Fava Account Maintenance

Fava Account Maintenance is a read-only Fava extension for understanding a large Beancount chart of accounts. It combines an account tree with operational views for dormant or unused accounts, account lifecycle, historical boundaries, Pad usage, and temporary buffer accounts.

The report UI is currently written in Traditional Chinese. The source and the example ledger contain only synthetic account names and amounts.

What it shows

• A collapsible tree built from the ledger's Assets, Liabilities, and Equity roots.
• Open, closed, future, unused, dormant-zero, and dormant-nonzero accounts.
• Activity includes ordinary transaction postings and Balance assertions. Future-dated Balance assertions count as maintenance activity without changing the report's as-of inventory or price calculations.
• Whether an account explicitly started at zero, was seeded from Equity, or began with Pad.
• Late or repeated Pad directives that may indicate a historical gap.
• Configurable investment, buffer, and Equity-role conventions.

The extension does not edit the ledger and does not make network requests.

Compatibility

Version 0.2.2 is tested with Fava 1.30.12, Beancount 3.2, and Python 3.12. The dependency is intentionally limited to Fava 1.30.x until newer versions are tested. Fava describes its extension API as unstable, so test upgrades before deploying them to a production ledger.

Install

Install the package into the same Python environment that runs Fava:

python -m pip install fava-account-maintenance

If Fava was installed with pipx, inject the extension into that environment:

pipx inject fava fava-account-maintenance

To install a tagged GitHub version directly:

python -m pip install \
  "git+https://github.com/hsiuhsiu/fava-account-maintenance.git@v0.2.2"

For a local checkout:

python -m pip install ./fava-account-maintenance

Then enable the extension in the main Beancount file:

2000-01-01 custom "fava-extension" "fava_account_maintenance"

Fava also searches the directory containing the main Beancount file. For a drop-in installation, copy the complete fava_account_maintenance package directory next to that file; keep UpdateGuidance.js and the templates directory inside the package.

Docker

The extension and ledger can remain in separate repositories. Mount the source directory read-only and add it to PYTHONPATH:

services:
  fava:
    volumes:
      - ./ledger:/ledger
      - ./fava-account-maintenance/src:/extensions:ro
    environment:
      PYTHONPATH: /extensions

Recreate the container after changing the extension version. A production image can instead install a tagged release during its build.

Ledger metadata

2020-01-01 open Assets:Household:Checking:Example USD
  nickname: "Daily checking"
  purpose: "Household cash flow"

Supported open metadata:

For example:

2020-01-01 open Equity:Opening-Balances
  maintenance_role: "opening_history"

2020-01-01 open Assets:Household:Clearing:Transfers USD
  maintenance_buffer: TRUE

Extension configuration

Configuration is optional. Fava passes the last string in the custom directive as a Python-literal mapping:

2000-01-01 custom "fava-extension" "fava_account_maintenance" "{'dormant_days': 180, 'buffer_components': ['Buffer', 'Clearing'], 'equity_roles': {'Equity:Opening-Balances': 'opening_history'}, 'source_mode': 'basename'}"

Allowed Equity roles are technical, modeled_asset, opening_history, untraceable, dust, revaluation, buffer, and other.

The default kind index works for both Assets:Bank:Checking and Assets:Owner:Checking:Bank. Use maintenance_kind when a particular account does not follow the general convention.

Privacy and deployment boundary

The repository does not need, include, or transmit a ledger. At runtime, however, the report necessarily sends its derived model to the browser. That model includes account names, native-currency inventories, lifecycle and activity dates, Pad sources, counterpart accounts, and—unless hidden—source basenames and line numbers.

Therefore:

• Protect the Fava instance with the same care as the ledger.
• Do not publish a saved report page, browser archive, screenshot, cache, or application log made from a real ledger.
• Do not expose the Fava server directly to the public internet.
• Use {'source_mode': 'hidden'} if source locations are not useful.

The source-path formatter never returns an absolute path. In relative mode, paths outside source_root fall back to their basename. These settings control this extension's model only; Fava itself may expose ledger filenames in its standard page data, which is another reason the Fava instance must remain private.

Development

python -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -e ".[dev]"
ruff check .
pytest
python -m build

The wheel must contain both UpdateGuidance.js and templates/UpdateGuidance.html; Fava loads those files directly without a Node build step.

License

MIT