I have searched for an answer to this in the documentation and haven't found anything. It was by chance that I discovered aliases were a thing in hledger, and wow, did they make life easier! Now that I'm using Beancount (for ease of handling investment lots), I'm back to square one.
Before I create 50 text expander snippets as a workaround can I please have confirmation that aliases really aren't a thing in Beancount? It really is a killer feature for reducing manual data input time!
Don't think so, no.
Thanks, that's what I thought. Okay, text snippets will have to do!
I'm not sure what are the main use-cases of aliases in hledger but you may also take a look at beancount_reds_plugins/beancount_reds_plugins/rename_accounts at main · redstreet/beancount_reds_plugins · GitHub. Seems to do something similar, at least in part?
In general, a lot of stuff in Beancount can be achieved with plugins. Some of them have been written and some of them yet to be 
P.S. Found more info in a second thread I'm not 100% sure if it would work if the account names are not using Beancount conventions (e.g. "pay" instead of "Assets:Bank:Paycheck"). It might be still parsed roughly by a plugin (maybe a more customized than rename_accounts mentioned) and then fixed to represent correct Beancount format. That's not how I'd do that though since it probably would lose some other conveniences like highlighting in the editor, and every place I use to edit transactions has an autocomplete anyway.