On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 08:06:11PM -0700, Boyd Kelly wrote: > Hi, > > I've been in a Gnucash environment for the last few years, and since Jan 1 > have been testing things out with ledger. I'm not an accountant, but can > deal with double entry fairly well. Previously I've kept two files for > personal and business, but wondering if I should put everything in a single > file in the ledger world, or use an !nclude statement to bring the business > transactions into my personal file to get a full picture. >
I prefer to separate files by the largest primary key / category. (ie: Account, expense report, etc). I also use DVCS extensively (bazaar). > Then as a related issue there is the chart of accounts. I'm setting all my > business accounts preceded with Business, ie Expenses:Business:Auto:Fuel, > and the personal stuff is just Expenses:Auto:Fuel. Is there any best > practice here as to what will allow reports that can separate and combine > business and personal data? -- I've been testing some basic commands like > ledger bal not business etc. > I would suggest you not use a large number of sub-accounts. Ledger supports metadata on transactions, and you can flag a txn with key/value pair data. Most of my expense reports have individual line items with metadata linking them to specific expense reports, while the accounts are just projects or internal. > When having two files in gnucash, if there was a transfer between my > business and personal chequing, that would be an Equity:Draw, but if I keep > these files together the transfer will just go from > Assets:Business:Chequing to Assets:Chequing. What do accountants think of > this? Also that transfer will have to live in the personal or the business > ledger file. Where should that be? And then if you separated the files > you would throw everything out of whack. So maybe avoid the !include > directive and just keep everything together? Then I believe I can do an > archive at year end. > I use !include, but otherwise I can't help. I'm not an accountant. > Regarding investments, in the gnucash world the accounts were typically > Assets:Broker:STOCK and Assets:Broker:Cash, but in the ledger documentation > most of the examples show the stock purchase of APPL in Assets:Broker (not > Assets:Broker:APPL). Is there going to be any advantage/disadvantage to > keeping an actual account for the stock itself? And same question for the > Assets:Broker:Cash account. I hope others can help you here. > While I continue to fiddle around with this... any suggestions or best > practices welcome. Make sure to do unit testing on your expectations (ie: create examples of txns and test first). Also you should standardize on text templates quickly (ie: yasnippet in emacs) for transaction types. Good luck! ------------------------------------------------------------------ Russell Adams [email protected] PGP Key ID: 0x1160DCB3 http://www.adamsinfoserv.com/ Fingerprint: 1723 D8CA 4280 1EC9 557F 66E8 1154 E018 1160 DCB3 -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
