Hi Jonathan, nice to read you here!
On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 12:03:39PM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> OK, for purposes of illustration, imagine that we send a check for,
> say, $1000 to an author on December 20; they cash it on January 4.
> The statement from the bank at the end of December will not include
> that check, but we know that we have $1000 less than the bank thinks;
> that money is spent. The lower balance is what I was referring to as
> the "real" balance - the amount of money we actually have.
The traditional way of tracking this in Beancount/Ledger (and, in fact,
in double-entry accounting with accrual basis) would be:
2018-12-20 * "author payment" "Mr Foo Bar"
; cheque: "12345678"
Expenses:Writing 1000.00 USD
Liabilities:Payables -1000.00 USD
2019-01-04 * "cashing in author cheque" "Mr Foo Bar"
; cheque: "12345678"
Liabilities:Payables 1000.00 USD
Assets:Checking -1000.00 USD
Unless I'm misunderstanding your needs, this allows to verify at any
point in time both (1) the amount of money you are supposed to have in
the bank (by querying Assets:Checking) and (2) what you called the
"real" balance, by querying Income/Expenses over the year of
interest. ... or any variations of it you might need: a common one is
your Net worth, i.e., Assets - Liabilities.
I've never used a GUI accounting tool, nor I'm an actual accounting
expert. But what I'm guessing from the conversation here is that the
accounting systems you're used to actually do the above, but "hide" the
two transactions behind a single transaction with a "cleared" flag,
whose state changes are timestamped and monitored by the system.
This is not to say that Beancount is or isn't suitable for specific use
cases (yours or others). I see value in both "low level" accounting
tools like Beancount (and I've enjoyed learning more about accounting
theory thanks to that) and in higher-level ones that focus more on other
aspects of accounting. Take your pick :)
Cheers
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . [email protected] . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director . . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Beancount" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/20190417125602.pdcdofpgkdqfsdhg%40upsilon.cc.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
