On Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 00:51 Eric Altendorf <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm struggling to come up with the right workflow for filing capital gains > taxes each year. > > I have too many lots for manual lot selection to be feasible, so I rely on > automatic booking. However, the method I picked when I started filing my > taxes a few years ago may no longer be what I want to use. > > One option would be to run parsing and booking for the older transactions, > and somehow persist the booking decisions. AFAIK, this isn't currently > possible with Beancount but it doesn't seem too difficult in practice. > I think if you bake in all the cost basis numbers explicitly the booking method doesn't get invoked. It's only there you resolve closing postings with a missing cost basis. In that way if you replaced your inputs to have an explicit cost basis you can cement the old decisions (which I think you have to, because they've been declared to the irs) > Another option would be to create sub-accounts for each account, per year > (or whatever time period), since then I can assign per-account booking > methods for each year. This doesn't require any changes to Beancount, but > it makes my accounts messier and requires synthetic transfers from one > year's account to the next. > Agreed, that's a bit ugly. Better might be too define your own booking method, that is dependent on time. That would require changing beancount to at least allow registering custom booking methods or to extend its default way to specify them by adding date ranges where they're applied. I'm not against it in principle but it's unclear if the additional complexity is worth it. > Finally, another option is to implement a new virtual booking method that > dispatches to a particular booking method based on the date of the > transaction. This is kind of easiest but seems the ugliest. > I wrote my answer above before I read this paragraph and it sounds like the same idea. I think that is the most elegant, because it reflects what were trying to do accurately: change the booking method over time. If it was easy to rewrite the input to insert the cost basis numbers that would be the nicest solution imho because you wouldn't have to maintain older versions of algorithms. Imagine for example a case where there was a bug in the booking method and you declared these amounts to the irs. It wouldnt be great to have to maintain the buggy code to be reapplied historically. This is why I think in a new parser we want to treat the input a little more like a database with update capability, where we can parse, make some modifications - insert the cost basis - and produce a new file with them changes but that otherwise keeps everything else the same including comments. > any thoughts? > > eric > > -- > 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/CAFXPr0u6rD3MErQGhRvhV5v9YbtrF4%2BUWa1PphECfXAtcniy-g%40mail.gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAFXPr0u6rD3MErQGhRvhV5v9YbtrF4%2BUWa1PphECfXAtcniy-g%40mail.gmail.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/CAK21%2BhN94Jjp_-gjHXhOoSzGMdkeR_U8LAZFG9GpKayii-hpcw%40mail.gmail.com.
