Hello, I'm a first-time poster on the ledger listserv although I've spent a couple of months lurking. There's been some great correspondence here and everyone seems willing to help. Community was an important factor in my choosing to use ledger to organize my finances. The simplicity of storing financial information in a readable text file that can be manipulated and exported was another. I'm also enjoying learning some of the basic accounting concepts!
I'm looking for troubleshooting advice as I attempt to get started using use budgets with ledger. I've been happily using ledger in org-mode as described in the worg tutorial http:bit.ly/1wIGq98 I've had no trouble using Babel to generate simple reports. However, I am having trouble getting the results I expect when it comes to using the budget function described in the ledger-cli manual here http://bit.ly/UhV1fh *** To start keeping a budget, put some periodic transactions (see Periodic Transactions) at the top of your ledger file. A periodic transaction is almost identical to a regular transaction, except that it begins with a tilde and has a period expression in place of a payee. ~ Monthly Expenses:Rent $500.00 Expenses:Food $450.00 Expenses:Auto:Gas $120.00 Expenses:Insurance $150.00 Expenses:Phone $125.00 Expenses:Utilities $100.00 Expenses:Movies $50.00 Expenses $200.00 ; all other expenses Assets ~ Yearly Expenses:Auto:Repair $500.00 Assets *** These instructions and an example I found elsewhere (although I can't locate the source now) has led me to believe that I should be able to generate a comparison between income, expenses, and the budget with code and a journal that looks like this: *** #+name: balance and budget #+begin_src ledger :cmdline --budget register ^expenses :noweb yes ~ Monthly expenses:rent $500.00 2010/07/22 * Got paid assets:bank:checking $1000.00 income:salary 2010/07/23 Rent expenses:rent $500.00 assets:bank:checking #+end_src *** When I run the code by typing C-c C-c on the "begin_src" line, I do not get any results in the org file as I do with all my other commands (e.g., when I run "bal" I get a balance). I also see this result in Emacs Messages: *** Evaluate this ledger code block (balance) on your system? (y or n) y executing Ledger code block (balance)... executing Ledger source code block ledger -f /tmp/babel-23672nm/ledger-2367yuD --budget register ^expenses While balancing entry: ~ Monthly Unbalanced remainder is: $500.00 Error: "/tmp/babel-23672nm/ledger-2367yuD", line 2: Entry does not balance Code block evaluation complete. *** So it seems that the code is being evaluated successfully even though, in this case, it doesn't balance. But the output only appears in the Emacs Messages output and not just beneath the source block as happens when I evaluate all other code. I suppose I could use ledger-cli to output to a file. But I'd prefer to output directly to the org file itself. So my questions here are two-fold: 1. (Specific) Can anyone advise me on how to begin troubleshooting the lack of output to the org file as described above? 2. (General) I'm aware that there seem to be other methods to generate budgets using ledger and org-mode such as the excellent description provided in Worg here http://bit.ly/1wIGq98 and Sacha Chua's example http://bit.ly/1p4d1EU with an example file here http://bit.ly/UhV2zW However, both are a bit beyond me at the moment. Would it be advisable to use one of these approaches instead? I'd like to avoid spending a lot of time learning how to create a budget only to find that there is a simpler method. Thanks for creating such a elegant piece of software and maintaining a community of support around it! All the best, Will -- --- 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.
