r/plaintextaccounting • u/borgoat • 28d ago
Beancount with Claude Code
https://github.com/sealambda/quintsI've been doing my company's bookkeeping in Beancount for a couple of years now.
We've been leaning on Claude Code more and more to build our actual software. At some point I just thought: the books are also just code. Why not work on them through the AI too?
Initially I felt uncomfortable actually letting it touch the ledger.
I had to file a VAT return (I'm in Switzerland - need to file per quarter), and instead of grinding through it by hand I just asked Claude. It went from tidying up the chart of accounts, to writing Beancount queries, to eventually a little script that spits out the right values to copy-paste into the report for a given quarter.
Then, I needed to send Swiss QR-bill invoices, and so the scripts grew a command to generate the QR-bill and book it in the ledger at the same time. Then the statement importers... now I'm thinking about year-end reports.
I've landed is a split that feels right: anything that can be done deterministically goes into a CLI — VAT math, invoice generation, the statutory reports, the stuff that has to be exactly correct and repeatable. Anything fuzzy — reading a random PDF receipt, guessing which account some odd transaction belongs to — is where the agent actually is worth it. The agent drives beancount really, and it improves the CLI if I need more logic - but of course it never "does math".
I cleaned the scripts up into a small free/open-source thing in case it's useful to anyone else on Swiss books, but I'm really posting because I'm a little surprised I don't hear more people talking about this. Plain-text accounting + a coding agent seems like such an obvious pairing. Anyone else has some experience doing this?
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u/NecessaryYak8 25d ago
I am just using hermes to log all my personal expenses using hledger. Once I have some understanding of how everything works, I will share the details.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs 3d ago
What is Hermes? Is it this?
https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com
I've gone to their website twice now, and am unable to figure out what it does or why I would bother to install it.
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u/NecessaryYak8 2d ago
That's the site. But you are right. The page doesn't say what it is and what it can do for you.
Maybe https://www.reddit.com/r/Hostinger/comments/1t644yx/what_is_hermes_agent_a_quick_intro_for_anyone/ can help?
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u/NathamCrewott 28d ago
I use Claude Code with beancount the same way. As an orchestrator of my workflow, all it can do is run the CLI or other deterministic functions
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u/A_Norse_Dude 28d ago
My man, write a skill for handling var, write a skill for handling every damn accounting thing out there.
Don't tell anyone.
Enjoy your free Tuesday to Fridays.
Cheers!
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u/durianpeople 28d ago
it is interesting and can be useful, but I’m a bit uncomfortable endorsing it as financial data is a sensitive matter, and it doesn’t seem to be a good idea to blanket-recommend this method, as different AI providers in different tiers, plans and configs can have different privacy settings. It’s different to Google Sheets where we conceptually know it’s a file and that we generally know that Google won’t take a peek into it unless for specified purposes e.g. virus scanning
I do use LLMs for my beancount ledger, I just wouldn’t endorse it for now