On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 4:53 AM, Roland Tepp <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks a bunch for very good answers. I did have to read the follow-up > several times though to fully understand what was said. > > I do have a couple of other questions about keeping my Ledger journal.. > > I do have a credit card from my bank with a predefined credit amount on > it. When I pull out money from the credit card, I decrease the amount of > credit available and increase my liabilities. > Actually that's incorrect. In the Ledgerverse, you would simply _decrease_ the amount of your liabilities account (it's a net negative) and view "your liabilities" as the reverse of that amount. For instance, if you've spend 700$ on it, a Liabilities:CreditCard account would have a balance of -700 USD but "your liabilities" is to be interpreted as 700 USD. Unlike traditional accounting, we deal with the signs explicitly in order to do away with the more problematic and confusing credits and debits. This simplifies things quite a bit, as changes posted to any account are all coherent and any balance checks always only involve sums. In other words, in the Ledgerverse, A + L + E + I + X = 0. In the outside world, A - L - E + I - X = 0. The former is simpler. It's a compromise: all you have to ever remember is that liabilities, equity and income are normally held with negative balances. > When I pay back more than I owe on this account, then I have just > increased my credit by that amount. > Yes. The end result would be a Liabilities account with a positive (i.e., abnormal) balance. I have it set up as a liability account, but that does not show me how much > credit I have on the card. > It does not indeed. > > What is the proper way of representing such accounts so that I could see > how much I owe but also be able to see, how much credit do I have? > The amount of credit you have remaining is a derived value. It is a function of your available credit and the current balance in your account. In Ledger you can probably do this by using a mathematical expression where you feed in your available credit. Beancount does not have such capability yet (I'm building it into my new query language). In other words: you don't track it explicitly. It is sufficient to just track the value of the Liabilities account and to calculate the amount of available remaining credit explicitly. -- > > --- > 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. > -- --- 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.
