I agree .
Here's how I would use it, and here's why (in my mind) it's both a bug
report and a feature request.
I run an academic lab. I get grants from different granting agencies, each
of which uses different accounting systems. The grants have start and end
dates. To manage them, I've recently started to keep each grant in a
separate ledger, with one main ledger that includes them all. Obviously, I
have to spend down on each grant before it runs out. I sometime transfer
recurring expenses between grants, like a postdoc salary or monthly charge
for liquid nitrogen.
For all the broad categories (Assets, Expenses, Liabilities), I have EOM
(Manpower), Equipment, and OOE (Other operating expenses). This is because
these are not transferable in the grant budget, or at least not without a
lot of extra paperwork. Ledger's flexibility is fantastic for reasoning
about this problem, so I can get a snapshot balance of, say, my Assets:EOM
across grants.
Scenario planning would include things like transferring a postdoc salary
from one grant to another when the EOM runs out on the first grant. The
ideal scenario planning would tell me what residual EOM I have on the first
grant, so I can transfer that amount to OOE and spend it.
Forecasting balances is ideal. Because I can't forecast balances, I've
been creating future transactions with effective dates and using that
instead. But what would really make this shine would be effective dates on
recurring expenses (or whole accounts)
For a whole ledger it would look like this
apply forecast d<[2015-06-01]
meaning the grant ends on May 31, while for a transaction it would look
like this
~ Monthly
Expenses:EOM $5,000.00 ;; forecast::
d<[2015-04-01]
Assets:EOM
meaning only forecast that recurring expense as described.
On Sunday, May 25, 2014 2:34:42 AM UTC+8, John Wiegley wrote:
>
> >>>>> Greg Tucker-Kellogg <[email protected] <javascript:>> writes:
>
> > I'm having this exact same problem in Ledger 3.0.2-20140507,
>
> I'm not sure I ever tested the forecaster with the balance report! That
> sounds like a bug to me.
>
> John
> > On Sunday, July 18, 2010 4:34:02 AM UTC+8, spiffytech wrote:
>
> > When I run "ledger --forecast "d<[2011/01/01]" bal" I see expenses
> and
> > assets values in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since I'm a
> > poor college student with $10k annual income, this is very wrong.
> > Running ledger --forecast "d<[2011/01/01]" print" shows dates all
> the
> > way to December 2037, the largest date a signed int epoch timestamp
> > can represent. Dividing the values from Balance by 27 (2037-2010) I
> > get the $10k annual for both Expenses and Assets.
>
> > Using Register instead of Balance or Print stops at (nearly) the
> > correct date. If I use "d<[2011/01/01]" I do get a transaction on
> > January 1, 2011, which should not happen (< vs <=)
>
> > Am I doing something wrong, or is this a bug? I'm using Ledger
> 2.6.2,
> > though someone in #ledger reported what sounds like the same problem
> > with 3.0.
>
>
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