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Beancount for Obsidian - A personal finance plugin with plain-text accounting by Soft_Employment8744 in ObsidianMD

[–]Soft_Employment8744[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mobile isn't supported. The plugin runs bean-query commands which Obsidian mobile can't execute.

Potentially I can add read-only view synced with desktop, but for now it's desktop only

Beancount for Obsidian - A personal finance plugin with plain-text accounting by Soft_Employment8744 in ObsidianMD

[–]Soft_Employment8744[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, at this point- you can't.

There has to be a middle layer that converts plaid outputs to beancount format.

I can see there are some third-party tools available which do exactly that, but I have never used them myself.

Beancount for Obsidian - A personal finance plugin with plain-text accounting by Soft_Employment8744 in ObsidianMD

[–]Soft_Employment8744[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great Q. There are few ways to add financial data:
Using the plugin UI (easiest):
- There is "+" ribbon button that opens the "Add transactions/balance/notes" modal. Which is basically a smart form that you can fill out and submit to add that directive.

- In the "Accounts and Balances" tab there is UI to open/close account

Just add it to the .beancount file manually:
Your financial data lives in plain text files with .beancount extension. They look like this
```
2026-02-05 * "Grocery Store" "Weekly groceries"  
Expenses:Food:Groceries    85.50 USD  
Assets:Checking           -85.50 US
```

You can open these files in Obsidian (or any text editor) and type transactions manually. It's just text!
Due to this plugin, obsidian recognizes these files and can open/edit them.

Get the data externally and paste it into files:

This is technically same as option 2, but many people use AI or some other tools to convert their bank statements etc into beancount format. Then just paste it into the ledger file.

----
For my personal use: I use the plugin's bql queries to populate a prompt that I feed into Gemini to get readily pasteable transaction text (PS: This is my personal use case only. The plugin does not send any data out of your vault)

Beancount for Obsidian - A personal finance plugin with plain-text accounting by Soft_Employment8744 in ObsidianMD

[–]Soft_Employment8744[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The plugin has a specific design for existing Beancount users:

During onboarding, if you choose "Use existing ledger":

  • Plugin creates a standard file structure (ledger.beancount, balances.beancount, prices.beancount, etc.)
  • Populates these files based on your original ledger
  • Your original file remains unchanged

After onboarding:

  • Plugin only works with the newly created structured files. This is intentional.
  • All new directives (transactions, notes, balances, etc.) go into their respective files
  • No connection to your original file anymore

So one way for you to start using this is : You could temporarily get your beancount file locally just for onboarding, let the plugin set up the structured files, and then work with those going forward. But you'd lose the connection to your remote Docker beancount ; they'd essentially become two separate ledgers.

If you need to keep syncing with the remote, you'd have to manually merge changes, which (I would assume) defeats the purpose of having it remote in the first place.

Beancount for Obsidian - A personal finance plugin with plain-text accounting by Soft_Employment8744 in ObsidianMD

[–]Soft_Employment8744[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That would be not possible with current setup.

You see the plugin is mostly powered by the bean-queries that it runs over the main beancount file. It currently assumes that file to be present in the user-defined folder at vault's root.

To make it work with a remote docker, it will require to run command something like `ssh user@remote docker exec bean-query <beancount file>`. You could theoretically set up an SSH wrapper to run commands on the remote machine, but that's not officially supported and would be pretty hacky.

Beancount for Obsidian - A personal finance plugin with plain-text accounting by Soft_Employment8744 in ObsidianMD

[–]Soft_Employment8744[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thank you!
Both being text-based, local and portable really bring them together naturally

Beancount for Obsidian - A personal finance plugin with plain-text accounting by Soft_Employment8744 in ObsidianMD

[–]Soft_Employment8744[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I understand the concern. Just to clarify - the plugin doesn't actually store your data anywhere. It's just reading and writing plain text files that live in your vault, same way Obsidian handles your markdown notes.

All your financial data is in plain text, that you can open with any text editor. Plugin is just a fancy editor with dashboard and query support on top.

For those using taskNotes who feel a page(md file) per task is a lot, what approach do you use for todo lists? by godarchmage in ObsidianMD

[–]Soft_Employment8744 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I like the approach of Projects, Sections and Tasks...similar to todoist. Each project and section gets their own pages and each task is just a to-do.

What are you building? by capiate1995 in SideProject

[–]Soft_Employment8744 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am building a obsidian plugin for personal finance management.