On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 11:29 AM Phil! Gold <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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?
There's no such rule system (I don't recall coming across it in Ledger either, how does it work?), but what I'd recommend you do is write a little script that creates the EOY transactions and insert those into your file. I'll admit that the general idea for Beancount is for itself to always automate those things on reporting, it would indeed be nice if it were able to invoke your own custom transaction insertion code to "close" a year automatically. There's nothing built-in like that at the moment. > > [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. -- 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/CAK21%2BhPeXa8H1jjGLqc72qEEhEoJuO9btdVuSHHBYLZ3CsmHNQ%40mail.gmail.com.
