In article
<cak21+hp9zp05erd8fhkkqtx-xglzyh93cxxv_r+05605e43...@mail.gmail.com>,
Martin Blais <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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?
@Jostein: I have concluded some time ago that keeping virtual and
non-virtual accounts distinct is a best practice (good tip for
LedgerTips?). This can be easily achieved without much inconvenience by
using two accounts sharing a common prefix instead of one account.
I think that Ledger's behavior is not only a reasonable assumption, but
a requirement: I can't recall the details off the top of my head (maybe
someone else will help), but I'm pretty sure that creating equity
reports is a use case that *requires* separate virtual and non-virtual
accounts to avoid ambiguities.
@Martin: I use virtual accounts sparingly, but there are situations
where they are logically necessary. Keeping in mind that I am not an
accountant, consider the following example: an employee in the public
sector gets a salary that is taxed in advance. He may get a monthly
statement with the following information:
Gross income: $5200
Family allowance (tax-exempt): $100
Taxes: $1700
Net income: $3500
The net income is the money that he eventually gets in the bank. He may
keep track of this information as follows:
2013/05/17 * Myself
Assets:Checking:Myself $3500.00
Income:Salary:Family Allowance $-100.00
Income:Salary:Taxable:Net
[Expenses:Taxes:Salary] $1700.00
[Income:Salary:Taxable:Taxes] $-1700.00
Since the employee never really gets the taxed amount, I think that
those are conceptually virtual postings and must be treated as such.
What do you think?
Now, a balance report including virtual postings will show all the
details:
ledger bal myself income taxes
$3500.00 Assets:Checking:Myself
$1700.00 Expenses:Taxes:Salary
$-5200.00 Income:Salary
$-100.00 Family Allowance
$-5100.00 Taxable
$-3400.00 Net
$-1700.00 Taxes
--------------------
0
A balance report without virtual transactions will only show the net
income:
ledger bal myself income taxes --real
$3500.00 Assets:Checking:Myself
$-3500.00 Income:Salary
$-100.00 Family Allowance
$-3400.00 Taxable:Net
--------------------
0
Enjoy,
Life
--
---
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/d/optout.
