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alexw24 / Beancount.md
Last active August 4, 2026 03:35
AI prompt for installing and configuring Beancount, an open source accounting software

USER NOTE: You should read the entire prompt and customize it to your needs. Beancount is a highly capable open source accounting software. Highly customizable, and very suitable for AI agents, as it runs locally and is plain-text based.

Objective

We are setting up a new plain-text double-entry accounting system with Beancount V3 for my business — a small plumbing shop. I have SWE experience. Help me plan and scaffold the initial setup. Here's my situation.

Environment

  • This will run on this machine, my home server which has some other stuff running on it. Port 5000 for Fava will already be taken. (I want fava installed.) I use tailscale to access this machine, so we should bind it to the tailnet. Lets not let this near the system Python, install with uv. I cloned the official Beancount Github repo into our directory here myself.
  • My accounting should live in a git repo, back up to a private github (use gh cli to create a private repo) and ignore secrets for bank credentials etc. I think th