On 7/30/10 2:41 AM, Roel Vanhout wrote:
But then we come back to the line in your first mail, "Reflecting on
this, it seems that Income/Expenses are by nature final categories,
while Assets/Liabilities are open." Which is deeply embedded in the
whole double bookkeeping system already,
I think that's right, and that Equity also falls in the second group.
and also how ledger work
already. You can track assets and liabilities in various currencies
(or commodities) and convert to one final valuation at reporting time,
while income and expenses are valuated at the time they are incurred
('fixed').
Is there something in current ledger that treats assets/liabilities/equity different from income/expenses ? I don't
think so. I think John is proposing to add that distinction (with the "final" directive, because obviously you can't
just check accountname =~ "^(income|expenses)(:|$)"...). I agree that some way of specifying account types is necessary.
This is independent of the whole commodity/pricing topic; you need it simply to print a standard-format balance sheet.
It's worth spending time to find the most intuitive mechanism, too, because it's getting hard to call the ledger file
format simple.
I wouldn't call it "final". There must be some standard accounting terminology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_accounts calls them Balance Sheet Accounts and Profit & Loss accounts, eg.
Also we might find it useful to specify more detailed account types some day, as Quicken/Gnucash do, I guess to adjust
sign and terminology and perhaps function. It suggests something like "account-type TYPE ACCOUNTREGEX" ? Or, if it turns
out detailed type is orthogonal to the major distinction above - I'm not sure - there might be "account-kind ..." as well.
