Beancount to CSV Converter

About this tool

Plain-text-accounting journals are readable in Git, but spreadsheet users often need one row per posting for filtering, pivot tables, reconciliation, or review. This converter flattens common Beancount and Ledger transactions into a fixed CSV schema, then rebuilds a simple journal from that same schema when you are done editing.

The CSV columns are:

date,flag,payee,narration,account,amount,currency,cost,price,comment

Journal → CSV repeats the transaction header fields on each posting row. CSV → journal groups consecutive rows with the same header fields into transactions; a blank date continues the previous transaction. The conversion is local and deterministic. It does not evaluate balances, fetch prices, load plugins, or read included files.

Worked examples

Beancount input:

2024-01-15 * "Starbucks" "Morning coffee"
  Expenses:Food:Coffee    4.50 USD
  Assets:Bank:Checking   -4.50 USD

CSV output:

date,flag,payee,narration,account,amount,currency,cost,price,comment
2024-01-15,*,Starbucks,Morning coffee,Expenses:Food:Coffee,4.50,USD,,,
2024-01-15,*,Starbucks,Morning coffee,Assets:Bank:Checking,-4.50,USD,,,

CSV input can also be rebuilt as a Ledger-style journal:

date,flag,payee,narration,account,amount,currency
2024-01-16,*,,Grocery Store,Expenses:Groceries,25.00,$
2024-01-16,*,,Grocery Store,Assets:Bank:Checking,-25.00,$

Ledger output:

2024-01-16 * Grocery Store
    Expenses:Groceries  $25.00
    Assets:Bank:Checking  $-25.00

Limits and edge cases

• This is a spreadsheet reshaper, not a full Beancount or Ledger interpreter.
• Non-transaction directives such as open, close, balance, price, option, plugin, and include are skipped.
• Elided posting amounts are left blank; inventory, balance assertions, plugins, and includes are not evaluated.
• Cost ({...}) and price (@ ...) annotations are carried through as text, not computed.
• Amount parsing assumes a dot decimal separator. Thousands commas are stripped from parsed amounts.
• The per-call cap is 20,000 postings/CSV rows.

FAQ