On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 7:41 AM, John Wiegley <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Nov 9, 2010, at 12:24 AM, Michael Farnbach wrote: > > > I think I'll leave them commented out for now. It seems like a natural > way to account for gasoline as simply something that I expend. While money > isn't created or destroyed, the gas leaves my car in many different forms to > add to the great ledger of the universe like any other expense. > > Why not just stick with the Gas expense, then? My "Dining" expense account > infinitely grows, but that's not a problem since I don't look at in balance > reports -- unless they are time bounded. > > John Yes! Exactly. Actually, the only reason I thought there was a problem was that I was getting an error that it couldn't figure out the cost of the gas when doing register reports. The value of the gas should be zero (I can't redeem it for any money) and even after I told it to ignore the value of the gas the error remained. It seems to work now, for reasons I'm not totally aware. But then again I am just learning this. One more quick question, does anyone else track assets as commodities? Like, say my house value, or the value of my cars. e.g. I have one civic and its current value is about $12,000. Okay, one more quick question after than. There is a program called "YNAB" that I like that does budgeting. The reason I like it is that it does envelope style budgeting, virtual envelopes that you stack money in to pay expenses with. Instead of it being a goal, it is like an account, and you can accumulate (save) for larger expenses or move the money to another budget. I like Ledger because you can do that too with virtual accounts and automated transactions, for instance every pay check 5% (or $150) goes to grocery budget account, and then I deduct from it whenever there is a payment to the Expenses:Food:Grocery account. I know ledger does budgets in another way, but does anyone else here keep envelope style budgets with ledger? My metric for how elegant a piece of software is comes from its ability to handle principles so well I feel smarter about a subject for just learning the software, but it gives me the freedom to do it the way I want to. Ledger seems like that kind of software, but I can also be nervous that I'm abusing the system sometimes :) Thanks again everyone.
