> 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.
I had interpreted this line (see below) from Scott's email as the reason why the manual entries are ideally avoided, but appreciate I may not understand (I apologize / thanks for bearing with me): > 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. To confirm I'm understanding, if I run: ``` SELECT account, sum(position) FROM OPEN ON 2017-01-01 CLOSE ON 2018-01-01 WHERE account ~ "Income|Expenses" GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 1; ``` I get that beautiful report which tells me my income and expenses for 2017 If I were to add manual entries at the end of the fiscal year, wouldn't I end up dirtying that report? I'd need to balance the equity changes against the net profit / Equity:Earnings:Current, (which would require me manually zeroing out the income / expense accounts) right? Just a sanity check: when we're talking about querying we aren't talking about something I do *in* the register / can write followup transactions against, right? I am under the impression that the book closing queries don't actually translate to closed positions outside of the query's output. Best, - Dan On Thursday, March 17, 2022 at 12:10:01 AM UTC-4 [email protected] wrote: > 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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