I use Beancount V2 to record transactions for various retirement accounts on Vanguard (among other things). I'm pretty sure that I haven't been dealing with my cost basis information correctly ... and I know that in at least some cases Vanguard is doing transactions at an average-cost basis ... so I've been trying to learn more about how Beancount handles average-cost transactions.
I've found and read a few pieces of documentation:
- The "Average Cost Booking" remarks on the Trading with Beancount page, dated 2014
- The proposal on improved inventory bookkeeping, dated 2014
- The "Average Cost Booking" section of the Beancount V3 Goals doc, dated 2020 (no link because Discourse is limiting me to two, since I'm a new user)
My impression from the above is that neither Beancount V2 nor V3 implements the proposal yet. But those V2 docs appear to be 10 years old at this point, and from the GitHub it appears that development on V3 has been quite active — so maybe some or all of the information above is out-of-date?
I'd appreciate any insight that folks have to share along either of two tracks:
- The current status of the "improved inventory booking" project, in either Beancount V2 or V3
- Recommendations for how to handle average-cost transactions in Beancount
I'll mention that I'm quite comfortable with software development matters, so I'm not at all afraid to switch to Beancount V3 or add plugins as needed.
Thanks for any pointers!
edit: changed topic name since I think basically what I'm trying to understand is about the general improved-inventory-booking project; average-cost booking was just the motivating item for me.