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Version: 2.4.2

Set Up Your Accounts for the First Time

This walks through going from a blank ledger (or the onboarding demo data) to a chart of accounts that actually reflects your finances, with correct opening balances.

If you haven't run the onboarding wizard yet, do that first — see First-Time Setup. This page picks up right after.

1. Set your Operating Currency​

Before opening accounts, set your primary currency in Settings → General → Operating Currency. Every balance calculation and Net Worth figure is reported in this currency, so it's easiest to get it right up front. See Settings.

2. Plan your account tree​

Beancount requires every account you post to be explicitly opened first — including Income and Expenses categories, not just Assets and Liabilities. It's worth sketching the tree before you start clicking:

  • Assets: one per real account — Assets:Checking, Assets:Savings, Assets:Brokerage, Assets:Cash
  • Liabilities: Liabilities:CreditCard, Liabilities:Loans:Car, etc.
  • Income: broad categories are usually enough — Income:Salary, Income:Interest, Income:Dividends
  • Expenses: this is the one worth planning — a 2-level tree like Expenses:Food:Groceries, Expenses:Food:Restaurants, Expenses:Housing:Rent gives you useful reporting without becoming unmanageable

You don't have to get this perfect — you can always open more accounts later.

3. Open your accounts​

For Assets and Liabilities, use the UI: go to the Accounts & Balances tab and click ➕ Open Account in the header for each one. Fill in the account name, opening date, and (optionally) which currencies it can hold. If it's an account you'll want to check regularly (a checking or credit card account), set a Reconciliation interval here too — see Periodic Reconciliation for why that matters. See Adding Accounts and Commodities for the full reference.

For a handful of Income/Expenses categories, the same modal works fine. If you're opening many at once (a whole expense tree), it's faster to open accounts.beancount directly in the editor — see Editing the .beancount Files — and type open at the start of a line to expand the built-in snippet template for each one.

4. Record opening balances​

Opening an account with open doesn't give it a balance — it starts at zero. To reflect your real-world starting point, Beancount's convention is an Equity:Opening-Balances account that absorbs the difference. You have two ways to do this, both ending at the same place:

  1. Open Equity:Opening-Balances like any other account (step 3 above).
  2. For each account, use + → Balance tab to record a balance assertion for today with the real-world amount from your bank/statement. See Using the + Button. Since the account is still at zero, this assertion will fail — that's expected.
  3. Open the Snapshot sidebar → Reconciliation tab. The account will show up as Failing. Click Force reconcile, and pick Equity:Opening-Balances as the account that absorbs the difference. See Reconciliation for details on what this does under the hood (it's a Beancount pad directive).

Manual alternative​

If you'd rather write it directly: open the file and type pad at the start of a line to expand the built-in snippet (pad Assets:Checking Equity:Opening-Balances), then on the next line type bal to expand a balance assertion with the real amount. This is exactly what Force Reconcile does for you automatically.

5. Verify​

Open the Accounts & Balances tab and confirm each account now shows the balance you expect. Check the Snapshot sidebar status indicator shows ✅ — if it shows errors, click them to jump straight to the problem line.

From here, you're ready for day-to-day use — see Adding Financial Data for recording new transactions, and Periodic Reconciliation for keeping things accurate going forward.