Thank you both -- this makes sense (and I'm finally getting through the
query language documentation which, as I believe / hope I'm correctly
understanding, is where that closing-from-whatever-date would occur!)
As a followup: how would I handle account for changes to equity with this
approach? To be clear I'm talking about net profit that hasn't be
distributed / the asset still exists in the company.
Specifically, we report allocations for each partner to tax authorities
based on an annual reporting period; this is where our targeted allocation
formulas kick in, etc.
I'm having trouble meshing the "close any time" concept with the ability to
track that equity allocation -- particularly in a situation where partners
might join or leave over time, or might have different targeted allocations
of a given annual profit.
I hope the problem / question makes sense.
Note: one idea I had is that maybe I need to just create parallel register
purely to track equity. It would ONLY track contributions, distributions,
balanced against cash -- and end-of-year allocations balanced against {some
well named account}. The separation and slight duplication makes this an
imperfect concept... but I'd love to know if it's my best bet!
Or... is there some way to give beancount a "hint" about how I want equity
to get distributed when books close for a given period (e.g. a set of
transactions against the `Equity:Earnings:Current` that only gets
recognized when running CLEAR queries?)
On Wednesday, March 16, 2022 at 10:54:47 PM UTC-4 [email protected] wrote:
> +1 to all that
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2022 at 5:35 PM Scott <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>>
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>>
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