How amounts are shown

Exactness

Beancount Desktop never does arithmetic on money itself. Every sum, conversion and percentage is calculated by Beancount with exact decimal numbers, and travels to the screen as text. The app only formats it. There is no floating point between your ledger and what you read, so a total is never off by a cent.

The only approximate figures are the percentages in chart tooltips (one decimal), which are for orientation.

Positive income

In double-entry accounting income, liabilities and equity are negative numbers: a salary of 2,000 is written as -2000.00 EUR on Income:Salary. That is correct, and confusing to read.

By default the app shows income, liabilities and equity as positive. It is only presentation: nothing changes in your ledger or in the calculations. With it on, a negative income (a refund you had to give back) or a negative liability stands out as unusual.

Turn it off in Settings ▸ General, or with View ▸ Show Income, Liabilities & Equity as Positive, to see the raw signs that Beancount uses.

Decimals and separators

• Each currency is shown with its own precision, the one Beancount infers from your ledger: 2 decimals for EUR, 8 for BTC if that is how you write it.
• Rounding for display is half-even (banker’s rounding), like Beancount’s.
• Unit costs and prices keep all their decimals in Portfolio. A price of 0.936550 is not rounded to 0.94, because that would mislead.
• Thousands and decimal separators follow your macOS region (System Settings ▸ General ▸ Language & Region). With a Spanish region you see 12.345,67.

Note

When you type an amount in the transaction dialog you can use either a dot or a comma for decimals. It is written to the ledger with a dot, which is what Beancount requires.

Several currencies in one cell

If an account holds more than one commodity — euros and dollars, or three different funds — its cell shows one line per commodity, and the row grows to fit. Choose a conversion to see a single figure instead.

A parent account and its children

In the report tree, a parent account shows the total of everything under it. While the parent is expanded its figure is dimmed, because its children are on screen and the bright numbers are the ones that add up. Collapse it and the total becomes bright again.