>>>>> Martin Blais <[email protected]> writes: > It's true that this is not a "nice" solution, but neither is using virtual > accounts, because you give up the balancing check, which in my view is > simply not an acceptable option... It might look nice, but it makes it > really easy for you to make a mistake that goes undetected. That's not a > solution either IMHO.
I have the balance check with --real. That's the only balance I truly need to care about, since any other balance is not "real". > I'm curious as to the reasons behind this structure. Why is the structure of > these projects managed in that way? Why do you need to have assets for each > community project? Is there a better way to structure this? I.e., how does a > company splice and dice their assets between their internal cost centers? (A > similar problem.) In my experience there's nothing that can't be sorted out > by introducing a level of indirection or two, some intermediate buckets to > reallocate the beans... can't the funds from all these real accounts be > pooled to some intermediate non-real account and then entries issued to > allocate budgets for each of the projects, which could then subtract their > entries from their own dedicated budget accounts as they incur them? There > has to be a way, I think if we discussed with a corporate accountant it > might provide some insight that makes this example solved with regular > postings. I don't know. It's been a while since I held that position, so I haven't faced that particular necessity of late. > In any case, I think we can come up with something better that achieves the > goal of managing two sets of distinct categorization while still keeping the > balances. Here's an idea: What if we marked some accounts (your real > accounts in the example above) as "required" to book all of the entries that > affect them into two well-defined but distinct subsets of postings, say A > and B? Then, when parsing, one would select the A set of postings or the B > set of postings. Requiring all those transactions to have two sets of > balancing postings would ensure that all the amounts in that account are > correctly booked one way or the other. You're basically entering two > categorizations in the same place for all transactions that related to some > set of accounts, and then choosing one set of categorization across all of > them, or another. This could be done early on, even during parsing. What would this look like? > I'm convinced we can come up with some other ideas to solve this problem > that don't require giving up balancing. I'd be interested to see your ideas! John -- --- 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.
