One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

Discussed on lobste.rs and Hacker News.

Two people. Eighteen accounts spanning checking, savings, credit cards, investments. Three currencies. Twenty minutes of work every week.

One net worth number I actually trust.

The payoff: A single, trustworthy net worth number growing over time.

No app did exactly what I needed, so I built my own personal finance system using plain-text accounting principles and a powerful Python library called Beancount. This post shows you how I handle imports, investments, multi-currency, and a two-person view.

How I got here

It all started during the 2021 tax season. I had blocked out an entire weekend and was juggling statements, trying to compute capital gains, stressing about getting the numbers mixed up. “This is chaos”, I thought. “There must be a way to simplify this with automation”. Being a software engineer, I did what felt natural and hacked together a bunch of scripts on top of a database.