On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 4:28 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:

> I started to use Beancount some time ago without reading entire
> documentation. Thus, I have Income accounts grouped by income type. E.g.
>
> Income:Interest:MyBank:Savings
> Income:Interest:AnotherBank:Savings
>
> But I have found that Beancount doc recommends grouping Income accounts by
> institution.
>
> What advantages does this approach have?
>

One the one hand, it doesn't matter. On the other, it does.
In any case, the concern is that of automatically creating aggregation
groups.

For the former, these account names can be viewed like columns in a data
table, e.g. in your case

category  type      institution  account
Income    Interest  MyBank       Savings
Income    Interest  AnotherBank  Savings

So as long as there's a way to match from the right component in those
account names (typically by regexp using the SQL query tool), you should be
able to aggregate any which way. So it doesn't matter much.


On the other hand, it implies a hierarchy, and the web interfaces render
only that hierarchy.
Collapsing parent nodes is an easy way to aggregate all the nodes under
them, for instance.
So by choosing to do it this way, you're making it easy to render all the
subaccounts of "Income:Interest", but not "Income:*:Savings" in the web
interface.


I think it should be possible to make a web UI that automatically renders
different hierarchies of accounts based on criteria.
Currently, bean-web just uses the hierarchy implied in the account name, +
it has these "component" filters, as you mention.

Anyhow, it could be fun to somehow specify criteria for inferring a custom
hierarchy beyond that which is implied by the account names and render that
with a collapsible and aggregating UI like Fava has. I think the Fava folks
will probably chip in at this moment, they're the one who've been actively
innovating the web UI.

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