minibudget 0.1.0

A simple CLI tool for personal and small business budgeting.

MiniBudget

MiniBudget is a tool designed to enable personal and small business budgeting using a plaintext format. It's inspired by beancount and plainbudget.

I wrote the MVP in an evening because:

1. Beancount doesn't have a budgeting feature
2. Google Sheets seemed far too complex and inefficient for such a simple set of operations

Quickstart

Run from Source

Clone the repo. Poetry is the easiest way to run it.

poetry run minibudget report budgets/example.budget

Now take a look at example.budget to learn more about it.

If you want to use the convert feature then use poetry install -E convert to get the required packages.

Documentation

• budget format
• minibudget report
• minibudget diff
• minibudget convert
• currency formats

Possible Features

Since this is a deliberately simple tool, the preferred way to implement these is as command line options which generate different types of output. A proper TUI in curses or similar would make this into a finance tool from the 80s, which is probably redundant versus a web app.

Pull requests welcome. I may or may not implement these myself when I feel like it.

• Attach notes to budget categories; view them by using a flag
• Comment syntax
• Metadata for specifying period the budget covers, default currency, etc.
• Assertions by allocating to categories with children; check if the budget for a category matches the total of its children (e.g. does discretionary spending match the totals of clothes, dining out, and entertainment?)
• Make formatting and report structure customizable
• Generate cool charts
• Proper multi-currency support (this is probably out of scope for a simple tool like this)
• Implement non-regression and unit testing
• CSV output options, especially for diff (as table grows large very quickly)
• JSON output options, mainly for testing but could be used for integrations
• Convert ledger records to minibudget format
• Convert csvs to minibudget format

Completed Features

• Cool formatting for CLI
• Integrate with beancount via bean-query to import real spending
• Totals for budget categories, not just the top level income / expenses / unassigned