I'm relatively new to beancount, so I have a limited picture at this point, but here's my understanding:
beancount is designed to allow closing of the books at arbitrary points in time. The benefit of this is that you can run reports for whatever time period you'd like and have the effect of that being the 'accounting period'. The downside to this is that since there's no formal/explicit closing of the books, there are not necessarily fixed journal entries corresponding to that action. This means that as an auditing tool, you need to be a bit careful with beancount, because (for better and worse) there's nothing to guarantee that you won't/can't modify the journal after the end of the reporting period. I imagine, that you'd thus want to put your ledger under version control, and check it in at the end of the fiscal year. The reports for the fiscal year would show revenue and you'd then draw from assets to pay shareholders accordingly. You could, but there's no need to, explicitly zero out income and expenses, but if you chose to do that it locks you into fixed schedule reporting because a report that spans the end of the fiscal year will have the odd artifacts of the zeroing transactions. Clearly my understanding is limited ;) But I'm also using beancount for a small business, so hopefully others will weigh in if I'm too far off the mark. Cheers, -Scott On Wednesday, March 16, 2022 at 9:07:39 AM UTC-7 [email protected] wrote: > I'm looking to close the books for a pay period (zero-out the income / > expense accounts into a revenue summary account so I can distribute equity > among my partners). > > I saw some mention that there is the concept of "clearing", which would > automatically generate transactions to close the books for a given pay > period but I'm not seeing it documented anywhere. > > Is there a ledger entry I can use to signal the end of a period which > would trigger that kind of action; or maybe a command / plugin folks use to > generates the needed transactions? > > Best, > - Dan > -- 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/5a38c51b-facd-4ed5-97e2-b63f2efb4e18n%40googlegroups.com.
