On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 9:04 PM, Martin Blais <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 7:06 PM, Martin Michlmayr <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> > Income:US:Google:Deductions:Medical XXXX.XX USD >> > Income:US:Google:Deductions:TransitPreTax XXXX.XX USD >> > Income:US:Google:Deductions:Vision XXXX.XX USD >> >> Are you should these shouldn't be Expense accounts? e.g. >> Expenses:Health:Insurance >> > > ... and Dental. > > Hmmm that's a good point, I'll review this indeed... > It does bother me that those have generally positives amounts, and points > to your comment likely being right. > I'll see why they call these deductions. > Why yes, of course, you are right, these are the deductions from my paycheck, expenses paid through my salary. I'm flabbergasted I was still booking this wrong. They are, indeed, to be dealt with as expenses. I've revised how I do this, both for these expenses, and for per-year booking of taxes, and it now looks like this: 2014-05-09 * "GOOGLE INC PAYROLL / GOOGLE INC PAYROLL" ^google-XXXXXXX Assets:US:TD:Checking XXXX.XX USD Income:US:Google:GroupTermLife -XXXX.XX USD Income:US:Google:Salary -XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Health:Dental:Insurance:Google XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Health:Life:GroupTermLife:Google XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Communications:Internet:Reimbursement:Google -XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Health:Medical:Insurance:Google XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Transportation:PublicTrans:TransitPreTax XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Health:Vision:Insurance:Google XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Taxes:US:TY2014:Medicare:Google XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Taxes:US:TY2014:Federal:Google XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Taxes:US:TY2014:City:Google XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Taxes:US:TY2014:SDI:Google XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Taxes:US:TY2014:State:Google XXXX.XX USD Expenses:Taxes:US:TY2014:SocSec:Google XXXX.XX USD Assets:US:Google:Vacation X.XX VACHR Income:US:Google:Vacation -X.XX VACHR It does not look as "regular" but it is more correct. All my health expenses are now grouped together under Expenses:Health:*, which integrates both my health insurance costs and the amounts I pay out-of-pocket (e.g., copays, deductibles, drugs/pharmacy). I don't know why I hadn't done this before, this is so much better. Note that the internet reimbursement is booked by the payroll company as a negative deduction so I'm choosing to book it as reducing my ISP internet expense as well... I could have chosen to view it as an income account but I prefer not to, because it always just reduces the expense. Also, booking the tax accounts this way matches more clearly how one organizes accounts to obtain a "taxes paid / total income" ratio for that year. I can just sum up Expenses:Taxes:US:TY2014;* to find out how much in taxes was paid *for that year*. (For those who might be unclear about why this is needed, 2014 taxation year expenses may be incurred in 2015, first at the date of filing taxes, and later on if/when I receive an adjustment/correction from the government for that year, so it's impossible to use the transaction dates for this purpose. Corrections may appear years after filing too. Note that all tax communications tend to have a taxation year attached to them, so it's easy to book the amount in the right year.) This is an example where the "close" directive comes in handy: after filing taxes and receiving confirmation from the government, I can just choose to mark the accounts for that taxation year as closed, and they will not show up in the reports for years beyond the close date. Now the truly, wonderfully great thing is how much *power* we have using our little text files. It's exhilarating. I can write a little script that renames my accounts automatically - I use xx-rename - look at it in visual diff, run bean-web on it, look at the reports, decide if I like it or not, revert and retry if I screwed up until I get it right. If I don't like it, "hg revert" and I'm back where I was. If I like it, "hg commit" and move on. Global renames, even of transactions far in the past, are not a problem. Text file power! The knowledge you acquire while learning how to do your bookkeeping right impacts your entire past transaction history, you can fix everything. Knowing that I will never lose any of this data to a software update or a company going EOL'ing their product and that I am able to completely reshape my history in the best way possible is something I could never give up now. Try doing that in any of the bookkeeping software that provide GUI interfaces. -- --- 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.
