Thanks for this post Martin, I've learned a lot reading it! Some specific questions/comments are inlined below,
On Sat, Jul 12, 2014 at 11:54:23AM -0400, Martin Blais wrote: > About Income accounts: > Income almost always has recurring transactions - you either work as an > employee and get multiple payments, or you do contract work and your work > does repeat from the same client (to which you send incomes and such), and > you will typically want to create an account for this client's source of > income anyhow. > > There are exceptions: for example, I sell books via PayPal. Every > "customer" is a new and different one and the great majority of them buys > the book only once; it would make no sense to create a subaccount for each. > That's an excellent use case to use a payee on an income account. Up to now, I've always thought that a payee was invariably the recipient end of a transaction. A naive reading of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payee confirmed that to me a while ago, but that's article is clearly not (yet) up to the definition precision that an accountant would expect. Here you're saying that payee are also used to qualify more precisely the origin of the money. Is that actually correct? It would solve some uniformity problems I'm having (which led me to introduce weird tags like "Debtor:") and hence make me happy :) But I'm curious to know if that's a common interpretation of what a payee is. (You touched this point also in another part of your email, but not in a conclusive way, AFAIU.) > About Expenses accounts: > Then you have expenses, which we tend to book to accounts associated with > "categories." You might ask, why do we do that? This would be a legitimate > question. For example, why don't we define Expense accounts to whichever > entity we're sending the payments to? Like this: > > Expenses:ConEdison > Expenses:TMobile > Expenses:WholeFoodsMarket > Expenses:UnionMarket Somehow orthogonal to this thread, I'm still struggling to find a satisfactory hierarchy for my expense accounts. Would you mind sharing your own Expenses hierarchy publicly? (maybe censored, narrowed down to a given depth, or whatever) That would certainly help me a lot. More generally, I think it would be useful to collect somewhere (wiki?) expenses hierarchies---or even more broadly entire charts of accounts---so that others can take inspiration from them. Thus far I've been taking inspiration from the predefined chart of accounts of GnuCash, but I'm not entirely satisfied by them. I've heard from other Ledger-CLI newbies that were doing the same, so there might be a more general problem to be solved here. > Expenses:Electricity:* > Expenses:Phone:* > Expenses:Groceries:* > > If you can aggregate this way, these methods are entirely equivalent > IMO. I've been thinking about adding a reporting feature to Beancount > whereby it would report payees as sub-accounts (i.e., define > subaccounts automatically), which might be fun and it might make > sense. I remember you saying that you were also toying with the idea of converting general tags into sub-accounts, and I quite liked that idea. Is this a specific case of it, or something that would require an ad-hoc treatment? > If you just use the "category only" method, then almost all the > transactions you book to expenses have a payee (unless it's a > summarizing transaction with multiple expense postings that implies > multiple payees, in which case you're out of luck - you can't identify > just one as the payee). Well, technically in Ledger-CLI you can associate the "payee: ..." tag to specific posting, rather than transactions as a whole. So (unless money also *come* from multiple accounts, I guess) you can probably "explode" a single transaction into multiple sub-transactions, each one with a single payee. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » -- --- 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 ledger-cli+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
