On 1/4/16 11:47 PM, John Wiegley wrote: >>>>>> Douglas Philips <[email protected]> writes: > >> I read through the manual (2.6.3, but the v3 manual is the same)... There is >> an example of using virtual accounts and automatic transactions to move >> money into a tithing liability account. Then real transactions are used to >> pay out of that virtual account? (section 5.22.9 in the v3 documentation >> pdf) That's where I get confused. If a report is run with --real then won't >> the balances be wrogn? > > --real would just show a positive balance for that liability account, since > the goal without --real is to bring it to zero. No bug deal, the --real report > just looks like I've been spending money to a Liability for no reason.
Ah, OK... (Still wrapping my head around that) >> Then I want to say that there is just one actual payment from the checking >> to the liability that "absorbs" the budget account amount (or some part of >> it), all at once. > > I'd have to see an example of this to completely clear on what you mean... Ok, so let's say that I have a bunch of "small" transactions. Meals, petrol purchases, etc. All these move assests (USD) from my Liabilities:Credit Card:CardX account to various expense accounts. So I can see what I owe to the CardX company based on that. And for small expenses I can directly subtract that from my checking account balance to see what I'd have left after paying them off. But. For larger expenses (car repairs, house repairs), I want to pay them off slower, so let's say for the small expenses I add the full amount to the budget account, but for larger expenses I might only add, say, $100 to the budget account. Now the statement comes. I can see from my budget account how much I intend to pay, and thus I know in advance how much of a hit my checking account will take. Which keeps me from spending that money on something else by accident. Ok, so the statement comes and I cut a check. This is recorded as a transaction between my checking account and my Liabilities:Credit Card:CardX account. This will also be a transaction that shows up on both accounts and can be reconciled. The budget account transactions have nothing against which they can be reconciled. However, since I have made a payment to the Liabilities account, I also want to deduct that from the Budget account so that I know I have relieved some of that obligation and can have an accurate view of the amount I still holding in reserve. So maybe a better name would be Reserve:CardX and not Budget:CardX. I'm not sure if that makes any difference, but at least I'm clearer on what my intentions are. To put it another way, the budget (or reserve) transaction is a check that I write mentally to "prepay" the credit card obligation, but it's not a real transaction that can be reconciled so I can't actually record it as a transaction against checking without really getting confused when the checking account statement arrives. -=Doug (needs more coffee this early) -- --- 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.
