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How to reconcil transactions in Beancount

Finance Accounting Beancount

If conversion scripts are used to translate bank statements into Beancount transactions, there will be two entries for one money transfers; one at the sending account and second at receiving account. Let’s discuss how to reconcil this.

In this post, we see a list of real-life transactions in beancount.

Observe that:

  • All of the positive currency amounts have a #debit tag.
  • All of the negative currency amounts have a #credit tag.
  • Above is still true for money transfers between bank accounts, wallet to bank account and vice versa.

This sign consistency seperates the Beancount transactions into a credit and debit buckets. These two buckets are also how transactions are naturally seperated on bank statements. If a conversion (bank statement to Beancount transaction) script is written for a bank account, all debits can be chosen to have positive signs and credits negative signs.

Now, for a money transfer between two banks, there will be two bean transactions, one at the sending bank account and another at receiving account. One of such is a duplicate. They were not shown in the mentioned post.

For example, the matching duplicate to the following:

2024-04-01 * "Self" "Make a deposit at ATM" #credit
  Assets:US:Bank
  Assets:US:Wallet                            -15.00 USD

is

2024-04-01 * "Self" "ATM deposit" #debit
  Assets:US:Wallet
  Assets:US:Bank                               15.00 USD

For this:

2024-05-01 * "Self" "Make a withdrawal at ATM" #credit
  Assets:US:Wallet
  Assets:US:Bank                               -5.00 USD

is

2024-05-01 * "Self" "ATM withdrawal" #debit
  Assets:US:Bank
  Assets:US:Wallet                              5.00 USD

Thus, we choose this convention: keep the transaction at sending account and comment the one at receiving account. Commenting, instead of deletion, leaves records for later.