On Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 8:27:41 AM UTC+1 [email protected] wrote:
That sounds right to me. Though to be honest, I've never really understood the use cases for open/close/clear and I don't think I've ever used them personally. I was just looking at these yesterday, as it was not clear for me as well. So, I will try to give you more extended explanation As far as I understood the purpose of them is to be able to produce traditional finance - like equivalent of the Balance Sheet report. In professional finance they like to stick everything in a balance sheet report (including information about income and expenses), and to have *Income *and *Expenses *empty. This balance sheet report then gets updated with every new accounting period. So, balance of earnings (Income - Expenses) from inception to the start of the current accounting period goes to *Equity:Earnings:Previous, * balance of earnings for the current accounting period goes to the *Equity:Earnings:Current.* *So, *OPEN, CLOSE ON, CLEAR effectively activate some functions, which transform ledger before it is passed to the further traditional beanquery query. In this case beanquery then operates not on original ledger, but on some transformed version of it. All for the purpose of being able to use beanquery to extract this Balance Sheet report - like information. I think Martin must have had this functionality before the beanquery (to serve bean-report) and then this functionality was added to beanquery. Martin, please correct me if I am wrong somewhere -- 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 visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/637165e0-4103-4772-865d-bea694206477n%40googlegroups.com.
