Pinto

Supercharged command line interface for Beancount.

While Beancount provides a few basic utilities for creating transactions via importers (such as a bank statement importer), it does not provide a mechanism to automatically insert them into your existing account. Instead, it writes these transactions to a separate file and the intention is that the user must manually copy those transactions into their own account file. This manual operation is necessary because Beancount does not place constraints on how the account file might be organised. For example, the account file might be a single flat file, or a master file with a hierarchy of imported subfiles. Beancount cannot know for sure where these transactions should go, so it leaves it to you.

Pinto constrains the way in which the Beancount account files must be organised and in doing so provides the ability for reliable automatic transaction insertion. The main feature of Pinto is to use this constrained account file organisation to provide some tools to further automate your accounting.

The main new tool is pinto add which provides an interactive way to add new transactions to your account. This is particularly useful for those who fully track cash expenses, where the data cannot be scraped from a bank statement. The tool provides flags to auto-populate transaction files like payees, accounts, tags and dates, and also provides a YAML-based template mechanism to auto-populate entries involving frequent payees.

Other tools added to the pinto command are:

• search, a way to search your transactions for previously used accounts, payees and templates;
• format, a way to format your account files without having to call bean-format with the path to the files (using instead the environment variable);
• check, a way to check the syntax of your files without having to call bean-check (using the environment variable the same way as format) and the date ordering of your transactions.

Examples

Adding transactions

You can start the interactive transaction insertion tool from the command line:

pinto add

This will first prompt you for the date:

Enter transaction date [today]:

This tries to allow any sane way of defining a date, such as "2020-06-14", "yesterday", "last week", "3 Mar 19", etc. (even future dates, like "in 3 weeks"). It uses maya as a parser. If you leave this empty, it assumes the current date.

Next up you're asked for the payee:

Enter transaction date [today]:
Date will be 2020-06-14
Enter transaction payee:

You can enter whatever you like here. Pinto will try to match this to a previously used payee. If your specified payee matches closely to one and only one existing payee, that payee is used. If it closely matches to other possible payees, Pinto offers up a ranked list of those matches to choose from. You can either choose to use one of these matches, or insist on using the exact string you entered. This way, Pinto tries to let you keep your accounts consistent, with the same payees being reused in the same forms, and allowing you to be lazy by entering lowercase or shorthand forms of your intended payees and having Pinto match them to the originals.

Enter transaction date [today]:
Date will be 2020-06-14
Enter transaction payee: BA
Non-unique or invalid payee.
Enter transaction payee ([1] BA, [2] Bamberg Bridge, [3] Kamps Backstube, [4] Bamberg market, [5] Bar Rossi):

You next get asked for a narration. This is simply a text entry, and does no fancy matching:

Enter transaction date [today]:
Date will be 2020-06-14
Enter transaction payee: BA
Non-unique or invalid payee.
Enter transaction payee ([1] BA, [2] Bamberg Bridge, [3] Kamps Backstube, [4] Bamberg market, [5] Bar Rossi): 1
Payee will be BA
Enter transaction narration []:

After this Pinto goes into line entry mode. This lets you add two or more transaction lines with smart matching of account names:

Enter transaction date [today]:
Date will be 2020-06-14
Enter transaction payee: BA
Non-unique or invalid payee.
Enter transaction payee ([1] BA, [2] Bamberg market, [3] Kamps Backstube, [4] Bar Soba, [5] Bar Rossi): 1
Payee will be BA
Enter transaction narration []: Flights to UK
Narration will be Flights to UK
Adding line 1...
Choose account: credit
Non-unique or invalid account.
Choose account ([1] Liabilities:DE:Deutsche-Bank:Credit-Card, [2] Expenses:Recreation, [3] Expenses:Recreation:Football, [4] Expenses:Recreation:Swimming, [5] Assets:UK:Reimbursements, [6] Other): 1
Account will be Liabilities:DE:Deutsche-Bank:Credit-Card
Enter value []: 250 EUR
Value will be 250.00 EUR
Adding line 2...
Choose account: flights
Non-unique or invalid account.
Choose account ([1] Expenses:Transport:Flights, [2] Expenses:Utilities:Electricity, [3] Expenses:Utilities:Internet, [4] Expenses:Utilities:Phone, [5] Liabilities:UK:Student-Loan, [6] Other): 1
Account will be Expenses:Transport:Flights
Enter value []:
Value will be empty
Add another line? [y/N]:

You may add as many lines as you like. If you want to leave a value empty, so Beancount calculates it for you, you can do so. Finally, you are shown the draft transaction:

Draft transaction:
2020-06-14 * "BA" "Flights to UK"
  Liabilities:DE:Deutsche-Bank:Credit-Card  250 EUR
  Expenses:Transport:Flights

Commit? [y/N]:

Entering y or Y or yes will save the transaction in the appropriate place of your transaction file (in date order).

Using templates

Templates can be used to further automate the account entry process. These must be defined in a file called templates.yaml in the account directory.

Example coming soon...

Installation

With Python 3 as the default Python interpreter, run:

pip install pinto

Usage

From a terminal, run pinto for available options.

Development

The developer warmly encourages collaboration. Please submit feature requests, bug reports, etc. on the GitHub issue tracker. Pull requests are also welcome.

To set up your development environment, please run the following from the pinto repository root directory:

pip install -e .[dev]

After installation, run pre-commit install. This sets up some linting and code formatting pre-commit checks.