AstrickHarren / auto-bean

Writing your beancount files with AI!

Auto bean

Write a beancount transaction with natrual language. See the following dialogue as an example:

> eat out with Amy for 30.58 from cash
2023-05-11 * "" "eat out with Amy for 30.58 from cash" #share-Amy
    Expenses:Food:Dine                                         30.58 USD
    Assets:Cash                                               -30.58 USD
looks good?

> change desc eat out
2023-05-11 * "" "eat out" #share-Amy
    Expenses:Food:Dine                                         30.58 USD
    Assets:Cash                                               -30.58 USD
looks good?

> write

Usage and limitation

Run the python script with your current beancount file. ⚠️ The script is not fully tested, and may harm your data (although the only thing it does is to open the file with append mode).

python cli.py <PATH TO YOUR BEAN FILE>

This may take several seconds on my local machine to load the language model before the it enters the interactive mode. If it the first time, it might as well download the AI model (see dependencies) in cache.

Dependencies

I used transformers from huggingface and the facebook model for zero-shot classification. So you may need to

1. install pytorch (or tensorflow) with pip

   # for torch
   python -m pip install torch

2. install transformers

   python -m pip install transformers

Commands

Once in the interactive mode, here are the available commands you can use to write a new transcation to your beancount file.

cmd	description	example
any other english	leave to the AI for automatic creation of a new transaction	eat out with Amy for 30.58 paid with cash
change expense <Expense Type>	change the expense type of the of the transaction, Expense Type can be any english, and the expense account is infered from all the accounts currently present in the beancount file	change expense groceries
change from <Account>	change the other account of the transaction (the account where the expense amount comes from)	change from cash
change desc <Description>	change the description of the transaction to exactly Bob	change desc eat out
change payee <Payee>	change the payee of the transcation to exactly Payee	change payee Bob
change share <Contact>	append a tag #share-.. to the transaction, attempting to utilize the beancount-share plugin	change share Amy
write	append the current beancount transaction to file	write

Limitations

1. Currently the script only support writing simple expenses, that is, any transaction with only two legs and one of them is an expense.
2. The contacts like those in change share <Contact> are only searched by the leaf accounts under ...:Share:.... For example,

   Liability:Share:Amy
   

   in the beancount file will indicate the presence of a contact named Amy.