I've created a large and complex Ledger setup for expense
reporting. As a traveling consultant I track my spending on a project
in order to be reimbursed. I have to keep to the penny records,
provide itemized receipts, and adhere to strict business rules
regarding weekly spending.
Ledger is the ONLY product to date I've been able to accurately track
expenses in, with flexible splits and accurate reimbursement by
spending source (ie: cash vs credit, biz or personal funds) and
project.
I have frequently discussed parts of my processes on IRC, and wanted
to shed some light into my requirements and give others opportunity to
ask questions about the process or advanced features I use here.
My data files consist of automatically imported transactions (txns), I
rarely input anything by hand. As a result I've put together many
one-off scripts to help maintain my ledger files, and cobble together
required features.
To do expense reporting, I assign postings from txns by week using
metadata to an expense report number (note that different postings
inside the txn can have different ER#'s due to splits). I also
include a project code, and spending category. The metadata is vital
for me to track reimbursements accurately.
Here's a sample COMMON transaction with two postings with txn wide
metadata and post specific metadata:
2012/02/08 * (02/10/2012) DUNKIN DONUTS
; RECEIPT: Receipts/PROJ3018/20120208_DunkinDonut_3_05_0.jpg
; CSV: "02/10/2012","02/08/2012","Debit","DUNKIN DONUTS","Dining Out",$3.05
; MD5Sum: 72a32c8210b8a0663a5c64fab35d7c99
Source:AISVisa $-3.05
Dest:Projects
; ER: AISER0108
; PROJECT: PROJ3018
; CATEGORY: Meals
I have few accounts, and group my data primarily by metadata. All my
transactions are this verbose, and get more-so with additional
splits.
I do link jpeg images of scanned receipts to my transactions via
metadata, however it is a fragile process. More on that later.
For reporting, I use --pivot against the metadata by project or ER #,
as well as traditional reports like balance and register. I have a
custom script which composes a PDF expense report from Ledger data and
includes scanned receipts. These PDFs are what I send to my customers
for reimbursement.
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Russell Adams [email protected]
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