On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 6:18 AM, Esben Stien <[email protected]> wrote:

> "Craig Earls" <[email protected]> writes:
>  The first use in ledger-cli is to link each transaction to a document,
> which is pretty important in accounting;)
>

Well no, not exactly. The thing you do in importing financial data is
basically to funnel transactions from all of your statements from all your
institutions in a single place in a single format with a single set of
accounts, so that you can do reporting with a view of everything you have.
Having support for a per-transaction link to a particular document is
generally unnecessary--you can easily find the corresponding document by
date if you need to.

In order to associate a unique ID with a particular transaction, in
Beancount you can use a "link" which is like a special kind of tag. I think
Ledger has a similar feature, per-post ("tag"?). It looks like this in
Beancount:

  2013-04-06 * "Invoice to Metropolis for job well done, waiting for
payment." ^metropolis-invoice-103
     ...
     ...

The "^...." bit is a link. You can have multiple links per transactions.
The web interface can show you all transactions with the same link in a
separate list (under the /link/.... URL).

Separately, there is a "document" directive that allows you to associate a
document with an account, e.g.

  2014-01-01 document  Expenses:Electricity
 "/path/to/filename/ConEdison-2013-12.pdf"

Documents don't have to be declared that way explicitly: you can also tell
Beancount about a root directory where it will find documents automatically
and create the document entries for you. The files just have to be
organized in a directory hierarchy mirrorring the account names exactly,
and files must begin with "YYYY-MM-DD" to provide a date for the document.
That's a simple convention. LedgerHub is able to move files that it
recognizes to such a file hierarchy, so after you import the data, you file
the files into e.g. a local git repo with all your statemetns, and your
document entries show up in the registers. It's also a nice way to organize
all your statements, so if you need to bring something up for e.g. a tax
audit, you quickly know where to find it.

Those two features are not related at the moment... but I think I'll add
the ability to have links on document directives. That seems like an
effective way one could associate a particular pdf document (given a
declaration) with a list of transactions. You click on the link, see all
the transactions + the document, and you can click on the document itself
to see the detail. Seems like a legit idea.

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