Stay away from virtual postings, they break the accounting equation. You never need to use them, period. They are a crutch that misleads many into not figuring things out. Beancount doesn't even support them and I've doing everything without so far without problems (though it has forced me to learn bookkeeping).
I see at least two ways of accounting for shared expenses: 1. The simple way: You can simply create a Liabilities account. When you book a shared expense, you book a portion of it to the liabilities account, e.g. 2015-12-11 * "CON EDISON ONLINE PMT" Assets:US:Checking -46.51 USD Liabilities:AccountsPayable:Caroline 46.51/2 USD Expenses:Home:Electricity You can then share the account on that liabilities account with your partner. Cut-n-pasting from the web interface into gmail preserves the HTML so that's one easy way share the balance details. However much your roommate/partner owes is the balance of that account. It's really convenient because you can use that account for a variety of purposes. It effectively separates the "counting" and the "payment". Counting occurs off the liabilities account; payments occur off the balance, paid to the account. 2. You can create a separate book. I used to do this for joint expenses and assets. I describe this here in much detail in the context of a trip but you can do the same thing, continuously: http://furius.ca/beancount/doc/sharing This uses a plugin to split up shared expenses easily, but you can do it manually too. As for using virtual units to track only a portion of amounts where you feel you need "virtual" units or "virtual postings", the technique you can use that doesn't break the accounting equation is to use a mirror currency instead. I've described this a number of times on this list. There's even a plugin to automate that method in Beancount. Look for mirror accounting in the archives. http://furius.ca/beancount/doc/sharing On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 7:02 AM, Ben Finney < bignose+hates-s...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > Mark Scannell <mesca...@gmail.com> writes: > > > The challenge is that I have my partner's books, my books, and then > > our joint books. As our finances are gradually being treated as one, > > I'd like to be able to have Assets -> mine, Assets -> hers, Assets -> > > ours, Expenses -> mine|hers|ours, etc. > > Pete Keen described a way to use Ledger's “virtual transactions” and > “automated transactions” to maintain a split such as you describe, while > allowing the split to be conflated when needing to deal with the “real” > transactions. > > Some people decide to do this by dividing the bills up between > roommates. […] Other roommates decide to nominate one person to have > all of the bills in their name and post the amounts due every month > for everyone to see. This is what my girlfriend and have been doing > and it's been working great. All of the bills are in my name and I > give her a summary every month and she hands me a check. Easy peasy. > > […] Ledger has an extremely handy feature named automated > transactions. The basic idea is that you provide a template > transaction and a pattern to match, and ledger will insert the > filled-in template transaction every time the pattern matches. > > […] For various reasons I keep most of my money in [one real > account]. I have most of it allocated away into various "funds", > which are just fake buckets that only exist for me. […] I've > implemented these buckets using ledger's virtual transaction > feature. > > […] On their own, these two features are pretty useful. It's when > you combine them that the awesome power of ledger starts appearing. > > <URL: > https://www.petekeen.net/program-your-finances-automated-transactions> > > -- > \ “In the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, | > `\ and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too | > _o__) palpable.” —Sigmund Freud | > Ben Finney > > -- > > --- > 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. > -- --- 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.
