In article <[email protected]>, Martin Michlmayr <[email protected]> wrote:
> Oh, you probably meant gross income of $5200 consisting of $5100 > taxable income and a $100 tax-exempt allowance. Sure, sorry for not being more explicit. Thank you all, I've learned a lot! As I said, I'm not an accountant, so my example was from the perspective of a "home" user. Quoting from the feature request by Martin M.: > A lot of us are tracking our personal finance. We sometimes get > the question as to how to track salary best: should we track all > gross income and then track deductions, such as tax. Or should we > simply enter our net pay since this is the figure we typically care > about. The solution I have proposed with virtual transactions achieves the goal of tracking everything, yet easily filter out (with --real) what you are typically interested in. If one includes --real in reports by default, tax-related postings, less relevant for day-to-day bookkeeping, are never shown unless explicitly requested. But you all made convincing arguments against virtual postings, and have proposed viable alternatives, using tags or subaccounts. I think that the drawback of tags is that generating reports becomes more involved (e.g., to know how much I have saved this month, I can't just `ledger --real bal income expenses` any longer, because I need to filter net income and exclude taxes). As for subaccounts, since virtual account [X] can be replaced by real account V:X, probably one can use subaccounts as easily as virtual transactions. Anyway, this discussion has given me several ideas, which I plan to try on my data. 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.
