That is correct. The details don't matter; a balance sheet is a snapshot in time, an income statement is a diff of two snapshots at different times. Since we have a stream of transactions we can just generate these in the fly for any period.
This is an attempt to specify that as a SQL extension. On Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 07:49 Chary Ev2geny <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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 > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/637165e0-4103-4772-865d-bea694206477n%40googlegroups.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 visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAK21%2BhO6LJLshECqUnhMNjonobhL57O7axFT86CaLgU48YonSw%40mail.gmail.com.
