Really? This surprises me. I read this as a reasonable assumption and
looked up the Ledger doc for it but could not find it.

It makes sense to me that one may want to restrict balancing transactions
to accounts with no virtual transactions at all and vice-versa, segregating
accounts by whether their transactions are all virtual or none at all.
Otherwise the accounting equation is not guaranteed to sum to zero! How do
these virtual postings get handled when you transfer net-income to equity
for drawing out a balance sheet?

In Beancount 2.0 I removed virtual postings for that reason, and also
because their availability always pointed me to a misuse of how I booked
many of my transactions, in most instances I was using virtual accounts as
a crutch. By not having them, it forced me to get creative and figure out
how to book my Ledger right, and now they're mostly superfluous (at least
my use case, I claim you don't need them). I'm thinking about reintroducing
something like them eventually: a Virtual:* account hierarchy separate from
Assets/Liabilities/Equity/Income/Expenses that would not go into the
accounting equation nor get balance checks (no special syntax except for
the Virtual: prefix). In other words, instead of virtual POSTINGS, you
would have virtual ACCOUNTS, and it would be understood that those
accumulators don't participate in the accounting equation, they're there to
count other things. In fact, they could be a great way for plugins to
automatically calculate and present various values without disrupting the
user's DE transactions.

Any thoughts?



On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 6:06 PM, John Wiegley <[email protected]> wrote:

> >>>>> Jostein Berntsen <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > Is there a reason for this?
>
> This sounds rather odd, and may be a bug.
>
> John
>
> > Example data:
>
> > 2014/03/05 * Opening Balance
> >         Assets:Project:Budget   1000000,00 NOK
>
> > Equity:Opening Balance
>
> > =  /TeamDev/
> >              (Assets:Project:Budget)   (1000,00 NOK * amount)
>
> > Example command and output:
>
> > ledger reg -s budget
> > While handling posting from
> > "/home/jostein/Documents/Finans/ledger/project.dat", line 16:
> >> (Assets:Project:Budget)   (1000,00 NOK * amount)
> > Error: 'equity' cannot accept virtual and non-virtual postings to the
> same
> > account
>
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