[beancount] Status of the "improved inventory booking" proposal?

General
1

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:

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the GitHub it appears that development on V3 has been quite active ā€” so maybe some or all of the information above is out-of-date?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.

2

@pkgw I suspect the answers exist in the mail list archives, https://groups.google.com/g/beancount , I saw some related discussion there recently.

3

As far as I know it's still not there. There is a recent thread about manually doing it. https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/F6rc8QgTNEY

4

Thanks ā€” the mailing list link is very helpful.

I also posted an issue on the Beancount GitHub and got a prompt response from the author to the same effect. While the V3 GitHub seems to be fairly active, he clearly doesn't have the time/energy to make progress on a big project like this one. As someone who does a lot of open source work, I'm very familiar with that feeling and the associated guilt :cry: