On Sun, May 02, 2021 at 05:23:07PM +0100, Caesar Schinas wrote: > Yes, I’ve been considering whether using an Equity account would solve the > problem. > So far I haven’t really understood how they are supposed to be used. > I’m not completely sure if a negative value is a gain or a loss in an Equity > account? > > Beancount does seem to internally use Equity:Conversions for FX transactions, > but I haven’t really worked it out yet – except that I end up with massive > balances in that account, positive in some currencies and negative in others. > I’m not sure if that’s how it’s supposed to be, or if it’s a symptom of me > doing something wrong…
I think that's normal. The description at https://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.html might clear it up if you have time to read it. But basically, I like to think of a currency conversion like this: 2000-01-01 * "Trade" Assets:Chequing:CA -100 CAD Assets:Chequing:CA 70 USD Equity:Trade 100 CAD Equity:Trade -70 USD I don't think it makes sense to interpret the current balance in Equity:Trade. You could look at the net change in Equity:Trade over a span of time if you want to understand your trading activity, but it requires further interpretation if you want to think of it in terms of profit or loss. NB I haven't tried to do this "further interpretation". > I’ve played with manually “converting” the currencies using “currency > accounts” as described at > https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_v3.html#currency-accounts-instead-of-a-single-conversion > > <https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_v3.html#currency-accounts-instead-of-a-single-conversion>, > but so far I haven’t managed to convert that currency loss to an actual loss > instead of having it show up as a gain (negative expense or income value). Can you show an example? Continuing mine from before, I could imagine converting back at a worse rate... 2000-01-01 * "Trade" Assets:Chequing:CA -100 CAD Assets:Chequing:CA 70 USD Equity:Trade 100 CAD Equity:Trade -70 USD 2000-01-01 * "Trade" Assets:Chequing:CA 90 CAD Assets:Chequing:CA -70 USD Equity:Trade -90 CAD Equity:Trade 70 USD and then Equity:Trade would end up with a balance of 10 CAD, which could be thought of as a loss. > It sounds like you have the exact same problem as me, so let me know if you > find a solution more elegant than just denominating all commodities in your > primary currency. > > Incidentally I’d be very interested in your "plugin that adds a separate > Canadianese version of everything” – I also need to report to two different > tax authorities in different countries and haven’t worked out how to do that > properly yet. Have you published your plugin anywhere? See my earlier thread: "Tracking different cost basis methods for different countries?" Current version is at https://hub.darcs.net/falsifian/misc-pub/browse/beancount_plugins/falsifian/parallel_average_cost.py I hope the documentation explains what's going on, but I'm happy to answer questions. The gist is that it just adds some postings that live in a "parallel universe" with new accounts and currencies. I'm curious what will happen if anyone else tries to use it; I'm sure there are plenty of strange assumptions I'm making that are true for my own ledger. -- James -- 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/20210502163542.4wyr3qo7hdnjmv6f%40moth.falsifian.org.
