I would personally use an Assets:Partner account: Assets:Partner:Contributions ; instead of Equity:PartnerContributions Assets:Partner:Expenses ; instead of Equity:PartnerExpenses
This: - makes it trivial to query your partner’s contributions and expenses (they’re just the accounts above) - Optionally, you could add ` Assets:Partner:Expenses:Phone`, ` Assets:Partner:Expenses:Utilities` etc. - the top-level account (Assets:Partner) trivially tells you if your partner owes you, or you owe her, or you’re even at any point in time (positive/negative/zero balance) - in addition, this is factored into your own Assets automatically, as it should. I.e., if your partner owes you 100 GBP, it is automatically a part of your own assets, as it should be On Monday, July 3, 2023 at 7:09:14 AM UTC-7 [email protected] wrote: > Hi, everyone; apologies in advance for the wall of text. > > So, I have a fairly common use case (sharing expenses with my partner), > and I know it's been discussed before, but there are still a couple of > things I'm not sure about. I realise there may be different ways of going > about it (one may be to use the autobean.share > <https://github.com/SEIAROTg/autobean/tree/master/autobean/share> plugin, > but I'm wary of adding plugin-specific metadata for now). > > *Previous relevant threads, for reference* > - Loosely tracking shared expenses between partners > <https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/p05e3hMqpJY/m/GJxoI33sBAAJ> (Dec > 17) > - Expenses paid with external account > <https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/USNXP2vIWHY/m/dMZdeUXrCQAJ> (Jun > 20) > - Payees, subaccounts, channels > <https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/vefi9DzrU4s/m/tB2nsseJAgAJ> (Jul > 22) > - Sharing household expenses > <https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/K8SSrCVikeY/m/bO0Aa1ONAQAJ> (Aug > 22) > > *My scenario* > - I use Beancount, my partner doesn't (meaning she doesn't care for the > same level of granularity in expense accounts, but she may be interested in > coarser aggregates). > - We have a joint bank account which we use for shared expenses. > - We're adding a fixed amount to said account each month. > - We split shared expenses (and, consequently, deposits to the joint > account) roughly in proportion to our relative income, so it's not 50/50. > - The bank where the joint account is (Monzo) has a decent API, so I can > get a JSON dump of all transactions, or a delta. > - I have an importer for our joint account which can already do the math > and prorate a posting's amount accordingly. I suppose it would be easy to > turn the prorating part into a plugin instead, in case that made more sense. > - I still review transactions manually, to fix payees and expense > categories as required. > > > *Sample ledger* > Here's a public gist > <https://gist.github.com/tatablack/2a2b733ec5979ad052721f264492585f> with > a sample ledger. In this example I am using Equity accounts for both my > partner's deposits and her share of expenses from the joint account; e.g.: > > 2023-06-01 * "My partner" "June top-up: 40% of £2000" > Equity:PartnerContributions -800.00 GBP > Assets:UK:SharedBank:Joint > > 2023-06-12 * "Electricity" "" > Expenses:Bills:Electricity 0.60 * 150.00 GBP > Assets:UK:SharedBank:Joint -150.00 GBP > Equity:PartnerExpenses > > *Solved problems* > My goals include being able to build reports showing my own expenses as > well as an aggregate of our shared ones (e.g. "how much are OUR rent + > bills + subscriptions each month?"). Red's suggestion > <https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/K8SSrCVikeY/m/P8HzhLhHAwAJ> to > use BQL's FINDFIRST and other_accounts works well for this. > > *Questions* > 1. Should I consider my partner's monthly deposits to our joint account as > "Income" instead? It doesn't feel right, because I can't really dispose of > that money other than for sharing expenses, but mainly because I don't want > to track the equivalent outgoing transactions under my own "Expenses" > hierarchy. > > 2. Looking at the definitions of the various types of account in the docs, > I can't figure out what type of account my partner's share of expenses > should be booked to—"Equity" feels a bit of a hack. > > "Equity" should, according to the docs, be used for accounts that hold a > "summary of the net income implied by all the past activity". In my head, I > could apply this to the account used to deposit money into the joint > account, but not to the one for expenses. > > Any other suggestions? Anything obvious I'm missing? > > Thanks in advance! > > *Angelo* > -- 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/7179e01b-dd2e-40c6-a65e-77cb8271d4d6n%40googlegroups.com.
