On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 8:04 PM, Martin Michlmayr <[email protected]> wrote:
> * Martin Blais <[email protected]> [2014-05-19 15:42]: > > If not, this is easily solved using subaccounts. > > I must say I'm with John on this: virtual accounts are a much more > elegant solution in this case than what you propose. > > I'm not sure if there's a way to achieve what John wants with tags. I > chatted with Bradley Kuhn earlier today about Conservancy's use of > ledger and it seems he (mostly) manages without virtual accounts, but > I'm not 100% yet how things work there. > > > This is a common case: Imagine you and your wife/life partner are both > working > > professionals and share a joint account for convenience of making common > > expenses (e.g. you're going to a restaurant together and one of you pays > but > > you want to generally split the expense, you also use those joint funds > to pay > > for individual expenses, etc.). You want to account for each other's > > contributions separately. You would get a real bank account and create > two > > subaccounts in it: > > > > Assets:US:Bank:Joint:Husband > > Assets:US:Bank:Joint:Wife > > Just as an aside, if you're married and it's a joint account, there is > no "this is mine", "this is his/hers". I know you're fond of > subaccounts, but I don't think this is a particularly good example. > Replace it with "roommates" if that works better for you. > I tend to have accounts that look like this: > > > > TYPE:COUNTRY:INSTITUTION:ACCOUNT:SUBACCOUNT > > One thing I noticed in your examples is that you really like > subaccounts. I'm not very fond of them... > I only use them where I need to. (Emacs provides instant completion, so I don't mind long names in my own stuff.) > Expenses:Taxes:US:TY2014:Google:Federal > > Expenses:Taxes:US:TY2014:Google:StateNY > > Expenses:Taxes:US:TY2014:Google:CityNYC > > ... I don't see the advantage of putting your employer's name there. > If you really want that info, I'd just use a tag. Same for the tax > year. > Tags are less flexible, though I think this may be a difference between how Beancount and Ledger do reporting. In Ledger, I get the impression that a user is always selecting some subset of transactions with expressions (from the questions on this forum) so using tags more liberally makes more sense. With Beancount, common usage is to just select your subset (I call them "views" in the web interface) - 99% of the time that's the current year - and click your way through the particular views on the web interface for that set of transactions. You don't change the matching transactions nearly as much... so having the account name in there provides that breakdown by default, which is nice. So maybe I favor tags less because of this. For instance, if I used tags, I'd have to switch views to whichever tax year in order to view them. Right now I can just switch to the unfiltered view and click on any tax year's root account to view all transactions that relate to that tax year. The only difference is in the convenience of reporting. After 2.0 is completely test-covered, I plan to factor out all the filtering code from the "views" that form the web interface, and build a command-line tool that allows you to filter and produce the same reports as the web interface but in ASCII format. Instead of producing HTML code, the rendering code will produce "report" objects which then get rendered in a separate step either in HTML or ASCII for the console. The subset of transactions will be selectable by a simple rules language on the command-line. It should provide an interface perhaps more similar to Ledger's (though parsing time is somewhat slower than Ledger's I suspect, my huge personal file takes about 1.2 seconds to parse right now, which is still acceptable to me). I guess it's just a matter of taste, but your account names seem > unwieldy to me. > > > So what can we do to select across many dimensions while still keeping > > hierarchical account names? > > Use tags? Note that in ledger, tags can have values, e.g. > > ; foo: bar > > > 2014-05-19 * "Booking tithe" > > Assets:US:BofA:Checking -300 USD > > Assets:US:BofA:Checking:Tithe 300 USD > > Now you're creating an account that doesn't exist, which I don't find > ideal. > > -- > Martin Michlmayr > http://www.cyrius.com/ > > -- > > --- > 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. > -- --- 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.
