FWIW, I have income and expenses in three countries (and three currencies) and have to file taxes in all three and I've never seen a point in having subcategories per-country for either expenses or income.
The hard part with any kind of accounting is that your account structure needs to reflect what you're actually going to do with the information. What are you going to do with knowing that some of your grocery expenses were in Country A and some in Country B? Does it affect tax reporting or your spending behaviour or...something? That's what needs to drive your account structure. So, for instances, I pay taxes on global income. There's no point in pretending that income from Country A is somehow different from income from Country B. The distinction has never once come up -- for me! -- in almost a decade of using beancount across multiple countries. And the great thing about plaintext accounting is that if I ever decide I'm wrong, it is pretty easy to edit all the files and change things around in the future. On Monday, August 26, 2024 at 1:12:27 AM UTC+7 [email protected] wrote: > Thanks. I slept on it and I think it makes sense to create a subcategory > for expenses in each country, the same way as "Income:US:Salary" and > "Income:UK:Salary" is shown as an example in the documentation. This allows > to have proper separation between the two countries. On the other hand, on > expenses such as travel, I think it makes sense to have on category, such > as "Expenses:Travel:Flights", that can hold transactions in multiple > currencies. > > On Sunday, August 25, 2024 at 9:39:54 AM UTC+2 [email protected] wrote: > >> In my ledger i've let these accounts have multiple currencies and do a >> conversion in one or the other when reporting / computing balances. >> >> On Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 23:41 Dmitry Kudryavtsev <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Recently I made a relocation. This means I now live with two main >>> currencies. >>> >>> Before relocating, I used currency as a name for the leaf account. So if >>> I had a bank account BankA that held both EUR and USD, I’d have two account >>> BankA:EUR and BankA:USD. >>> >>> However, since most of my expenses were made from my main currency, I >>> usually recorded that in that currency, even when traveling, since the bank >>> usually did the conversion of which I didn’t care. So my income/expense had >>> one level, let’s say Expenses:Groceries. >>> >>> Now I have more than 10 years worth of financial data in my main >>> currency and I’m wondering how to move forward. I could let Groceries have >>> expenses in two currencies, but in GnuCash I adopted the currency name as a >>> leaf for most income/expenses as well, so I’d have Groceries:USD and >>> Groceries:EUR. >>> >>> Is this a good model for starting with beancount, or I should just let >>> income/expenses contain multiple currencies? >>> >>> Thanks! >>> >>> -- >>> 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/CAEzdkV9ZWWVET9FgUQuHBX-%3DnoriruTi6Tu%3DKeTy_O0P1VDhYA%40mail.gmail.com >>> >>> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAEzdkV9ZWWVET9FgUQuHBX-%3DnoriruTi6Tu%3DKeTy_O0P1VDhYA%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/4d9cd994-928b-4007-a275-4b1d12dbc281n%40googlegroups.com.
