The idea of "close at any time" just means that the calculation for net income and transfer to a summarized set of equity accounts happens at the time of reporting and is automated. Nothing prevents you from adding equity accounts and creating manual entries at the end of your fiscal year.
On Thu, Mar 17, 2022 at 12:03 AM Dan Schultz <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >>>> >>> -- >>> 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 >>> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/5a38c51b-facd-4ed5-97e2-b63f2efb4e18n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> >>> . >>> >> -- > 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/46c48ad2-2502-4a9c-bdc8-56a71cd4ce11n%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/46c48ad2-2502-4a9c-bdc8-56a71cd4ce11n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. 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