Simon, Martin, Just a quick catch up on this -- one of my latest approaches to help with this challenge is to look at notes attached to transactions that end in :<number>m, and then generate depreciating entries from that.
Example: 2016/01/05 Insurance ; Auto:12m Expense:Auto:Insurance £600.00 Assets:Current:Chequing Will generate a first-month offset transaction: 2016/01/05 Insurance Depreciation ; :Deprec: Assets:Deprec:Auto:Insurance £550.00 Expense:Auto:Insurance Then for the next 11 months..: 2016/02/01 Insurance Depreciation ; :Deprec: Expense:Auto:Insurance £50 Assets:Deprec:Auto:Insurance I'm considering also using this for holidays, for example. This way I can look at my monthly holiday expenses smoothed out. And I can filter out the Deprec tag if I want the cash expenses. Mark On Monday, 17 August 2015 23:27:04 UTC+1, Simon Michael (sm) wrote: > > On 8/16/15 2:33 PM, Mark Scannell wrote: > > Some challenges and reasons to move beyond this: > > - Income can be occasional, monthly, more secure or less secure (eg > bonus, > > shares). This is becoming more significant for me. > > - Long term savings can be locked-in pension, cash, or various forms of > > long term investments that are sellable (eg buy-to-let, ISA accounts) > > - Expenses can be optional. Some things can be dropped without > significant > > impact. (Holidays, renovations) > > - Expenses aren't regular. Some are prepaid for a year (eg insurance), > some > > are prepaid for a few years (eg car). > > - Expenses can be time-bound. Specifically, large childcare expenses > aren't > > forever. Or lost-income due to unpaid maternity time. > > These seem to point towards refining your chart of accounts - > adding/reorganizing categories to bring out more of the details you're > interested in. Eg once expenses are categorized as fixed/optional, you > can more easily play what-if by filtering out the optional. > > > Some reports I'd love to get: > > - See how I'm trending. How would my change of net worth be in 12 months > if > > I continue on the same course? > > - See how things could change. What if I earned more? Earned less? Took > on > > more expensive childcare? > > - How is my liquidity position? If I were to take on a longer-term > > investment, or leverage myself up, how easily could I cover my > > debts/de-leverage? > > - How is my liquidity position trending? > > These seem (mostly ?) about projecting into the future. Two approaches > to consider: in one, you use Ledger's automatic transactions to generate > recurring transactions arbitrarily far into the future. In the other, > you generate the journal entries yourself (eg with editor macros) and > just save them in a file, eg future.ledger, which also includes your > current ledger. The first approach will require expertise if you want to > model one-off and irregular future transactions. The second seems more > tedious, but not if you're expert with your editor, and it's simple and > gives full control. And of course you could combine both. > > I currently use the second approach and just run reports in the usual > way. For what-ifs I may use temporary account aliases or extra included > files. For quick balance-over-time charts, I use hledger-web, or for > something more complex I would export report data as CSV to a > spreadsheet and do the charting there. > > > -- --- 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.
