I think the conversation now is not about *Strategy for multi currency*,
not about * Strategy for multi location.*
My approach is that I normally try to log as much information as I may need
in the future and be sure, that I know how to extract it later.
If you think of it, country of expense is just one of the things you may
want to track for the purposes of the future data analysis. But this is not
the only information, you may want to track.
Say you track *Expenses:Clothing*. But you may want to track this per
country and also per family member. Say you have 4 family members and you
have expenses in 3 countries, In this case just for *Expenses:Clothing *you
will have 3*4 = 12 sub-accounts
Expenses:Clothing:UK:John
Expenses:Clothing:UK:Mary
Expenses:Clothing:UK:Richard
Expenses:Clothing:UK:Anna
Expenses:Clothing:US:John
Expenses:Clothing:US:Mary
Expenses:Clothing:US:Richard
Expenses:Clothing:US:Anna
.......
If you then separate Clothing on Clothing and Footwear, you already end up
with 24 accounts
This very quickly becomes not manageable. However the advantage of keeping
meta information in an account is that beancount gives you a lot of
control about accounts (it checks them, you can then close them at certain
moment etc).
Another disadvantage is that it is not that easy for instance to group
expenses per country, as the country is berried as the 3rd element of the
account name.
Another alternative is to keep meta data in a meta field. Meta fields do
not have a lot of built in checks (but you can script them), but avoids
problems, mentioned above.
Example:
2024-01-01 price GBP 2 USD
2024-01-01 * "Shopping UK"
Expenses:Clothing 100 GBP
country:"UK"
Assets:Cash
2024-01-01 * "Supermarket UK"
Expenses:Supermarket 50 GBP
country:"UK"
Assets:Cash
2024-01-02 * "Shopping US"
Expenses:Clothing 100 USD
country:"US"
Assets:Cash
2024-01-02 * "Supermarket US"
Expenses:Supermarket 50 USD
country:"US"
Assets:Cash
You can then query the above like this for instance
SELECT meta['country'] as country, account, SUM(convert(position,"USD",
date)) as USD
WHERE account ~ "Expenses"
GROUP BY country, account
You can experiment with it here:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1DNmh9Jlos_LHIN2joGzs3-EKcKt6qzZr?usp=sharing
On Monday, August 26, 2024 at 8:22:16 PM UTC+2 [email protected] wrote:
> It does make sense when you put it this way.
>
> The things is I’m new to PTA so I’m somewhat afraid to commit to a
> particular CoA, so I’m trying to come with the best setup right ahead. But
> I guess I just need to start and see how it goes throughout at least
> one/two tax seasons.
>
> On Mon, Aug 26, 2024 at 05:57 Justus Pendleton <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> 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!
>>>>>
>>>> --
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>>>>>
>>>>> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAEzdkV9ZWWVET9FgUQuHBX-%3DnoriruTi6Tu%3DKeTy_O0P1VDhYA%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
>>>>> .
>>>>>
>>>> --
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