I’ve been thinking about how to track transfers into a certain account, for example, a Health Savings Account or 401k.
For example:
2014-06-01 Transfer
Assets:Health Savings $500
Assets:Checking
2014-06-10 Doctor
Expenses:Health $200
Assets:Health Savings
2014-07-01 Interest
Assets:Health Savings $0.25
Income:Interest
For tax purposes, I care about the total amount transferred in ($500 in this
case).
Solution 1: Tags.
2014-06-01 Transfer
Assets:Health Savings $500
; Taxes: HSA Contribution
Assets:Checking
Now leger bal "Assets:Health Savings” and “%Taxes=HSA Contribution” gives me
$500. The downside is that tags can be difficult to work with. (For example,
can you match a tag value by regex? Not that I can see)
Solution 2: extra accounts. I’ve put them under Expenses, because that seems
most apt, but still a little weird.
2014-06-01 Transfer
Expenses:HSA:Contribution $500
Expenses:HSA:Transfer -$500
Assets:Health Savings $500
Assets:Checking
Now leger bal “Expenses:HSA:Contribution" gives me $500. The downside is that
this is more verbose. You also have a more or less meaningless account in
Expenses:HSA:Transfer. You can use automated transactions to clean up data
entry, but it still may not be worth it. Also, I’m soured on automatic
transactions since rediscovering bug 983
http://bugs.ledger-cli.org/show_bug.cgi?id=983.
Does anyone else try to solve this problem? Is there a solution I’m
overlooking?
Nathan
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