journal

View all
Transactions
Newest transactions matching the current dashboard filters

Income vs Expenses

Income vs Expenses
Bar chart comparing total income and expenses for each interval in the selected period.

Amounts are shown in USD. Balances in IRAUSD, VACHR are not included.

Balance Sheet

Assets Distribution
Visual representation of Example Beancount file assets composition

Amounts are shown in USD. Balances in VACHR are not included.

Liabilities Distribution
Visual representation of Example Beancount file liabilities composition

Cash Flow

Cash Flow
Money flow from income sources to expenses and investments

Loading account roles…

README.md

Beancount Example Ledger

A comprehensive, self-contained personal-finance ledger demonstrating everyday Beancount usage: banking, credit cards, employer payroll and benefits, taxes, and multi-asset investing — generated with Beancount's own bean-example tool. Part of the Open Ledger project on beancount.io, which also publishes real public-company financial ledgers reconstructed from SEC/regulatory filings.

Quick Start

bash
uvx --from beancount bean-check main.bean

Zero output means the ledger is internally consistent — every transaction balances to zero.

What's Inside

main.bean spans January 2015 through September 2017 for a single simulated household, covering:

  • Banking — checking/savings accounts, monthly fees, interest income
  • Credit cards — recurring spend categories (dining, shopping, travel, utilities, etc.)
  • Employer — paycheck deposits, employer 401(k)/IRA contributions, vacation-hour accrual
  • Taxes — payroll tax withholding
  • Investing — commodity/price directives for ETFs and mutual funds (index funds, bond funds, gold, sector funds), with cost-basis tracking

This is the same demo content Beancount's documentation uses to teach double-entry plain-text accounting from first principles — useful as a reference for account naming, price directives, and everyday transaction patterns before modeling something more specialized (a company, a crypto portfolio, a real-estate holding).

About Open Ledger

This repository is part of a growing library of ledgers published at beancount.io/ledger — plain-text, git-versioned, and fully auditable, spanning both general-purpose examples like this one and real public-company financial histories reconstructed from their own filings. Read more on the beancount.io blog.