I'm the treasurer for a very small nonprofit organization. I'm looking at
using beancount for my bookkeeping[0], but I'm not sure how to track some
of our finances within beancount's assumptions about account structure.
The specific problem is that I have a few different funds I need to keep
separate from each other. We periodically have projects in collaboration
with other organizations where the funding for those projects has to remain
separate from our general funds. I manage this in Ledger by having
separate income and expense accounts for these projects. So our
transactions might look like this (in Ledger):
2019-10-08 Donor A
Assets:Cash:Bank Account 1 $50
Income:Project 1:Donation $-50
2019-10-08 Project 2 Expense
Expenses:Project 2:Catering $300
Assets:Cash:Bank Account 1 $-300
2019-10-08 Member C
Assets:Cash:Bank Account 1 $125
Income:General:Annual Dues
When I close our books, the income and expense accounts get closed into
different net asset (equity) accounts, depending on the funding stream.
The above transactions would result in the following balances:
Net Assets:General = $-125
Net Assets:Project 1 = $-50
Net Assets:Project 2 = $300
beancount wants to put everything into a single account, though. (If I
understand things correctly, when running a report over a period of time,
all income and expense transactions before the period start date are closed
into Equity:Earnings:Previous by default, and income and expense
transactions during the period are closed into Equity:Earnings:Current.)
Is there a way to define my own rules about which equity accounts receive
the money from each income and expense account?
[0] I currently use Ledger, but I've been growing increasingly frustrated
at the difficulty of programmatic access to transaction data.
--
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 view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/f15c9ed5-c29c-47b8-a466-b08318a4b5d6%40googlegroups.com.
